How To Train Employees To Test and Validate Their Own Ideas

This creates the situation where organizations cannot pursue all the ideas due to limited resources. The best way to address this bottleneck is by involving frontline employees.

When you involve frontline workers, it helps address low workforce engagement and retention, and actually deliver on building a culture of innovation. Moreover, involving frontline employees is more scalable and cost-effective than other options.

Addressing The Employee Engagement Problem

It is important to foster a culture of innovation within your organization, driving growth, relevance and sustainability in the long run. Fundamentally, a culture of innovation empowers employees with a voice, regardless of their role or title, and it enables employees to learn new skills (which they then bring back to their everyday jobs) which breaks down silos.

Employee turnover and overall engagement have a significant impact on a company's financials. According to Gallup, disengagement costs businesses an average of $3,400 out of every $10,000 spent per employee. This is due to higher absenteeism, lower productivity, and lower profitability. In a 250-person organization, disengagement can lead to an annual loss of about $3.16 million. These statistics highlight the importance of prioritizing employee engagement to reduce turnover and improve company performance.

To address the engagement problem, there are three key approaches you need to focus on. The first is enabling employees to feel the impact of their work. Second, by listening to employees' ideas and making them feel empowered with a voice, engagement can significantly increase.

A study by Gallup found that when employees felt their opinions counted, they saw a reduction in turnover, fewer safety incidents, and increased productivity. Specifically, when the percentage of workers who strongly agreed that their opinion counted increased from 30% to 60%, these positive outcomes were observed.

Another approach to addressing engagement is providing your employees with the opportunity to learn skills beyond their traditional job titles. By offering learning and development (L&D) opportunities, your employees feel more engaged and prepared for the future workforce. Studies have shown that 80% of employees believe L&D programs increase engagement at work.

Additionally, a study by Deloitte found that companies with L&D programs have a 92% higher likelihood of developing novel products and processes. Furthermore, 94% of employees surveyed by Gallup stated they would choose to stay at a company longer if they offered learning and development opportunities or had a formal program in place.

The Building Blocks To Enable Your Employees To Test And Validate Their Own Ideas

Here are the building blocks that you need to have in place to enable your employees to validate and test their own ideas. The process begins with posting a challenge statement related to the organizational goal. Employees then submit their ideas and collaborate on them. The ideas are further refined through voting and shortlisting by managers or program leaders.

First, there should be a cadence or structured process to capture ideas. This ensures that all ideas are captured and no valuable input is missed. Additionally, there should be a defined structure for organizing and developing these ideas. This structure helps to ensure that ideas are well-articulated and can be easily understood by leaders.

Second, in order for ideas to be pitched to leaders with budget decision-making authority, your employees need training and coaching. This coaching provides them with the necessary skills and knowledge to effectively communicate their ideas and present them in a persuasive manner.

After the initial approval of the ideas, the ideas should be piloted or integrated into operations. This allows for thorough testing and evaluation of the ideas in a real-world environment. The pilot phase serves as a learning opportunity, where adjustments can be made, and feedback can be gathered before full-scale implementation.

Finally, change management plays a crucial role in integrating the ideas approved from the pilot phase into daily operations. Change management involves facilitating the transition and ensuring that your employees embrace and adopt the new ideas. This process addresses any potential resistance or challenges that may arise during implementation. By effectively managing change, you can increase the success rate of implementing new ideas and ensure their long-term sustainability.

Walk Before You Run

If innovation isn’t yet widespread within your organization, start by focusing on a few opportunities and gradually transitioning to researching many opportunities.

You’ll want to gradually increase the speed of decision making on green lighting the testing of new ideas, from it taking 5-6 months to 4-6 weeks, as well as increase the speed of validating, prototyping, and piloting new ideas, so that it takes you 4-8 months instead of 12-16 months.

As a result, you’ll reduce risk and minimize average cost per validated idea. You’ll go from invest larger dollars in fewer projects to investing smaller dollars in many projects.

However, implementing this methodology is easier said than done. Don’t run before you can walk. In order to build a scalable program, we start with less complex, lower risk ideas and increase their complexity and risk as we build buy-in and internal capabilities.

In the initial "Walk" phase, the main goal is to build a team of innovators within the organization. The focus is on low-complexity projects with a short timeline for return on investment (ROI). By achieving some early successes, the value and business case behind the innovation program can be proven within the first six months to a year. This allows for better chances of securing funding from leadership. These short-term projects serve as stepping stones towards the "Run" and "Scale" phases, where larger-scale projects and new products/services are pursued.