Over the last 10 months we have been working hard on introducing an Ideas platform to Bromford called (wait for it)… Ideas!
A staff suggestion box as a way to unearth ideas is nothing new - it is believed to be at least 300 years old. Yoshimune Tokugawa was a shōgun warrior who ruled the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan during the 18th century. He is often credited as the first person to introduce a suggestion scheme. A meyasubako (complaints box) was placed outside Edo Castle which encouraged locals to place ideas about how the province could rid itself of debt. Only Yoshimune himself had the key to the box.
The concept of asking employees to share their ideas to drive innovation is always a good one. Unfortunately, the traditional suggestion scheme often fails for all sorts of reasons. So we set ourselves the challenge of rebooting the concept for the 21st Century.
Ideas is basically an online colleague suggestion box. We want to encourage our colleagues to submit their ideas on how we can improve things for customers, for colleagues or even Bromford as a whole. We wanted to create this platform so that colleague ideas could be heard and hopefully have their ideas implemented across the business. We also wanted them to let us know about the day to day barriers that stand in the way of innovation.
All it takes is one simple idea that could create a huge, beneficial change across an entire business.
- Charlie Ward was an employee at Amazon who put his idea for exclusive shipping options forward and now Amazon Prime generates around 19 Billion dollars per year on subscriptions alone.
- Freddy Anzures was an employee at Apple who when locking an airplane bathroom thought to himself “why isn’t this feature on our phones?”. Sometimes all it takes is a colleague’s idea to unlock a whole world of potential.
Testing for Ideas started during the pandemic when we were all working from home. We had previously attempted to use an app within Microsoft Teams, but it ran into some difficulties. The issue was a lack of simplicity, there were too many steps a colleague had to take to finally submit their idea that it just became too longwinded.
We decided to keep it as simple as possible. A form situated on our intranet, which then links into Asana begins the process.
So what’s the process?
A colleague submits an idea which is then triaged to determine what happens next. They are put into 3 sections
Simple Ideas
Complex Ideas
Future Ideas
An Idea that makes it through triage but may be a little more complex are submitted to the Ideas Steering Group who help us decide on the next steps and provide the executive and leadership support we may need for that particular idea. If an Idea doesn’t make it through, it’s more than likely the business are already looking into it, or the business is not in a position to move that idea forward.
Although we do like to remind colleagues that no idea is a ‘bad’ idea, our Ideas platform is a no judgement zone that will be focussing on creativity, development and future thinking.
There is so much talent and creativity across Bromford and I’m very happy that we now have a platform to show off our innovative side.
Moving forward we are very excited to start developing regular blogs, vlogs and we’ve just released the first episode of our brand new podcast called Let’s Talk ideas.
The future is looking very bright for Ideas, and we can’t wait to share it with you.
@K_MFletcher