Most companies will agree that innovation is critical to sustaining growth and remaining competitive. Creating a culture of innovation is seen by most business leaders as the number one way to drive innovation for the business. However, for this culture to exist, employee engagement is imperative. Unfortunately, most aren’t.
According to Gallup Inc.’s 2017 State of the Global Workplace Report, 85 percent of employees are disengaged on the job, which is costing companies $7 trillion in lost productivity, turnover, poor customer experience, absenteeism, and lower profitability.
A culture of innovation relies on employee engagement and a shared vision for a company’s success. When innovation becomes part of a company’s culture, amazing things can happen. It not only generates sustained ideation, but innovation flourishes when employees feel valued, included, and heard.
Over the last 15 years, organizations have invested $100 billion annually to improve employee engagement with little success. Crowdsourced employee innovation is another option for engaging employees to offer insights into or solutions to a business challenge. Those who get it right, are reaping the benefits and hundreds of companies are trying to figure out how to do the same.
Here are a few amazing examples of companies taking their employee engagement to the next level. Watch the full video: Talking Employee Engagement with Planview IdeaPlace Clients.
Herbalife revitalizes its call centers
Herbalife Nutrition leverages innovation management to tap the creativity of its employees to add more value to its North American call centers while increasing employee job satisfaction. Their joint efforts with employees helped save a business unit by identifying missing tools and functions. Their success spurred the company to create a new group to review all company call centers and implement the same solutions.
Pfizer engages 90,000 employees for hundreds of innovations
Pfizer leverages innovation management to create an innovation program that improves the way it develops new products with greater employee engagement. Eighty percent of the company’s 90,000 employees participated in more than 200 innovation challenges. Pfizer is using Planview IdeaPlace to run nine awards programs, building a knowledge base of 1,000 high-quality innovation stories and enabling sharing practices across its organization.
Employees convince energy firm to deploy drones
A leading energy firm used innovation management to recruit ideas from employees on several operational issues, including how to keep the lights on during severe weather and how to guard against cyberattacks. One of the winning ideas was to use a drone to check power lines, which is estimated to reduce 11 power outages a year.
Traditionally, aerial inspections of power lines are performed with manned aircraft; employees suggested instead using UAVs that are more cost-effective and enable closer inspection with less environmental impact.
Advancing a culture of innovation is critical to the success of every enterprise in the current climate of digital transformation. The right innovation management solution gives teams and organizations to surface hidden innovators by bringing the very best ideas to the forefront through high employee engagement and patented crowd science technology.”
For a closer look at how to engage your employees to drive innovation, read more here.
