Workforce Intelligence: Employee Sourced Ideation
QuestionPro – one of the largest online survey platforms which hosts over 2M surveys per week, added another addition to its Workforce Suite – “IdeaBoard”. Taking past successes within QuestionPro Communities, Project Hive is an offshoot project designed to empower a workforce by providing a platform to cultivate the best ideas.
The IdeaBoard was affectionately codenamed “Project Hive” due to the strong colony culture witnessed by bees in beehives. Within a hive, bees produce exceptional results since bees work together and have a culture of collaboration, cooperation and trust. Project Hive is designed as an employee sourced ideation tool to create within a business unit as well as cross-pollinate ideas across business units.
The Workforce Suite creates internal conversations through its product offering of 360 surveys, Pulse, custom frameworks and now Ideaboard. Packaged together – the Workforce Suite enables business leaders to measure engagement through multiple mediums. QuestionPro Communities was the first crowdsourced ideation project. Companies such as AeroMexico and KOA have created communities and witnessed an overwhelming number of users collaborating and freely offering their opinions. Community members would post their ideas to message boards and upvote or downvote different topics of their particular interest.
The Workforce IdeaBoard serves its users as an in-house employee sourced idea engine. Employees can submit ideas through text posts. These ideas are sorted in the order of popularity, and the highest voted content rises to the top of the board. The idea value chain moves in three phases – from idea generation to conversion finally to diffusion. Internal idea generation could be creation requires a platform for ideas to be recorded, distributed and voted. We’ve found that the most basic systematic way for employees to express an idea is absent from companies. Great successes and innovations made by the most unexpected internal sources which are usually attributed to someone by chance speaking to the right person at the right time.
LEARN ABOUT: Employee Trust
With an IdeaBoard in place, organizations can tap into team members across multiple divisions to discover the missing piece of the puzzle. Business leaders can solve problems quicker than traditional idea sourcing. Typically, there aren’t shortages of ideas, but there is a gap between the creative and the decision maker. The workforce is filled with creative thinkers and it is time for organizations to seek and implement a technological solution.
