Sift through input
If you just talk to your department heads or your executive team,
you’re not getting the whole picture. To get more good ideas, you
need to go straight to the source.
After the first few meetings with his department heads,
Warmington sent out an e-mail soliciting ideas. It went to all 550
employees the company had at the time.
“We said, ‘Send us your ideas; we’re going to categorize and work
through them and start looking at the biggest and the best ideas —
the things that would save the company the most money, make
things operate better, improve who we are as a company the
most,’” Warmington says. “People were really excited about it
because they were finally getting contact, and they all had ideas.”
Warmington worked with his vice presidents and departmental
leaders to sort through all the ideas. As an added incentive, whoever submitted what was judged to be the best idea got a cash
bonus of $1,000. There were about 50 awards total, including several other cash awards and many gift cards.
He says the awards were just another way to get everyone even
more invested and involved in the process. Every person who submitted an idea got a response from Warmington, even if the idea
didn’t win an award or if it hasn’t been implemented.
Telling someone his or her idea isn’t going to be used can be a
tricky test of your management touch. Warmington always uses
examples of the ideas the company is actually going to use when
he explains why one particular idea won’t be used.
“People would say, ‘Oh, you’re right, that’s really better than my
idea. I see why you’re focusing on that,’” he says. “They got it
because they could see that even if their idea was good, it took a
lot of time to implement for a little reward, while some of these
other ones were super easy to implement for a huge reward.”
Another way Warmington handles employee input is leaving the
door open to possibly revisit an idea. Just because it may not work
for the company at the time doesn’t mean the idea has no value, he
says.
“We started with the best ideas, and we just trickled down,” he
says. “Then a year later, we got to some of the other ideas, and
we’d call them back up and say, ‘Hey, just wanted to let you know
we’re working on your idea again. Have you given it any more
thought?’ They’d say here are a few more things and some refinements, and we’d talk about it as a group and push it through.”
Warmington says continued patience is necessary when it comes
to developing an all-encompassing business plan for your organization. Getting input from everyone is essential, and while
progress may be slow, the final product will be one your entire
company can stand behind, not simply an edict handed down from
the CEO.
It took Warmington four months just to get a basic outline and
about a year before the program was finalized and was rolled out
across the entire company.
Once it was finished, the results spoke for themselves, as the
company once broken into six silos had one set of brochures, one
set of writing materials for new employees and one training program, with minor changes for product and location differences.
HOW TO REACH: The Warmington Group, (714) 557-5511 or www.warmingtonhomesca.com
