Well the beginning of November was our annual Idea of the Year competition, once again this year, the final was held in conjunction with our annual conference.
There were over 100 ideas submitted from all sectors of our membership and indeed from all over the world. Once a shortlist was decided on, we invited the finalists to our conference to carry out a brief interview with the judges to explain the idea and the benefits it has brought to the organisation. Continue reading
I had a link to this infographic sent over to me last week and thought it would be good to share with you all
If you think working overtime, skipping your lunch hour and staying chained to your desk will make you more productive, you need to cut yourself some slack and take a break.
”Working non-stop without taking a break can increase your chances of weight gain, heart disease and worse. Staring at a computer screen for more than 2 hours per day can cause Computer Vision Syndrome, a real affliction, which causes blurry vision, headaches, dry eyes and can lead to long-term nearsightedness. However, getting up and away from your desk for just 5 minutes can alleviate eye strain and reduce fatigue in addition to making you feel better. The mere act of standing at your desk instead of sitting at it can help you burn up to 2500 calories per week. Not bad for just standing around”
Work hard and break hard; doing so will make you a healthier, happier and more productive employee.
What do you think?
A big thank you to Learn Stuff for sharing!
I have just spent the past week in the United Arab Emirates visiting companies and auditing their suggestion schemes for accreditation 2012.
As most of you know, the UAE has developed hugely over the past 15 years and Dubai is hardly recognisable from the town it was in the late 90’s. Something that may surprise you though is how employee engagement is taking hold within Governmental Departments in the area.
One of the highlights of the calendar at ideasUK is our annual conference and awards dinner. This year the event takes place in Bristol on the 7th and 8th November and we can honestly say that although this is our 26th conference this year the line up is the best we have ever had. Continue reading
I was sent a link to a great peace of work by Harvard University by a friend of ideasUK, Paul Sloane (Destination Innovation) and thought I would share, it is a very interesting piece of work that would be a great starting point to anyone setting up an ideas programme.
Here is an abstract from the paper:
Service organizations frequently implement improvement programs to increase quality. These programs often rely on employees’ suggestions about improvement opportunities. Organizations face a trade-off with such suggestion-driven improvement programs. On one hand, the improvement literature recommends that managers focus organizational resources on surfacing a large number of problems, prioritizing these, and selecting a small set of high priority ones for solution efforts.
The theory is that soliciting a large number of ideas from employees will surface a set of higher priority problems than would have been identified with a less extensive search. Scarce organizational resources can be allocated to resolving the set of problems that provide the greatest improvement in performance. We call this an “analysis-oriented” approach. On the other hand, managers can allocate improvement resources to addressing problems raised by frontline staff, regardless of priority ranking. This “action-oriented” approach enables more resources to be spent on resolving problems because prioritization receives less attention. To our knowledge, this tradeoff between analysis and action in process improvement programs has not been empirically examined.
To fill this gap, we randomly selected 20 hospitals to implement an 18-month long employee suggestion-driven improvement program-58 work areas participated. Our study finds that an action-oriented approach was associated with higher perceived improvement in performance, while an analysis-oriented approach was not.
Our study suggests that the analysis-oriented approach negatively impacted employees’ perceptions of improvement because it solicited, but did not act on, employees’ ideas. We discuss the conditions under which this might be the case.
To download the full paper, follow this link
Full credit for this research goes to Anita L. Tucker and Sara J. Singer and taken from HBS Working Knowledge website.
Of course, ideasUK can help in your quest in launching the ideal engagement programme for your organisation. Contact us today for more information.
In the third article from reviewing the speakers at our engagement event on the 5th July, we come to Ricoh UK Products.
I had this infographic sent over to me last night and thought it would be good to share it with you:
Thank you to – Daily Infographic for posting this.
The text that accompanied the graphic stated:
Call it a “case of the Mondays,” but surveys and studies show Americans’ happiness in the workplace decreasing each year. It is no coincidence that as job security ebbs happiness dissipates with it. But there are other factors to employee happiness at work, and the infographic below takes a stab at why you should care.
The infographic illustrates that happy and engaged employees do a better job at work and are more likely to stay in their jobs. It’s common sense, yet how many people hate their jobs because the corporate culture is thankless and depressing?
Scroll down to see if your current job is one of the top five happiest jobs (who knew that Biotechnology workers and Customer Service Representative were so darn happy?) and why Facebook is allegedly a positive force at work. Apparently, exposure to Facebook and other social media sites enhances both contentment and productivity. Perhaps I need to show this to my boss…
Now, although the study was carried out in North America, this is the same all over the world. The message is simple, happier employees means a more profitable organisation.
One thing to note is that 52% of people value the relationship they have with their manager or supervisor. How many managers can honestly say they value the role their employees play in the business?
Once again, thanks to the guys at Daily Infographic for posting this, there is a huge resource over at their site, why not pop over for a look.
Now, something about my home life that you should know is that my wife loves soap operas on television. Well, one in particular, and that is Coronation Street. For readers of this blog overseas, this is a soap that is set in the North of England and is set around a working class street.
So, what does this have to do with employee engagement I hear you ask?
Well, on Monday night, my wife was watching some episodes of this soap and something really struck me. In the show, one of the central points is a factory that manufactures ladies underwear run by a character called Carla. Continue reading
It is that time of the year again when the thoughts of all the team at ideasUK are focused on our annual conference.
Have you ever wanted to deliver a workshop or keynote at an International Conference?
YES? Continue reading
Today’s post comes from a good friend of ideasUK, if you have never visited What’s the Pont, I suggest you go over and have a look, it is a great site to visit
One of my pastimes is checking out the abandoned flipcharts I find in the variety of offices and meeting rooms I get to frequent. It’s quite a revealing pastime (possibly about me unfortunately). Occasionally you do stumble across sensitive material, obviously this goes straight in the confidential waste bin, or back into the hands of the originator. However, it’s the other material on flipcharts that fascinates me. I reckon you can get a useful insight into an organisation from the debris gets left behind on the flipcharts. The more frantic the scribbles, the more I like it. Line & box diagrams, mind maps, dodgy graphs, stick people and bullet points all feature. Whatever form it takes it’s all a great informal record of organisational life. The real story of what’s going on from the hands of the people who know the place best.
This helpfully gives me an opportunity to talk about some recent experiences where a drawing has helped focus a discussion. Continue reading
ideasuk.wordpress.com 