How Companies Are Imploring Workers to Keep Thinking

For decades — and maybe centuries — companies have had suggestion boxes in the main lobby or on the factory floor. Today, that simple process of gathering ideas from front-line employees has become exponentially more sophisticated, and beneficial. Indeed, at several area companies and one community college, idea programs with colorful names and scores of acronyms like OFI and SME have been implemented, and with tangible results.

They’re called ‘OFI boards,’ and they’re everywhere at Health New England.
OFI stands for ‘opportunities for improvement,’ and at HNE, the concept is much more than a colorful acronym; it’s a big, big part of doing business.
Indeed, OFI has become part of the lexicon and culture at the health insurance company; there’s the cartoon-like OFI logo, but also an OFI committee, OFI ‘champions,’ OFI stickers, and an OFI page on HNE’s intranet. Of course, it all starts at the boards, one for each of the company’s 30 departments, where the opportunities for improvement, or ideas, are posted, categorized, and, most importantly, tracked.
OFI has become the defining phrase, as well as the face, of HNE’s exploits in what has become known in some quarters as the ‘idea revolution,’ or the promulgation of ideas to spur continuous improvement and greater efficiency at companies large and small.
“One of the things we realized years ago was that we had a lot of bright ideas coming from our associates, but we weren’t implementing many of them,” said Joanne Walton Bicknell, HNE’s business improvement manager. “That’s where OFI comes in; it helps vet out the ideas and put them into effect. And last year we had 4,000 ideas implemented, or about 14 per associate.”

HNE put all things OFI into effect after listening to Alan Robinson, associate dean of the full-time MBA program at UMass Amherst, who wrote the book on the subject — literally. It’s called Ideas Are Free, which he co-authored with Dean Schroeder, associate dean and director of graduate programs in Management at the College of Business Management at Valparaiso University, and the two are writing the next book on this matter, too.
The working title is The Idea-driven Organization, and it’s due out in 15 months, said Robinson, adding that the follow-up will be what the first book wasn’t intended to become, but did anyway: a how-to guide.
And the basic concept behind this ideas revolution is summed up on page 63 of Ideas Are Free:
“Most people already have lots of ideas for their organizations, want to tell managers about them, and would be thrilled to have them used,” write Robinson and Schroeder. “An idea starts when someone becomes aware of a problem or opportunity. The definition of a problem is ‘a source of perplexity, distress, or vexation.’ It is something people have a natural inclination to fix. … Employees will naturally come up with a great number of ideas — whether it is to make their jobs easier or less frustrating, to stop their organizations wasting money, or simply because they see an opportunity to do something better.”
What companies need is a structured program to inspire, process, and implement ideas, said Robinson, who has consulted with businesses across the region and around the world on this subject.
At Big Y Foods, there was a program in place before Robinson spoke to company officials several years ago, said Patricia Shewchuk, who has the title ‘manager of Employee Strategies Inclusion’ on her business card. She noted that the old system was incentive-based ($100 was awarded for ideas that were implemented) and mired in logistics, complexity, and subjectivity.
It was replaced by a much simpler program known as ‘Keep Thinking’ that has inspired more than 11,000 ideas since its inception a few years ago, on subjects ranging from the location of keys on cash registers (‘clear’ and ‘total’ were way too close to one another, causing some real problems) to flavors of donuts sold in the bakery, to a suggestion to sell the garlic-butter company the chain uses on many of its baked goods. And the only rewards (aside from stickers and pens) is the satisfaction that comes with problem solving.
“It’s a very positive thing for the company,” said Shewchuk. “What we want is for people to tell their manger when they see a problem or hear complaints from customers and have a solution; we don’t want them going home and telling their family, ‘this is stupid.’ We want them to tell us.”
Robinson also helped administrators at Springfield Technical Community College establish what is still believed to be the only ideas program within the realm of higher education.
Mike Suzor, assistant to the president and point person on the initiative, said it has yielded hundreds of ideas since it was implemented just over a year ago, with an estimated net savings to the school of roughly $200,000 at a time when all public institutions are looking for ways to reduce costs, eliminate waste, and enhance revenues.
For this issue, BusinessWest takes an indepth look at the ideas movement, and why and how more companies are compelling employees to put on their thinking caps.

Chain of Events
They call it the “parking lot.”
This is the place where those involved in Big Y’s Keep Thinking program put ideas that require time, resources, and, generally speaking, more thought before being implemented, said Shewchuk.
She noted that ‘parking lot’ is just one designation that can be placed on an idea by the so-called SMEs (subject-matter experts) called upon to review suggestions and conduct the thorough follow-up procedures.
There’s also the much-sought-after ‘yes, do it’ stamp of approval, said Shewchuk, who referenced one idea — a suggestion to put items other than cases of bottled water (such as large bags of dog food) in the ‘hard-to-scan’ category to facilitate checkout — that gained such designation. There’s also ‘thinking alike — already working on it’; ‘let’s test it’; ‘need a meeting’; and ‘research needed.’
And then there’s a category called ‘teaching moment,’ reserved for those instances when an SME politely informs an individual making a suggestion that it is not practical for one reason or another. Here’s an example: an employee in the bakery department, upon watching untold numbers of customers squeeze bread and then pass on it because it wasn’t warm, suggests that Big Y “have a bread warmer like Big Bunny to have warm bread all day.” John Fraro, corporate in-store bakery sales manager, considered the idea and wrote back, “thank you for the great suggestion … the main problem with bread warmers is that they pull moisture out of the product, giving the bread an inferior quality.”
This high level of organization, as well as a detailed database of ideas and follow-up, praise for employees who forward ideas, and commentary from SMEs, are all components of a successful ideas program, said Robinson, also a professor of Operations Management at UMass, who has consulted on the creation of many of them.
He told BusinessWest that there are variations on some of the major themes, as well as variety in the names given to various initiatives and specific components, but there are many common denominators. These include simplicity, a strong buy-in from the top levels of management, and an element of fun, he said, adding that, without these qualities, many programs will fail to catch and keep the attention of employees.
Elaborating, he said that ideas are welcome and accepted at just about every business, regardless of its size. But what most companies still need is an organized system by which employees are encouraged to formulate ideas and, most importantly, know what to do with them when they have them.
“You don’t just want to put a suggestion box out there,” he explained. “You’ve got to have a path so ideas can get where they need to go.”
Why and how companies carve such paths are subject matters that Robinson has been studying for nearly 30 years now, he told BusinessWest, noting that implementation of ideas systems has become a “labor of love.”
His research into the phenomenon has taken him all over the world, starting in Japan in the mid-’80s, where he watched and learned at companies like Toyota. “I was one of the first Americans to go over there and study Japanese management,” he explained. “And one of the things I noticed was that they put a lot of emphasis on getting ideas from their front-line people.
“I noticed that companies here didn’t really pay much attention to it, and neither did companies in Europe,” he continued. “Back in the ’80s, there were businesses in Japan that were getting 50 ideas per person implemented; today, there’s probably only 30 companies in the U.S. at that level; it’s still a very rare practice here.”
This comparatively poor track record helped inspire Ideas Are Free, said Robinson, adding that, with its subtitle How the Idea Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations, it was intended to inform and inspire managers to follow best practices.
The followup book, he went on, is not so much about what the best in the world are doing in this realm, but how to get there. “We’ve been helping a lot of companies implement these programs, and asking a lot of questions about how you get from here to there,” Robinson explained. “So for the next book, we’re focusing much more on the journey.”

Getting a Rough Idea
As he talked about that journey, Robinson went to the blackboard in one of the conference rooms in the Isenberg School of Management at UMass and drew a large triangle, and then a line across it near the top.
He did so to illustrate that the vast majority of the ideas generated within a company (80% by his estimation, or what’s below the line) would be considered “small,” and come from employees, with the rest from management. The significance of that diagram isn’t lost on forward-thinking CEOs, he said, adding that they recognize the need to develop coordinated systems to collect, review, and, when warranted, implement these ideas.
Smart managers also resist the temptation to affix numbers to everything, he continued, adding that those leaders continually asking about return on investment from an ideas program are essentially missing the main point.
He noted that, while there are, indeed, gains in terms of cost savings and increased revenue (some of which are harder to effectively measure than others), the real benefits come in the form of improved service to customers — which usually translates into more business — and from employees gaining inclusion and strong measures of satisfaction from identifying, and helping to solve, problems. “Generally, good things happen when you ask front-line people for their ideas.”
And with that, he referenced a sheet of ideas from staff members working in the bar at the Clarion Hotel in Stockholm, a high-end facility known for its customer service.
“Here’s one — ‘get maintenance to drill three holes in the floor behind the bar and install pipes so bartenders can drop bottles directly into the recycling bins in the basement,” he said. “Before, they had to carry a hamper of stuff down the stairs; that saved seven minutes an hour, 15 hours a day, 365 days a year indefinitely, so you could put a number on that one if you wanted to.
“Here’s another one: ‘when things are slow, mix drinks at the table so guests get a show,’” he continued. “If you’re a typical CEO, you’re saying, ‘show me the numbers on these things.’ But this idea makes the bar a little bit cooler, a little bit hotter, and you can’t put a number on that.”
At Health New England, there have been many ideas that could fall into that same category — difficult to quantify from a dollars-and-cents perspective, but beneficial in terms of service to customers, operational efficiency, morale, and building the HNE brand, said Kim Kenney-Rockwal, director of Human Resources for the company.
“Some of them can be very simple, but have a meaningful impact, she said, citing, as one example, the suggestion to acknowledge all résumés that come to the company electronically, rather than through the mail, as was the policy for years.
“This saves paper, time, and postage,” she said, adding that there are, indeed, tangible cost reductions. “About 99% of the résumés were coming in electronically anyway, but we were responding through the mail. This is just something simple that streamlined our process without compromising the brand.”
Explaining how the ideas process works at HNE, Kenney-Rockwal and Walton Bicknell said it starts with the OFI boards, the large white boards posted strategically within each department. New ideas are taped to the top of the boards and later put into an elaborate queue for consideration and possible implementation. Some are in the system for a few weeks, and others for several months.
Ideas fall into three main categories — ‘customer service,’ ‘work culture,’ and ‘process improvement,’ said Walton Bicknell, adding that there have been thousands in each realm, and the various departments compete against each other, informally, to see which has the most ideas implemented.
Kenney-Rockwal and Walton Bicknell told BusinessWest that many companies and institutions large and small, such as STCC, have approached HNE and requested advice and technical support with getting idea programs off the ground. And they have some general advice for those considering such propositions.
“Make it simple,” said Walton Bicknell, “and start slow — don’t try to implement the entire organization at one time; start with one department or two departments and roll it out that way.”
Said Kenney-Rockwal, “make it real, so it has to tie in to what employees are doing every day. It can’t be a program of the month; it has to tie into making their life easier — they need to stop doing the things that are causing them frustration.”
“Our success has come from growing it from the bottom up,” she continued, “but to start, there has to be in a buy-in at the top. And it has to be fun — you need to celebrate the wins.”

School of Thought
All this advice and more was taken to heart at Springfield Technical Community College, where, following initial consultation with Robinson and meetings with OFI leaders at Health New England, a program called Great Ideas at STCC was put in place roughly a year ago.
No one can say with any degree of certainty whether it is the only initiative of its kind within the broad realm of higher education, said Suzor, but then again, no one is aware of any other institution doing it.
One reason why could be the challenging nature of academic settings, which are layered in bureaucracy, and where decisions are rarely made quickly or easily, said Suzor, noting that, while there was trepidation among some officials at the college when the program was implemented, there has been a strong, campus-wide buy-in and many tangible results.
They stem from ideas involving everything from new policies requiring printing on both sides of a sheet of paper, to a strong suggestion to move either a solar-powered trash compactor or the library book-drop receptacle it was apparently mistaken for on a few occasions.
Explaining how the system works, Joan Thomas, director of marketing for the college and a member of the steering committee that oversees it, said it begins with the idea boards, on which each department lists focus areas, and suggestions are posted on large sticky notes.
These ideas are then considered at weekly departmental idea meetings, and they are then categorized in ways similar to those implemented at Big Y (there’s a parking lot at STCC as well).
In many cases, ideas can be implemented on the departmental level, said Thomas, adding that for those that can’t be, there is what’s known as the ‘idea-escalation process,’ whereby OFIs must clear additional hurdles such as review by the college’s management team, the securing of needed financial resources, and/or the approval of senior leadership such as a vice president or the president.
“There are a number of checks and balances put in place to see that ideas are followed up and thoughtfully considered,” Thomas explained. “A vice president can’t just say ‘no’ to something.”
A year into the program, Suzor, armed with that $200,000 net-savings estimate, says the idea program has helped with the bottom line at a time when all publicly funded institutions are feeling the pinch.
“As state funding is declining, we have to figure out ways to increase revenues and decrease costs,” he explained. “And the idea system not only engages the community in doing things for customers, it also gets us focused on ways we can reduce costs.”
And it has been as fun as well, said Thomas, noting everything from the buttons (similar to those Staples ‘Easy’ buttons that say ‘great ideas at STCC’ when you tap them) that are given to participants, to the ‘idea of the month’ videos posted on the school’s Web site that give a dose of exposure — and school pride — to the winners.
“We do manage to have fun with it,” said Thomas. “And we’ve seen great results, which you would expect when you empower front-line employees to have a voice in how we do business.”

Thinking Things Through
Judy Hogan, a customer-relations specialist at Big Y, would agree. She told BusinessWest that, among the many thousands of ideas funneled to the company’s SMEs, one of the better ones recently was a suggestion to further simplify the ideas program.
Instead of being placed in the parking lot, it was awarded the coveted ‘yes, do it’ designation, she explained, adding that the change has helped in the process of tracking and implementing suggestions.
Like the concept of moving keys on the cash register, the idea concerning ideas is a poignant example of what happens when there is a system in place to inspire people to contribute thoughts and then follow through on them, she continued, adding, “it’s what happens when you have a culture that encourages people to keep thinking.”

George O’Brien can be reached at obrien@businesswest.com