Make your intranet 2-way using ideas

About a year ago someone showed me what Dell were doing at ideastorm.com.

The concept is a great, practical development of web 2.0 - let anyone in your community create an idea and then let anyone else vote and comment on it. Then promise to do something about the ideas that get voted to the top.

Before I tell you how we got on with our implementation I'd like to point out why I think this works so well in the enterprise.

1. Get staff to tell each other how bad (or good) their ideas are
2. Get staff talking about ideas - people want their idea to get voted up (just human nature), this starts people discussing your business issues in the coffee shop
3. High visibility - management have to get involved and do something
4. Post some management ideas anonymously - you'll get real feedback on what people think
5. Promotes an adult-adult relationship with your staff

I implemented something similar inside our company and found some great learning points:

1. Middle and senior managers may be more open to the concept than you'd think
The downsides are obvious - you are suggesting to a manager that we should have an open exchange of ideas that everyone can have an equal vote on. Strangely enough, in my experience most management did not fight this concept. Not necessarily because they loved the idea, but rather we had been running, suggestion boxes and idea schemes for quite a while and it had some serious downsides. In our particular situation it created conflict because managers had to evaluate ideas and if the idea was no good then the process ended up with a manager having to politely tell a member of staff that their precious idea, the one they nurtured for months, was not good enough. How's that for employee engagement. Worse still, managers across the airline dreaded receiving ideas as they had to spend the time evaluating poor ideas. Employees were unhappy because the system rarely worked and when it occasionally paid out (there was a bonus involved) there was a lot of suspicion about the quality of the ideas. We had to do something better.

2. Your people don't realise how much you are doing already
We ran an idea exchange with a trial group of 2,000 staff in the IT department. Over the half the ideas were under way already, and of the rest, nearly all had been evaluated at some point or other. It was a chilling reminder of how hard you have to work to get your people to understand what's going on in any case.

3. Most ideas are not that good
Just because you have thrown down the challenge to everyone in the organisation doesn't necessarily mean that you will suddenly identify hundreds of fantastic ideas. In fact, our experience was that we got 1 or 2 really great ideas. I think, and here's where I'm out of my area of expertise, we raised the average quality of ideas - and since most people (in life in general) only occasionally come out with a sparklingly adroit comment, so it is in the realm of ideas.

4. It's obvious, but you have to implement something
Once everyone knew that we were running the thing (we got over half the staff to use the system within the first 3 weeks) then we faced the challenge that they all wanted to know what happened to their ideas. At least those that did not get voted into the top twenty had dealt with themselves, but we still had some hard work getting those top ideas going.

Comment below if have you ever tried something like this in your company.