It is highly imperative that the Owl Company take the situation from two perspectives. First, how would Employee Suggestion Program benefit the company as a whole if implemented Second, if this program is implemented, how would employees benefit from it
Methods of Investigation
The committee set-up initiated the review process and it involved three distinct steps
It organized five focus groups with the employees. In each of these focus groups, the committee tries to determine that what can the company do more to increase employees sense of belonging toward the company In other words, it tried to have employees tell them what can company do to have them feel an intrinsic part of the company
The committee also conducted visits to competitors and other industries to get to know what others have to say about the employee suggestion program as the insights form others are very valuable.
The committee also hired an independent Human Resources Consultant. The task of the consultant was to provide Owl Company with the feedback on various sets of policies followed by businesses across US.
Employee Suggestion Program A need of Owl Company
Now that we have the background, our report will focus on the recommendations of the committee, the process of implementing the program, and the advantages it will offer to the company.
Recommendations
Owl Company should reward employees for any of their suggestions accepted through the Employee Suggestion Program.
A permanent committee should be set-up which will regularly see through suggestions put forward by employees and choose the appropriate ones for further processing.
The committee should also make an ESP form which must be accessible to all employees and should be used by them to communicate their suggestions to the management.
The Chief Financial Officer of the company will have the authority to approve any amount of reward for the employees whose suggestions are accepted. It will depend on the value added by that suggestion if implemented.
We will now move toward the description of the program but before that let us briefly discuss the findings of investigations conducted (the investigation methodologies are described above). The investigation revealed that 61 of the employees at Owl Company believe that there should be set procedure through which employees could convey their ideas to the management. In other words, this procedure can be called an ESP. 90 of the above 61 employees were of the opinion that if their ideas are given some attention by the management, they would associate themselves more closely with the company.
Description of the Program
The Employee Suggestion Program (ESP) at Owl Company will reward employees with cash if their suggestions are approved. The cash reward will be calculated under the supervision of Chief Financial Officer. The amount will depend on the degree of positive cash flow that the suggestion will generate. It must be noted that the maximum cash reward allowed is 5000. Suggestions which will not have any financial impact on firm but may contribute to other aspects like goodwill will be reward with 100 only.
The ESP will be open to all the employees, both full-time and part-time as every employee is an asset for the company. Employee who wants to make any suggestion can use the ESP form to convey it to the management. The committee formed for this purpose will review the suggestion and will recommend any action.
All the suggestions will have to lie in one of the following categories operations, marketing, product enhancement, product development, training and development, social responsibility, and employee well-being. Any suggestion that cannot fall under any of the above categories should be marked as other.
Various costs will be incurred in the implementation of this program. These costs will include promotional material, policy book, and training of employees. The cost will approximately add up to 3000. An additional cost of 2,500 will be incurred under the head of administrative expenses. If no suggestion is made, the company will risk losing approximately 5.500.
Administration of the ESP
There are 10 different departments at Owl Company. In each department, we a coordinator for ESP program should be selected who would coordinate ESP procedures in their respective departments. These coordinators will attend a special 4-hour training session besides a 1-hour training session mandatory for all employees. The special training session will train coordinators in the areas of tracking and procedures of ESP, employee awareness campaigns etc. Our foremost goal in ESP program is to make sure that every employees suggestion is given due attention. For this to happen, we present the following procedure
Employee fills the form and informs us about the savings expected to be generated from hisher suggestion. Heshe submits the form to his boss.
The boss goes through the form, acknowledges that by his signature, and returns the form to the employee.
Coordinator then collects the form from the employee.
Coordinator, in turn, submits the form to the head of review committee to consider the suggestion.
Head Review Committee calls a meeting to review all the ideas submitted in a given period of time. The committee discusses the ideas and approves or rejects the ideas with decision communicated to the coordinator who informs the employee of the decision.
Advantages of the ESP Implementation to the Owl Company
Owl Company can possibly generate more revenues through this program as employees might give ideas for new products, product improvement, improved customer service etc. But revenue can only be increased if the review committee is very honest in review the suggestions. In some cases, it might reject some ideas because the idea did not tick their minds but the idea might have resulted in more revenues for the company. While in other cases, the committee might approve a suggestion which might be that impactful.
Employees are the key persons who are involved in day-to-day operations of the business. They might have a better idea of how to achieve efficiency in various processes. Employee suggestions can, thus, provide management with wonderful ideas on how it can achieve efficiency in business processes which might lead it to gain competitive advantage in the industry. This applies to Owl Company as well.
Now that employees are free to tell management about their ideas, the company will encourage employees in training sessions to spend their free time thinking about new products or improvements to the existing products as they will be rewarded for that. This might result in more ideas coming for product development and improvements which will lead to the extension of product lines.
The ESP will also boost employee morale at Owl Company. Listening to employee suggestions and implementing practical ideas is, in effect, telling employees that they are a great asset for the company and that the company cannot function effectively without them. Including employees in decision-making actually makes employees feel more closely to the company and hence improve their productivity as they would love to work for the company. From the discussion in this paragraph, we can conclude that employee turnover will reduce. This will save company a huge amount of money that it invests in new recruits training them to fit in the company.
All in all, it can be said that implementing Employee Suggestions Program at Owl Company will benefit company in the long run. The ESP will reduce employee turnover as employees start feeling part of the company intrinsically. The companys revenue will increase as employees start pouring in their suggestions to improve the business that the company is currently into. The program will offers less risk as the investment is minimal so even if the program fails, the company would not have much to lose. The success of this program depends mainly on its implementation. If the management is genuinely interested in this program and makes conscious efforts to make it a success, it would surely be a success.
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