4 Ways Idea Management and Employee Engagement Work Together

edison365
edison365
Published in
3 min readOct 13, 2022
A group of cartoon people are building a colourful jigsaw puzzle

Newsflash — employees are feeling less and less engaged in their companies. In fact, US businesses have seen their first slump in engagement in over a decade, with 17% of people actively disengaged from their jobs. Here’s how idea management and employee engagement can work together, to help you get your teams involved!

1. Give Work Meaning

If you felt your work had no impact, would you feel engaged? Of course not! People are more likely to feel engaged in their work if it’s meaningful.

You can give meaning to people’s work by showing how it links to the wider goals of your organization.

So, here’s where the link between idea management and employee engagement comes in…

Creating an innovation campaign and asking people to submit their ideas, and then showing how those ideas go on to make a difference, will create meaning. People will be able to see how they can really have an impact on your organization and feel they’re being listened to.

2. Use the power of gamification for idea management and employee engagement

If you use idea management software for collecting ideas, then you may have access to gamification tools.

Gamification uses aspects of gaming — such as point scoring and leaderboards — to encourage people to take certain actions (like submitting ideas!).

This also makes it a perfect tool to build rewards and recognition into. Many companies use this as a chance to be creative with their rewards, some of our favorite examples have included hard-hat tours of construction sites, mentoring sessions, and coffee shop vouchers!

And, most importantly, it’s meant to be fun! If people enjoy themselves, then they are more likely to engage in the innovation process. Plus, you can use it to improve employee engagement in other areas of your business too.

3. Check the Pulse of Your Business

You can use your idea-gathering tools to get your employees’ views on how to improve their working environment. This is a great way to find out if there’s a reason people are disengaging. For example, is there a lack of training opportunities or technological issues that hamper their work?

By creating open-ended challenges, you can also provide a place for people to submit ideas and suggestions at all times of the year, and not just when annual surveys take place.

It’s a good idea to play back the ideas you receive and how you plan to address them so that people know that you are listening to them.

This is another way idea management and employee engagement can help you re-engage your teams.

4. Measuring idea management and employee engagement

If you’re looking to make improvements to your idea management and employee engagement strategies, you first need to establish a baseline.

Work out what your goals are, the data you’ll need to gather to measure success, and what success looks like.

You may choose to use data from idea management software to measure employee engagement across your organization. For example, you’ll be able to see which teams are less engaged and if there are certain times or days when people engage more.

Summary: idea management and employee engagement

Your idea management campaigns can help to support employee engagement by:

  • Giving meaning to people’s work
  • Making it fun to engage with the business
  • Have their say about the issues that matter to them
  • Gathering data to help you make improvements.

If you’d like to know more about idea management and employee engagement, you can read our blog on how to build a culture of innovation.

You may also find it interesting to learn about the differences between creativity vs innovation and how you can harness both.

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edison365
edison365

Experts in business innovation management, writing about how you can take ideas from the drawing board to the project management office and beyond.