I’ve given my employees the opportunity to do a fun project in work time, but no one has submitted an idea. What’s wrong?

To jump start innovation, I’ve given my employees the opportunity to do a fun project in work time, but no one has submitted an idea. What’s wrong?

Six months ago the boss of a medium-sized business in the media industry asked her employees to think about a fun project they would like to work on. She suggested that they each come up with an idea that, as individuals, they would feel passionate and creative about, and that, as a business, the team could work on for a bit of fun.

The boss thought she would be inundated with ideas. She got none. The initiative, which she designed to jump start innovation in her business and enhance employee engagement, fell awkwardly on its face.

Recently, researchers at the University of Kansas were studying the participation of employees in innovation when they realised that some employees had lots of good ideas but were refusing to make them public because they feared looking foolish in front of their co-workers. The researchers termed this “image risk”.

Image risk starts young. Hands up if you ever kept your hands down at school because you were worried about looking dumb in front of your classmates? It’s a hard mindset to break and I think image risk is more prevalent in Australian companies than we would care to admit.

So what can you do to reduce the susceptibility of your employees to image risk? Here are three suggestions:

1. Make sure that all your employees understand the basics of the business you are in. By that I mean check that they understand the purpose of the business, what you can be (or are) best at, how you make money and what your goals are. Employees often submit ideas that seem completely out of kilter with the business because they simply don’t understand it properly. Sadly, it’s often these well intended but completely off-the-wall ideas that are ridiculed.
2. Ask employees to submit at least one new idea each quarter. When employees have to get into the habit of generating and sharing ideas they tend to lose their inhibitions.
3. Celebrate all ideas but explain to the team why some of the ideas are particularly good ones for the business.

The employees at the media company I mentioned above were overwhelmed with image risk. As it turns out they were terrified of being discovered to be uncreative. For safety’s sake they each, individually, decided not to submit an idea rather than volunteer a woeful one. The boss worked this out and changed the brief to lower the emphasis on creativity. Thereby, funnily enough, unleashing a plethora of creative ideas from her team!

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Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business” and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).