TOPICS
TOPICS
The Sums of Silence
In this spiraling climate of shrinking budgets, downsizing, outsourcing and chronically limited resources, meeting the needs of the public can be overwhelming. Yet the solution might be right under agencies' noses.
Managers are trained to set goals and evaluate where their programs should be in one, two or 10 years. Such yardsticks might include improving efficiency, customer satisfaction, employee morale and public relations, or reducing maintenance costs, fleet management investments and paperwork.
The question of how to achieve these goals with steadily declining resources remains a paradox. Government differs from the private sector, but turning to the business world might provide some insight. Corporate management experts Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder studied suggestion systems at 150 companies in 17 countries for their book, Ideas Are Free: How the Idea Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004). At the Technicolor Corp., for instance, 80 percent of newly identified cost savings have come from employee ideas. Conversely, that means agencies could be operating at only 20 percent of their capacity for improvement if they don't have a mechanism for gathering, evaluating and sharing employee ideas.
In the July 15 issue of Government Executive magazine Angela Smith, a National Park Service employee in Missouri, writes about how the failure to create a mechanism for employees to share ideas often results in agencies "reinventing the wheel." You can read the full column here.
COMMENTS
- Suggestion programs CAN work if the agency has a mechanism in place that has more than a direct supervisor reviewing the idea and allows the employee to actually vocalize and discuss the idea. I made a suggestion through the suggestion program. I had about a page to communicate my idea and the benefits of it. I submitted it and didn't even get the opportunity to discuss it face to face with the supervisor. Two months later, the idea was rejected based on incorrect assumptions that could have easily been clarified if the supervisor had taken 5 minutes to talk to me. Could I have been more clearer in what I submitted - possibly. Would I have left the process - with the idea still rejected - on a more positive note if I had had the opportunity to have a face to face/or at least a phone conversation with the supervisor? Most definitely. I would have accepted the rejection and tried again. Unfortunately, the lesson learned was - it wasn't important enough to warrant that. Oh well... so much for being proactive. GovExec.com reader Posted August 1, 2005 11:56 AM
- As stated before this government is loaded with managers who do nothing but sit around and dream up some goal that never works and does nothing more than cost the american taxpayer millions in dollars. The whole system is a failure due to underworked, overpaid managers who spend their day in pipe dreams in order to create themselves a job, or cause some hardworking, dedicated employees to lose their's. Get the fatcats out of DOD and elsewhere and put them in Iraq where they can be productive and serve a purpose. Charlie Posted July 30, 2005 5:46 PM
- This article misses the point. About 10 years there WAS a big push in government to promote just the sort of information sharing and widespread encouragement of ideas that this article promotes. It was called TOTAL QUALITY (or "TQ" for short). Guess what? It FLOPPED! Only people who have worked for the government 10+ years even know about it anymore. Why did it fail? That's easy: the machinery of government management never "bought in" to it. There is nothing new in this piece; it's just a re-hash of "earth-shattering ideas" of 10-20 years ago that have all since blown over. David Posted July 28, 2005 1:26 PM
