To become more efficient, a company grows sales and cuts costs at the same time. The second part is harder: the bottlenecks at each production step are visible to people other than those who can remove them.
The iceberg of ignorance
According to Sidney Yoshida's “iceberg of ignorance” model, a company's top management knows only about 4% of its problems, middle management about 9%, supervisors about 74%, and only frontline employees face all 100%. It is a vicious circle: those at the top have enough authority but not the full information; employees have the information but not the authority to change anything.
The solution — a single register of ideas
You need a channel through which an employee can describe a problem, its source and a proposed solution — and have it reach a top manager without edits, distortions or interpretations from middle management.
How the “Idea exchange” works
In their personal account, an employee submits an idea, describes its essence and sends it for review. To avoid overloading management with empty proposals, the idea is first checked by an independent party — the HR department — against formal requirements: it is not a request for a pay rise (that is handled in budgeting), not a complaint about the boss, not a return to issues already resolved, not a platitude. HR passes an idea that clears this check to a top manager, who reviews it and either delegates implementation to a subordinate or declines it with reasons on the merits. Proper feedback at every step is essential — otherwise the company will get indifference instead of enthusiasm.
Stage two — the effect in money
The scheme can be extended by adding two fields — the expected and the actual economic effect, filled in independently by the finance department. At the end of the period, the company sees the return on ideas in figures.
Risks along the way
Management's conviction that improvements come only from the top; a lack of interest in innovative ideas; the belief that only doers are needed; support in words and neglect in practice. The most advanced practices here belong to the Japanese, with the kaizen system, quality circles and continuous process improvement.
Where the platform comes in
The “Idea exchange” is an example of a module built on the TopHR platform for a specific client's task: an approval route, roles, economic effect fields and reporting on the flow of ideas.
