How to Invest in Employee Engagement Through The Power of Employee Ideas with Will Read

  In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with Sideways6 founder and CEO Will Read on the importance of employee ideas and how to generate and tap into them.

Will shares his thoughts, stories and experience with...

• How having your ideas heard helps foster employee connection.
• How to convince organizations to take employee ideas seriously.
• Why clarity in asking for ideas is better than generalities.
• How do you define "good" ideas?
• How incorporating anonymity is a good approach. 

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Transcript

Russel Lolacher 
And on the show today is will read and here’s why he is awesome. He is the founder and CEO of Sideway 6, a service to build better businesses through employee ideas. And he’s the host of The Ideas Show a podcast about ideas that change the world, and the people that might make them happen, or do actually make them happen. Hello, Will.

Will Read 
Hello, hello. Thank you for having me.

Russel Lolacher 
Yeah, no, I’m excited. I’m a big fan of listening to employees and doing it for the betterment of an organization. And I don’t know if we do that enough. So I’m really excited to dig into this. But I can’t get into any of that. Well, without asking you the first question, which is, what’s your best or worst employee experience?

Will Read
So my best or worst felt like the worst, okay, probably for about for about 10–20 minutes, and then turned out to be the best it was, it was pretty transformational. It’s actually a one on one experience within a Month X manager of mine, and we were going to see a potential customer. And I was with him, my manager at about 4pm. And I showed him this presentation, I’d excitedly showed him this presentation that I had, for us both to kind of deliver and go through the next day at 10am with this potential customer. And he looked at it, he kind of flipped through the PowerPoint deck. And he turned to me and he went, This is terrible. And he said it with a smile on his face and a glint in his eye. And we had a great relationship. And he said, You can do so, so much better than this. And I know that you have not, you have not put enough into this. And truth be told I hadn’t. I was quite early on in my career, I thought that I could probably kind of wing it and make it up a little bit more than than then was the right thing to do. And he gave me some pretty specific feedback around like, look at this, like this, this part is really not up to scratch for this reason. And I really think you could, you could do so much more on this part. And he said to me, I’ll be on that train with you at 830 tomorrow morning. And he’s just said, I’m really interested to see what this looks like, by that point. And because on reflection, because we had a great relationship, because I knew that he he kind of cared about me and wanted the best for me. And because it was so direct, but delivered with a smile, I went home and I fixed it, I sorted it, I put my pride into it, there was a happy ending and that we won the customer. But that’s always that’s always stuck with me on on the power of like, really, really being fairly direct whilst was very, very caring. And obviously it all kind of matched up when the whole radical candor book came out. And I was like, Yeah, I’ve had that experience. But it stuck with me, it’s an experience that that shaped how I chose to work, I kind of lets up, lets up the care that I’m putting into things. It’s definitely shaped how I manage. And, and it’s the kind of story that stuck with me. So that’d be my best experience that maybe felt like the worst. Whilst it was, whilst I was in the moment,

Russel Lolacher
You had some time to marinate on it a bit and realize that it was all for your best.

Will Read
Exactly. And when we remained good friends afterwards, and I’ve shared the story with him, he didn’t really remember it. So obviously, not quite as pivotal fair.

Russel Lolacher
It’s always funny because people don’t realize the impact they have on others, they’re just going about their work for good or for bad. And then we find out like decades later that that was such a pivotal moment for their co workers, employees leadership, where they’re still dealing with the trauma of it, or they’re still you know, using that as an influence or a motivator in their own work

Will Read
100% 100% We can have these huge influences on each other, I’ve definitely experienced that, when you first become a manager, and you start to realize that your kind of little actions or how you’re showing up in the office, or when you seem super excited that’s giving everyone else loads of energy. And when you seem a little deflated, that’s actually people start to worry or take a bit of take a bit of notice of that. And I think it’s such an interesting point.

Russel Lolacher
So let’s get into the idea collection space, which is where you’re where a big part of your time and efforts are focused on. So employee ideas, collecting them actioning strategy six helps collect that information. So I want to I want to get into the idea and the philosophy of it. Why did you think gathering employee ideas had a problem to fix?

Will Read
Yeah, sure. So I’ve had the experience, I’m not sure if you have of being as small fish in a large pond or a small cog in a big machine, whatever the analogy you want to use, working at really big organization, and not feeling particularly connected to what you’re doing. And I think that that lack of connection can happen through a couple of things. It could be that you actually just don’t really care too much about the mission or the purpose of the organization. And if that’s the case, you probably want to have a look at finding a new a new role potentially. But it could be that actually you’re you buy into The overall picture is why we’re all here, you buy into we are making people’s lives better in some way through the product or service that we’re delivering. But just at the moment what what the organization is trying to do in the short to medium term, it’s either not resonating with you or you don’t feel like what you’re doing on a day to day basis, has a particular link to that or you don’t feel consulted, or you don’t feel like you’re contributing to the change that’s supposed to be happening happening around you. And I’ve definitely had that I worked to a TV media company in the beginning of my career, and had that experience of kind of interacting with people that had interesting insights, right. So our customers or suppliers, I was interacting with colleagues every day. And we all had these ideas about what to do, like we had these ideas about how we might be a little bit better. But we didn’t really understand the context that the organization was trying to play in. Because we were quite low level people early on in our careers. As I say, there was this mis mismatch where the organization wanted desperately wanted to get buy in into the short to medium term, picture desperately wanted to engage people around that. But it wasn’t doing a good job, because I didn’t really know what that medium term picture was, let alone feel like I was a part of it. And I was yearning to be a part of something because I had enough engagement, to have the insights to have the ideas that I wanted to contribute somewhere in and that’s where that’s where sideways six came from. It’s that experience of thinking, well, people have ideas, right, we talk about ideas about how to improve the place that we work for our customers for ourselves for the world, all the time we talk about it in the back of taxis on the way to customers, we talk about it in a bar on a Friday with our friends, we talk about it wherever it might be, and organizations and at the very top, if you were to ask people, do you want to listen? Do you want to hear people’s ideas? Do you want to be a culture where ideas they do, but there’s something going wrong in the middle. And we set out to fix that something going wrong in the middle. And it’s from personal experience, and then started sideways six or eight or nine years ago, and started to speak to two organizations and start to work out where the where the challenge was. And it turns out, it’s not quite as easy as I probably thought when I thought, right, I’ll just fix it then. And there’s all these kind of intricacies. But when you get it right, when you are able to run employee ideas, programs that are impactful when you are able to harness that kind of collective insight, the collective excitement behind the things that you’re actually trying to achieve as an organization, magic, magic can happen.

Russel Lolacher
So you kind of breezed over it there. What is an ideas program?

Will Read
Yeah, so what I do program essentially, is just a structured way of engaging employees in a subject. So that subject might be something that’s very important to you in the long term, like your purpose or your mission? How do we how do we speed up the achievement of our purpose? How do we make sure that we are living in the world as an organization as we want it to be? It could be something much more topical and short term? So how are we going to hit this quarter’s targets? How are we going to fend off this recession? How are we going to capitalize on this market trend, where it could be something more in the medium term, so we see a lot of ideas programs around say sustainability, but broad strokes, you are making a commitment to engage employees around their ideas, we try to we actually try and avoid the use of the word can’t collect and gather because what we want is for our employees to put their eye to the set a challenge or a theme. And then to put their ideas forward. And then to have the excitements how to bring their own ideas to life. Ideas program is basically a commitment to do that. It’s a commitment, but it’s a resource behind it. It’s a commitment to evaluate those ideas, valley, its commitment to bring some of them to life.

Russel Lolacher
How do you convince an organization to even start when ideas program being a value to invest in to begin with?

Will Read
Yeah, so I mean, there’s there’s three main benefits. So what what can happen when you talk about this whole space, is people can think back to the dusty suggestion box in the corner of kind of restaurant or something like that? Or it can that’s the that’s the kind of one of the worst things that can be associated with this space, where you ask people for their ideas, and then nothing happens. And it was all a big waste of time. Did we even need to spend money on that box in the first place? The second thing that can happen is you can think back to efforts were people actually have earnestly gone out and tried to listen to employees ideas, and then they’ve been a bit overwhelmed. So it’s like, we got loads of ideas. We didn’t know what to do with them. Actually, it turned out we thought we’re gonna get loads of good ideas. Actually. None of them were implementable. And so you’re always battling against that. So it’s not actually it’s often not just that they haven’t thought about doing it, but it’s that they thought about doing it and thought, no, but there are three main kind of big benefits to it. Companies who take this seriously to organizations who take this seriously. And they are, the first one is the most obvious one. So you get if you do it, well, if you set the brief Well, if you make sure that you are aiming this at something that the organization cares about, and the employees know about and the employees care about, then you’re gonna get a bunch of ideas that you can actually implement. It turns out that the people speaking to customers all day long on a retail shop floor, have some insights about how the shop could be better for customers, like who knew? Well, it turns out, we work a lot with kind of airlines or we work a lot with like utilities companies, if you’re out speaking to customers in their homes, whilst you’re fixing their boiler, you’re gonna find out some pretty interesting stuff about what they want. Or if you’re kind of speaking people at the check in checking desk, you’re, you’re gonna have some ideas about how that check in process could be, could be better. So first off, you’re going to get a bunch of ideas that you can implement them, wherever you point, this program, if you do it, well. It doesn’t matter, you’re still you’re still gonna get those ideas. So whether it’s an innovation piece sustainability piece of saving money, peace, whatever it might be, you’ll notice I’m not really talking about Super general ideas, programs, because they are the 5%, we would almost always suggest that you don’t start off with them. So the first benefit is you’re getting those ideas. And that might lead to new revenue streams, but a customer experience. Same goes for the less obvious Well, the second one is somewhat obvious, as well as it feels good to be heard. It feels good to be listened to. But experienced, I talked about the company that I worked at, I was less engaged with the company, I was I was having a worse experience. Because these things were bubbling up and there’s no evidence go, even if they were not good, even if even if actually, they someone just listened to them and went, Hey, we can’t do that. For this reason. It’s still a much more engaging experience, and you feel like you’ve been heard then if no one’s asking. But the third one, and actually, for me, the most exciting benefit, and how you convince companies to go on this journey to start listening to ideas is that you are engaging people in creating shared ownership of the things that you want to happen, those of those goals, there’s this thing called the IKEA effect, and employee engagement, frequent crossover or the endowment effect before it’s applied to and before we got this kind of catchy name, which is that we value more the things that we help to create. So you’ve got a set of drawers that you spend a few hours from Ikea building versus the exact same set of drawers that’s been built by someone else, you’re gonna want the ones that you’ve kind of endowed into that you that you have helped to build. And we can actually leverage that when we’re thinking about any change that we’re we’re trying to make happen in a large organization. And so that’s the real third benefit is what if you could instead of saying to people, Hey, we need to be more innovative. You say to them, we are looking to be more interested as company together? How can we do that? How can we build this innovation culture together? Or if you want to say, hey, we need to be more prudent because there’s a recession, recession coming to write his five themes in ways that we can be more efficient? What’s our strategy? What are your ideas for how we can get there, and then people are going to just outside of the ideas program, they’re going to feel a sense of ownership over that thing, that goal that you’re trying to achieve? That’s, to me, that’s actually the most interesting benefit.

Russel Lolacher
So you do talk about bringing those ideas forward, and the benefits that are them. And again, I totally agree with all the benefits. But I also see a bit of a difficult part of this, which is, how does an organization define what a good or a bad employee idea is? Because employees are going to share? And then that’s in the eye of the beholder sometimes. So being listened to you? Hmm, yeah, we get into a difficult situation for a lot of people.

Will Read
Listen, you’re absolutely right. And there’s a few things to touch on there. The first is, as I say, you don’t want to go super, super general. So we once started working with a company where they actually had run an ideas program without us. And they launched it and they basically just said to people, hey, it’s We want your ideas. First off, or how can like, what are your ideas for how we can be better full stop. And that’s so ill defined? That’s so fluffy. That’s, that’s so open to interpretation, that so many people can go forward excited, excitedly, and say, here’s my idea. And they can really believe that it’s a good idea. But you don’t have a shared a shared understanding of what a good idea is. And so what they got, on day one, they had the most liked idea, the most kind of supporting idea amongst colleagues, was put an ice cream machine in the corner of the office. And of course, as a large utilities company that’s running on a low margin, it’s very unlikely they’re gonna put an ideal ice cream machine in the corner of the office. But who can blame the person for putting that for us? Because through the prism of, would this make employees happier would like would this make a cool office? That’s a good idea, through the prism of is this actually going to help our business is, is this going to help drive value for our customers? That’s a terrible idea. So first off, you have to set a clear kind of challenge. And in their case, what they should have done is said, here’s what we care about. Here’s where we’re trying to get to, what are our ideas together? And the second thing that that story brings up, is that you need to give a clear prism through which you’re going to evaluate these ideas. Right? So that’s, that’s, that’s quite a common one is to say, does this benefit the customer? Is it achievable within a few months? Is it proof of concept double within a couple of weeks? And does this fit in with the values that we that we live within this organization, and then it’s about well, what happens if you get an idea that’s not that’s deemed not good? Well, actually, one of the other things that I would bring up there is to make sure that as well as a consistent kind of prison that you’re looking at and evaluating these things through it, is to look at having the right kinds of people that are making these decisions, and ideally having like a diverse group of people that are making these decisions. So rather than feeling like those people in the ivory tower are going to make the decisions on the ideas, you might get a small group of kind of reviewers, we might include actually, frontline colleagues, you might include a middle manager, you might include a director in that in those decision making. So it feels much more fair and representative and kind of diverse in the people that are making these decisions. And then finally, it’s about being super transparent about why these decisions are made. So there’s a very big difference between being told no to your idea, or getting some horrible automated email that goes out to all 300 people that have contributed saying, Sorry, on this occasion, we’re not taking an idea forwards, and actually receiving something which is considered transparent, and feels fair. So an example might be, I put that ice cream thing forward. And in this example, the company’s set the challenge quite clearly that we’re trying to create an organization which delivers amazing value for our customers, and lives to a set of values that we that we believe in, I might be able to really kind of in theory rejects that idea, which sounds really harsh and horrible. But actually, I might be able to say, hey, I really appreciate this. And we think if, if money was no object, this would be a super cool feature for our office. On this occasion, as we’re looking at ideas that are going to really move the needle for our customer. This isn’t something that we’re going to prioritize. And it like, for example, like it’s scored, and it actually scored a two out of five on that metric. And it’s got a two out of five in the metric. But please do keep contributing. It’s a very different experience.

Russel Lolacher
Communication is key to really understanding why some get through and some don’t. My worry sometimes though, when I was checking out strategy six a bit and it was talking about how it’s helped implement millions of ideas. Sorry, let me rephrase that get millions of ideas, but only implement 1000s. So if somebody reads that they’re seeing an exceptionally big gap of you’re listening, but you’re not like, like, my dad always says, right? You’re not listening to me. But what my dad’s interpretation, if you’re not listening to me, is you’re not doing what I’m telling you to do. Those are completely two different things right. Now, I heard you, I’m just not going to do what you told me to do. Because it’s not right for me not right for whatever. So how do you tackle that gap from a communication standpoint, because I get what you’re saying. But that is a significant gap from listening to doing.

Will Read
On average, around about one in 30 ideas is implemented. So the gap is large, it’s definitely not 100% of ideas being implemented, but it’s not. It’s not super, super, super, super low. And then that number goes up, the more you define a specific challenge that you’re aiming at. And the cold hard reality is that organizations are focused on something and that is going to bubble up to the top. Now the best organizations are obviously focused on long term purpose and long term mission. And therefore, you’re gonna get more like, there’s gonna be more space for innovative ideas, right? So it may be that this idea does not specifically did us X percentage in this region in this space of time, but it helps us hit our purpose and our mission, and there should be space for those ideas. So it’s not just the case that, hey, we know the exact ideas before we even launched this. We know the ideas that we want. And if you don’t give us those ideas, then then get lost. Definitely not the case. You should be creating space for the small wins, medium term wins and the long term stuff. There’s almost like a scale, right? There’s a scale from we’re not listening. We’re not consulting, we don’t even care what you think, all the way to some kind of self organizing company where you We’ll get to decide everything that they work on. And they like the it’s totally democratic. It’s called a holacracy, that type of thing where it’s like, you decide everything. And what I would say is that completely ideas definitely doesn’t take you all the way there. And I understand that. And and I think it’s really interesting to look at what’s taking all the way there. But we’re certainly, by running employee ideas, programs, you’re involving people, and you’re listening to people more than if you don’t ask them anything. Because of the nature of like a mechanism of an idea you’re listening to the more it’s it creates a lot more ownership than just a survey, where you’re just saying, What do you think about this thing, and you’re not, you’re not giving any space for like, someone to take initiative or someone to suggest a response to that. And then we’re probably a step up, which is the kind of 75% of the way there which is like, Okay, we want you to come up with the actual things that we will do, not just the not just asking how you feel about some things that we pre decided, raise an interesting question, which is like, how do you go even further? How do you get to the point? And we’re starting to think about that, like, how do you get to the point where, instead of suggesting, it’s almost like, you’re just surfacing an idea, and then you’re being allowed to work on it, or you’re gonna get to work on it? And, and maybe people ask you how it’s going. And I think I think that’s a really interesting kind of path for the future.

Russel Lolacher
What if you don’t get enough ideas?

Will Read
It’s a big thing. And there’s, there’s a bunch of things that you can do around communication and making sure that you make it as easy as possible for people to engage and what the suggestion box in the corner of the office or the restaurant got, right, is being where people are, right. So it didn’t ask you to go out to, I don’t know, like, if you’re working in the office and didn’t ask you to walk all the way to the warehouse or to the back of the parking lot to put your idea for us it was there it was when you’re walking to the bathroom, or the cafeteria like you you are dropping something in. And I think you need to kind of think about that principle, when you’re trying to engage people got a lot of things wrong as well, don’t get me wrong. But you need to think about that principle when you’re trying to think about making sure that you get the right volume of ideas and get the right volume of engagement is to be where people are. So how can you make it as easy as then texting their idea in or liking their idea on a slack channel, or sending it off on a team’s app is super key. Outside of that there’s a bunch of like pretty standard change management stuff that you want to you want to do to gauge people. One of the things though, is that you often if you’re an organization where this type of thing feels a bit foreign, where this type of thing feels like, Oh, we don’t speak up around here. This is not this isn’t our culture. And I think you have to be quite ready at the beginning for some skepticism, you have to be quite ready for people to say, No, you don’t really listen, you’re not really you don’t really care about listening. And that is going to lead to lower engagement, and you have to be you have to almost be ready for it. And you have to basically take whatever you can get to start off with and, and like really listen to the people who who put their ideas first, because they’re going out on a limb, they are going against the kind of the grain or the what the expense of the culture, need to celebrate those people, you need to get ideas very, very seriously. And ideally, you need to get to a point where you have those success stories where you have the example of like, Hey, I know this skepticism here, I get it. But we are really listening, like this idea was put forward from the front line, and it now has come to fruition. And it’s now like out there and build up build up from that.

Russel Lolacher
What is the right number? You mentioned having, you know, the right number, amount of engagement, the right number of questions, or ideas? Is there a magic number of hey, if you get 30 ideas this month, that’s considered successful, is there a metric for that?

Will Read
We kind of talk about all other things being equal, more engagement is better, pretty much without a limit. But of course, usually all other things aren’t equal. And a lot of design getting significantly more engagement comes at the expense of some other very important things like the quality of the ideas, like the thoughtfulness that’s gone into putting them forward, like how actually kind of actionable, they are mainly mainly the thoughtfulness to be honest, right? If you if you make the if you just say hey, we need like five words for your idea. And you don’t need to think about the problem itself. And you don’t need to think about this, that the other, then you’re going to degrade the quality. But I don’t see why. Like, there’s a brilliant book called The idea driven organization, which which kind of posits that you can actually run a whole organization based on this like currency of ideas. And it wouldn’t all be going through the type of programs that that we’re thinking about all the time, like some of it is just around giving people the space to work on their own ideas in response to goals and making sure that people have that resource and time in order to work on their ideas. But I don’t think there’s really, I don’t think there’s really a limit. So if if the ideas are helping to contribute to what you what you’re trying to achieve as an organization and if the ideas are coming from a great place from the employees and if the ideas are ones that employees really care about. I don’t think I don’t think there’s an upper limit.

Russel Lolacher
I was noticing of your software as an integration tool within existing platforms. Yeah, those existing platforms are very public on who you are and what you do. Anonymity is always been something that people really enjoy, because of the particular culture within the organization, which I’ve always said is a canary in a coal mine is that you have a problem with your culture, if the only ideas or criticisms you get are from anonymous sources. This kind of takes away the anonymity, which can be not great for a lot of safe spaces within an organization. What are your thoughts on that?

Will Read
I actually agree with you now and it’s taken, it’s taken me a while to agree with you. I think I used to be I used to be very pro, this should be public. If you can’t do it publicly, you’ve got a problem this can be this can be the start of a change, etc, etc. And I still believe some of that, well, I still believe it to an extent. But I think what I’ve realized over the years is that there is there should be space for people who don’t feel as comfortable speaking up, who don’t want their profile picture next to a suggestion that they’ve made, because it’s not always the sign of a bad culture, it might just be someone who’s a little more introverted, it might be someone who it might be the same people who struggle to like, speak up in meetings, because they’re a little more nervous. That’s just not the way that they operate. And we want to give them space to contribute as well. So we actually, you’re right in saying that our default is public, but we’ve actually introduced the ability to do this anonymously as well. Because… Because of that, because I think that there should actually be space for those people who, for whatever reason, don’t want to be so. So I’m quite like a code guy, like I don’t mind like kind of speaking my mind doing it publicly. That’s not the case for that’s not the case for everyone. I think it’s quite important when you’re thinking about building these types of platforms and, and systems that you take into account, different perspectives, and you take into account different levels of the upside. And that’s been really interesting, because I think when you speak to CEOs and leaders of these larger organizations, the initial reaction reaction to Hey, you should introduce an anonymous channel is like, that’s just going to be complaints. That’s just going to be everyone saying, I hate this thing. And I hate that thing. And do we really want to create that negative culture, but it’s really interesting that that doesn’t play out. That’s not That’s not the what we see from from our data. There’s a little bit about don’t get me wrong. But there’s a little bit about publicly to be honest, because there’s, we all know, people who are more than happy to speak up negatively, publicly as well. What it is, as well as there’s people that are maybe afraid that they’re saying the wrong thing, or they’re afraid that they might get mocked for their idea and things like that. And so giving them that space is really, okay.

Russel Lolacher
Yeah, and I’m always curious how technology takes into account diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, when it comes to how it’s going to be able to be communicated, but also implemented. So thanks for that.

Will Read
I think it’s, it’s a really key thing.

Russel Lolacher
What has been some of the benefits you’ve seen? I mean, you use the ice cream machine, as an example. But you’re in this space, you’ve been in this space for years. What are some of the examples or story you can share with me? That’s like, no, no, this is how it’s supposed to work.

Will Read
Yeah, so so listen, I mean, I think some of the exciting stuff at the moment is availability. And around, obviously, organizations have woken up to the fact that they need to reduce their negative impact on the world or start making a positive impact on the world. And we can talk about why they’ve woken up to that. Maybe there’s purely financial and shareholder pressure, maybe the goods of their hearts, but but they have woken up to it. And they understand now that, that that needs to be the case. And of course, to make anything happen, as I’ve talked about a little bit, you have to get people on board, especially if you’re an organization of 100,000 people, you need a good deal of them on board with that message and contributing to that message in order to in order to make your result happen. So let’s say you’re aiming for Net Zero within five years, that’s not gonna happen if people don’t know or don’t care about that job. And so, some of the exciting stuff is actually the collective and just how many people I mean, we work with organizations of 20–30,000 people where they’ve managed to engage over 50% of those people across the course of a year in a particular goal. But then there are a bunch of a bunch of stories that still amaze me where it was one organization where someone basically suggested that their vans out on the on the highways should be limited from I think they were they were currently limited. I’m gonna get these numbers wrong. I think they may be limited at 70 miles an hour, and they need to be they should be limited at 68 miles an hour because they worked out the cost efficiency. And the saving on gas would be noticeable for a single vehicle, but across the whole fleet, that would make a huge difference. And actually, they worked out that the timing difference on an average journey was we’re talking like minutes or less than And so that idea went up and got implemented, and that saved good. It’s kind of like a win win win because it’s saved. Have a lot of kind of gas from going out into into the ozone layer into the into the atmosphere, which obviously great for great for the environment, but it’s also save the money for the for the organization. And it’s those type of kind of win win wins that we’d like to see are kind of more of a fun one was we worked with British Airways over here in the UK. For their 125 year anniversary, they wanted to do run a campaign called the best of British where it was like, what are your ideas on how we celebrate being kind of one of these kind of best of British brands? And someone said, Well, another best of British brand is BrewDog the brewers. So why don’t we do a collaboration beer. And that idea got kind of picked up. And hundreds of 1000s of customers are now drunk that beer on board British Airways flights, it’s led to a long partnership between the two brands. And it’s just a quite a cool example. But the reason I like that one is because it’s so physical, because every time that someone gets on a flight, and they’re offered that beer that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for that member of the category kind of putting their hand up and saying, Hey, how about how about this, here’s, here’s my idea. So you have you have all sorts of things from the mundane and the boring, that makes a big difference through to the like, super exciting, where the differences are a little bit less quantifiable, but kind of you can tell it through the the feeling of the story.

Russel Lolacher
You know, I gotta go back to what you started with with the organization’s are now suddenly realizing that employees have something to say they’ve got this new woken up ability, which, again, is so frustrating. And I’ve talked about this on the podcast a lot, which is this whole pandemic happened, organizations suddenly realized employees have more power than they thought they did. And they realize that the way of business needs to change even though we’ve known this for decades, it suddenly the pandemic made it everybody else aware about it. So how has that impacted the world of idea… ideas?

Will Read
Yeah, I mean, we saw a big, a big surge in people interested in doing this, because of things like the great resignation, obviously, employee engagement goes up, retention goes down. And so this is a driver of employee engagement. And so you do see, you do see a lot that one thing, one, one word of caution, I guess is that very successful programs can be led by the head of people or the head of employee engagement with head of comms, just need to make sure that you can do something with those ideas. Right. So we talked about the topics. And so what’s one of the things that we kind of speak to these these engagement focused folks who are speaking to us now, and we just, we just made sure that like, if you’re going to run this, you need to make sure you actually bring these ideas to life, you need to make sure that you’re actually doing something about this, this is not a survey that you can sweep under the rug if you if you need to. Once you’ve kind of shown the graphs, this is something where you have to show tangible, tangible action. So it definitely has created a big swell in organizations wanting to listen to employee ideas in spring. But we just need to caution them that you it’s not just about the listening, it’s about them, making sure that that things happen, making sure that change happens as a result of it.

Russel Lolacher
And the importance of the communication too. As you’ve already illustrated. We’re hearing you, here’s why we might not be doing what you’ve done. But we don’t want to discourage further ideas. With Yeah, exactly. Lack of action and lack of communication can just be a poison to a culture anyway. hunterson. So I’ve got to ask you the big question here, which is what’s one simple action people can do right now to improve their relationships at work, Will?

Will Read
So for me, it’s to take this phrase of what do you think when you’re consulting on something, and to think about, at least some of the time changing that to what do you think we should do within within a set framework? So to move just from just from feedback, feedback, so important, there’s a there’s a massive space for feedback and consultation, but also to create space for that to be active as well. So not just what do you think? What do you think we should do? Turn those maybe passive conversations into active conversations, and you can do that on a tiny scale in a one to one or you can do that on a massive scale with a big injury ideas program.

Russel Lolacher
Thank you. Well, that’s well read. He is the founder and CEO of Sideways 6 and the host of The Ideas Show. Thanks so much for being here, Will.

Will Read
Thank you. Thank you.