Repeat After Me: 'That’s a Great Idea!'
Researchers have found that employees are more willing to stay in a salaried job if they have greater autonomy and opportunities to use their entrepreneurial skills.
If you’re not recognizing your employees for their good work and great ideas, you’re risking losing them to your competitors. You may even be inspiring them to leave you and start their own businesses.
According to researchers at Rutgers University’s The Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, salary plays a role in employees’ decisions to quit and try their hand at entrepreneurship, it’s not the only reason they leave. Feeling like their ideas were ignored or rejected at work was frequently cited as another reason for leaving.
The researchers suggest that employees are more “willing to stay in a salaried job if they have greater autonomy and opportunities to use their entrepreneurial skills, such as initiating projects, leading people, and utilizing creativity to develop new ideas, processes, and businesses within organizations.”
Ask your employees: What is a problem we have that no one talks about?
If you’re out of practice in encouraging employee ideas, the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) suggests these 12 ideas - including making sure you set aside time for brainstorming and creating an internal “startup” culture. In a separate post, the YEC suggests, perhaps counterintuitively, that you embrace both good AND bad ideas as a way to encourage employees to think big and bold.
If you think you don’t need any new ideas - you should reconsider. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company say we are in nothing less than an innovation crisis, driven in part by the change in how employees worked during the pandemic.
The good news is that small businesses are considered better suited to innovating and pivoting than big ones - even Richard Branson thinks so. If you’re ready to get some new employee ideas, here’s a list of questions to ask to get the conversation started. My favorite: “What is a problem we have that no one talks about?”