Idea Exchanges for Employee Feedback

One of my favorite things we do each month is honor an internal hero and choose the most pressing hassle/best idea. The hero and hassle of the month is chosen by everyone through directly voting with an idea exchange. For us, we use UserVoice.com and just close the ideas out each month. The winner of the hero of the month and the provider of the most pressing hassle/best idea each get a $100 bill at our monthly all hands meeting. Here are some key benefits:

• Employee recognition is done in a consistent and company-wide fashion
• More pressing hassles and good ideas are generated, and documented, using this methodology
• Departments and team members talk about the recognition and ideas on a daily basis at our morning check-ins
• Each winner gets a fun lawn ornament (think little sumo wrestler and big foot character) to keep at their desk for the month to highlight that they won

I’d recommend looking for ways to recognize employees and capture good ideas in a systematic fashion. Idea exchanges provide just the medium for us.