by Lina Martinez
Sometimes the spark of creation really does need to be swiftly moved along for it to bear fruits. It's much like an ember, it needs to be quickly put into kindling and blown on for it to catch light. Now there are of course, bad ideas and good ideas but the trouble is many businesses won’t allow an apparent bad idea to run and gain some momentum and show itself to be a truly great idea. This has happened so many times in business, where CEOs won’t take on the advice of a junior employee because their idea doesn’t make sense. The junior staffer goes onto work more on the idea and a few weeks later that idea is presented and then accepted by that very same CEO. Where did it go wrong? If ideas are given more collaboration or perhaps more authority to grow, then your business could be in a much stronger position.
A time and a place
Where can the humble junior employee have their ideas heard? The usual practice is that the leading employees and management will conjure up the next direction of travel for the business. You as the business owner too, will want to bring new ideas into the fold. However, the junior employee should be able to confide with managers and project leaders with new ideas they have come up with. There should also be time during project meetings or any kind of allocated time for discussions and debates, where junior employees can voice their opinion and explain their ideas. This gives them a time and place when they can share, and not have to hold it in.
Rapid multiple engagement
The internal functions of a business day to day is the advancing of tasks. There are jobs to be done and this means that each employee will have their head buried in their own responsibilities. However, there should also be fluid and rapid collaboration of ideas. This means that the cloud-based systems you use for tasks and emails, will be high in traffic. To keep them smooth and free from error, your business should have IT Support and Consulting Services on standby. When servers and connections slow down, this hampers the speed in which ideas can be passed around the office. If one employee cannot load up what everybody else is viewing, then they are de facto left out of the discussion. So having a good reliable network is something you should invest in.
Code of urgency
Many businesses have a code of conduct but you should also have a code of urgency within those standards. When something is urgent, then you should have a type code which can then be addressed according to the severity. For example, an email with the words ‘Type A’ will be a high priority task to complete. This could be something like speaking with a high profile client about an issue they are having with your product or service.
Communication is of course vital within business but it's not enough to say or accept that. Speed and fluidity for small ideas to blossom into something larger and urgent issues to be addressed quickly, are the detailed manners in which to accomplish fast effective communication.