Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 14, 1993 TAG: 9302110052
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LINI S. KADABA KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
EMPLOYEES' SUGGESTIONS HELPING COMPANIES ACHIEVE MORE WITH LESS
In the midst of layoffs, tightfisted budgets and a recovery as slow as molasses, U.S. businesses face a challenge:Achieve more with much less.
Wesley R. Major and Melani Kulick have a solution.
Suggestions.
Both have made suggestions that enabled their companies to meet the challenge.
Major and 16 co-workers saved Philadelphia Electric Co. $3.9 million last year, the largest savings in the company's 83-year-old Employees' Suggestion System. The 17 workers, who wanted to repair a boiler system's tubing rather than replace it, shared a bonus of $25,000, giving new meaning to the phrase, "a penny for your thoughts."
Kulick, a Pep Boys' employee in Ocean Township, N.J., has sent a flurry of ideas - thoughtful, technical suggestions relating to store operations - said Christine Matheson, a communications specialist at the company. "Sometimes . . . she is very creative," Matheson said.
The suggestion box is an idea whose time has come - again.
"Ideas are the new currency of commerce, the new capital," writes Donald W. Blohowiak, author of "Mavericks! How to Lead Your Staff to Think Like Einstein, Create Like da Vinci and Invent Like Edison." He points out that the word "capital" has its roots in the Latin "capitalis," meaning "relating to the head."
"Thinking," he writes, "is the new competitive weapon."
He argues that America's future depends on the ingenuity of its past. For many companies, those bright ideas will come from the slips of paper in the often dusty, snickered-at suggestion boxes hang- ing on shop walls. Or, more likely, from suggestion systems accessed through interoffice mail and computers.
Suggestion boxes have a long history. In 1898, William M. Connor, an Eastman Kodak employee, scrawled the suggestion, "wash the windows," and he received $2 for his idea. Eastman Kodak's is considered the first suggestion program.
"They're being rediscovered on a daily basis," said Bernie Sander, president of the Washington-based Employee Involvement Association and associate director of corporate performance at Bell Canada.
Merck Co.'s U.S. Human Health Division has a year-old IDEA (Improvement Driven by Employee Action) program to improve four areas: quality, jobs, safety and profits, said coordinator John Colline.
In 1991, employee suggestions saved North American companies $2 billion for the fifth straight year, according to the association's most recent figures. For those ideas, the group's 1,200 members paid $164 million in incentives, with $193,260 the single largest award, by Martin Marietta. Employees submitted a million ideas.
Sander offered the statistics on the big bucks reluctantly. It isn't about cents, but sense, he emphasized. "We've got to get away from the `thousand percent big breakthroughs,' " he said. "We've got to focus on the 1 percent improvements every day."
In Japan, such an ethic is called "kaizen," constant improvement. "The Japanese do this every day," said Colline of Merck. "They tweak it, tweak it, tweak it and by the end of the year, they have thousands saved."
On the surface, constant improvement sounds a lot like a repackaging of the concept of total quality management, an idea that much of corporate America had embraced until recently.
But one of TQM's failures is its reliance on a manager controlling the process. In constant improvement, managers give up some power and encourage workers to think continuously about bettering their work, about building better mousetraps.
In Japan, this expectation yields many more suggestions, about 2,500 per 100 employees per year compared with only a dozen per 100 American employees, according to "Mavericks!"
Encouraging worker ideas builds a sense of ownership and trust - at a time when many employees may lack both because of layoffs. Blohowiak calls it a daily "psychic paycheck."
"One way to feel in control is the idea you can make a difference," said Louise Sandmeyer, director of the Continuous Quality Improvement Center at Pennsylvania State University.
"That's the '90s, the idea of empowerment," said Maureen Boyle, administrator of Philadelphia Electric's suggestion program, which in addition to bottom-line savings uses the program to create a sense of satisfaction throughout its workforce.
Companies take a variety of approaches toward suggestion programs. Most reward ideas that affect the bottom line and those that affect intangibles, such as health, safety and environment. Some offer hefty rewards, usually a percentage of the money saved. Others give token gifts, treating all adopted ideas alike.
At Merck, the division has adopted ideas ranging from one that saved paper by using computers to transmit reports to another that improved the division's telephone directory by listing fax numbers along with telephone numbers.
"No one knows where the opportunity for improvement is better than those on the job," said Bill Scottoline, a manager at Merck.
Some academics, however, have suggested throwing out the age-old suggestion box. In its place, they would encourage better communication between managers and employers, thereby building trust, allowing employees to contribute their two-cents' worth and producing a better company.
Blohowiak said the suggestion box was the catalyst for just that.
Eventually, said Blohowiak, who is director of marketing at a Times Mirror Co. subsidiary in New York, a good program will lead to "an environment where everybody is encouraged to put their brains on the table every day."