Do You Have the Most Creative Employees?

When a new year comes around, most small business owners will try to make adjustments and improvements to their business plans in order to achieve better results.

To create an effective business plan for 2014, you need to have a good understanding of every aspect of your business, ranging from day-to-day operations to marketing. This can be difficult if you do not have sufficient hands-on experience in the various tasks needed to keep your company running.

Since your employees perform those tasks on a daily basis, they can help you identify specific problems and find solutions to manage your business activities more effectively.

As such, it is essential that you encourage your employees to come up with ideas to make your company better in 2014.

Ideas You Can Get from Your Employees

In the area of operations, you can ask your employees to suggest ways to make certain processes more efficient and effective.

Employees who are observant and proactive can contribute useful ideas that can help your company increase productivity, reduce costs, boost competitive advantage, improve customer satisfaction and create a better work environment.

To gain better marketing results, you need to discuss the latest consumer and marketing trends with your marketing staff. Find out which trends will be prevalent in 2014 and how you can make adjustments to your marketing strategy to accommodate those trends.

It is also important that you get your IT staff to contribute ideas on how to improve your company's IT strategy, such as adopting cloud computing or IWMS.

Encourage Your Employees to Share Ideas

According to a Right Management survey, about 54 percent of employees in North America offer more than 20 suggestions to their employers every year, and only 7 percent do not offer any suggestion at all.

This means that most employees are actually willing and eager to share ideas with their employers.

All you have to do to get your employees to make suggestions is to provide the necessary opportunities, environment and motivation for them to do so.

Be Open

By establishing an open-door policy, you will be able to eliminate any apprehensions that your employees may have about sharing ideas.

Create a conducive environment for them to speak up and refrain from criticizing or judging them.

Provide an Avenue for Sharing Ideas

Try to make it as easy and convenient as possible for your employees to make suggestions.

You can do this by providing a suggestion box or setting up an ideas committee.

Be Responsive

Whether the suggestions you receive are helpful or not, it is important that you provide acknowledgement and feedback to the employees who submitted them. This will make them feel valued and give them the motivation to keep submitting ideas.

Employee suggestions can be invaluable to your company, whether you are Donald Trump, Cecilia Ibru or the owner of a business with less than a dozen employees.

By incorporating knowledge and idea sharing into your company culture, you will be able to make well-informed decisions that will propel your business to greater heights of success.