The suggestion box is used for collecting slips of paper with input from customers and patrons of a particular organization. Suggestion boxes may also exist internally, within an organization, such as means for garnering employee opinion.
The suggestion box is used for collecting slips of paper with input from customers and patrons of a particular organization. Suggestion boxes may also exist internally, within an organization, such as means for garnering employee opinion.
Daniel W. Voorhees, a U.S Senator from Indiana first introduced the suggestion box in 1890. [2] Voorhees referred to this box as "The Petition Box". Just like the suggestion box this provided a space for American's to offer their feedback. The photo on the left depicts the suggestion box used during World War II in the 1940s. The federal government encouraged factory workers to leave suggestions on how to increase efficiency and productivity. Throughout the years variations of this method included paper feedback forms which can be sent via postal mail, such as the "We value your input" or "How was the service today?" cards found in some restaurants; solicitations to provide comments over the telephone, such as a voluntary survey at the end of a transaction with a call center, or even an invitation on a printed store receipt to call and complete a customer satisfaction survey (sometimes offered with a product discount); or the placement of feedback forms on an institution's website.
The suggestion box for customer comments going beyond an ordinary point of service has several benefits. Suggestion boxes provide some degree of anonymity from the person or service that a customer may be critiquing. Therefore yielding a more frank and open feedback. Anonymous feedback increases the opportunities for obtaining accurate market research data and improving customer relations.
Soon enough the ideology behind the suggestion box gained momentum and was introduced into corporate settings. Management would use the comments left in the box to assess the workplace culture. Companies since have adopted their own versions of this solicitation model to better fit their needs.
The physical box, as a post box, was replaced by an electronic form of communication; like postal service systems was replaced, in the 2000s, by email. The traditional function, "obtaining additional comments, questions, and requests", still exist as a demand: collecting information with input from customers and patrons of a particular organization, or means for garnering employee input.
During this age of fast moving technology the physical suggestion box simply cannot keep up. In some contexts the modern suggestion box is a webpage with an anonymous form, for example an online reviews, anonymous digital feedback, employee suggestion programs, and employee review sites such as Indeed. In other contexts, it turned into a complete issue tracking system, which allows the following main features (that was impossible with the old classic suggestion boxes):
Running a suggestion program virtually can be beneficiary regarding greater transparency, clear and direct communication, and a more effective feedback loop.
Gathering employee opinions with a suggestion box can also be fruitful, especially in groupthink-prone environments and within a corporate culture that adheres to a "shoot the messenger" mentality. However, as with the use of anonymous suggestion forms from the public, allowing unsigned comments may sacrifice accountability and make the feedback system prone to abuse. Employers can also gather employee opinion by posing questions and gathering everyone's opinion anonymously through crowdsourcing. Using the employee's knowledge, crowdsourcing techniques have been known to promote "New Innovations". [3]
Recording received suggestions in a database can help track any trends. While some systems keep suggestions private, some systems make suggestions public, allowing other people to endorse the suggestion rather than creating a similar one. This voting system allows organizers to quickly see what is most suggested. Much like suggestion box allows employees to give ideas, internal company crowdsourcing gauges employee opinions on ideas or suggestions. [4]
An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in contrast to public networks, such as the Internet, but uses the same technology based on the Internet protocol suite.
Historically there have been differences among investigators regarding the definition of organizational culture. Edgar Schein, a leading researcher in this field, defined "organizational culture" as comprising a number of features, including a shared "pattern of basic assumptions" which group members have acquired over time as they learn to successfully cope with internal and external organizationally relevant problems. Elliott Jaques first introduced the concept of culture in the organizational context in his 1951 book The Changing Culture of a Factory. The book was a published report of "a case study of developments in the social life of one industrial community between April, 1948 and November 1950". The "case" involved a publicly-held British company engaged principally in the manufacture, sale, and servicing of metal bearings. The study concerned itself with the description, analysis, and development of corporate group behaviours.
Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production process, i.e. output per unit of input, typically over a specific period of time. The most common example is the (aggregate) labour productivity measure, one example of which is GDP per worker. There are many different definitions of productivity and the choice among them depends on the purpose of the productivity measurement and data availability. The key source of difference between various productivity measures is also usually related to how the outputs and the inputs are aggregated to obtain such a ratio-type measure of productivity.
Enterprise feedback management (EFM) is a system of processes and software that enables organizations to centrally manage deployment of surveys while dispersing authoring and analysis throughout an organization. EFM systems typically provide different roles and permission levels for different types of users, such as novice survey authors, professional survey authors, survey reporters and translators. EFM can help an organization establish a dialogue with employees, partners, and customers regarding key issues and concerns and potentially make customer-specific real time interventions. EFM consists of data collection, analysis and reporting.
In business, open communication is the ability of anyone, on equal conditions with a transparent relation between cost and pricing, to get access to and share communication resources on one level to provide value added services on another level in a layered communication system architecture. Simply put, open access plans are to deregulate oligarchy of telecom operators in a bid to give consumers more choices for equipment, services and service vendors or carriers. It will also provide some breathing room for the controversial net neutrality that has been the central issue between mobile carriers, like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Nextel, and web media moguls, like eBay, Amazon.com and Google. True open communication is where employees are encouraged to share their thoughts and concerns, both good and bad, without the worry of retaliation from management when the feedback is bad.
An ideas bank is a widely available shared resource, usually a website, where people post, exchange, discuss, and polish new ideas. Some ideas banks are used to develop new inventions or technologies. Many corporations have installed internal ideas banks to gather the input from their employees and improve their ideation process. Some ideas banks employ a voting system to estimate an idea's value. In some cases, ideas banks can be more humor-oriented than their serious counterparts. The underlying theory of an ideas bank is that if a large group of people collaborate on a project or the development of an idea that eventually said project or idea will reach perfection in the eyes of those who worked on it.
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is not limited to online activity, however, and there are various historical examples of crowdsourcing. The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing". In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.
Co-creation, in the context of a business, refers to a product or service design process in which input from consumers plays a central role from beginning to end. Less specifically, the term is also used for any way in which a business allows consumers to submit ideas, designs or content. This way, the firm will not run out of ideas regarding the design to be created and at the same time, it will further strengthen the business relationship between the firm and its customers. Another meaning is the creation of value by ordinary people, whether for a company or not.
Crowdcasting is the combination of broadcasting and crowdsourcing. The process of crowdcasting uses a combination of push and pull strategies first to engage an audience and build a network of participants and then harness the network for new insights. Those insights are then used to shape broadcast programming. These insights and concepts can include new product ideas, new service ideas, new branding messages, or even scientific breakthroughs. These insights are extracted from participants' submissions.
Crowdreviewing is the practice of gathering opinion or feedback from a large number of people, typically via the internet or an online community; a portmanteau of "crowd" and "reviews". Crowdreviewing is also often viewed as a form of crowd voting which occurs when a website gathers a large group's opinions and judgment. The concept is based on the principles of crowdsourcing and lets users submit online reviews to participate in building online metrics that measure performance. By harnessing social collaboration in the form of feedback individuals are generally able to form a more informed opinion.
Dell IdeaStorm was a website launched by Dell in 2007 to allow Dell to receive feedback from customers. The project was described as both crowdsourcing and Web 2.0.
In the workplace, an evaluation is a tool employers use to review the performance of an employee.
A touchpoint can be defined as any way consumers can interact with a business organization, whether it be person-to-person, through a website, an app or any form of communication. When consumers come in contact with these touchpoints it gives them the opportunity to compare their prior perceptions of the business and form an opinion.
Within qualitative marketing research, an innovation game is a form of primary market research developed by Luke Hohmann where customers play a set of directed games as a means of generating feedback about a product or service. The research is primary because the data collected is gathered directly from customers or prospects and is intended to answer a specific research question. “Customers” who play innovation games are commonly direct recipients or consumers of a specific product or service. In some cases, though, game players may be any person or system who is or would be affected by a product or service.
Citizen sourcing is the government adoption of crowdsourcing techniques for the purposes of (1) enlisting citizens in the design and execution of government services and (2) tapping into the citizenry's collective intelligence for solutions and situational awareness. Applications of citizen sourcing include:
As a result of advances in technology, information technology has become a highly important economic sector. Although it is relatively new, this industry still experiences many of the workplace culture problems of older industries. Bullying is common in IT, leading to high sickness rates, low morale, poor productivity and high staff turnover. Deadline-driven project work and stressed-out managers take their toll on IT professionals.
Work motivation is a person's internal disposition toward work. To further this, an incentive is the anticipated reward or aversive event available in the environment. While motivation can often be used as a tool to help predict behavior, it varies greatly among individuals and must often be combined with ability and environmental factors to actually influence behavior and performance. Results from a 2012 study, which examined age-related differences in work motivation, suggest a "shift in people's motives" rather than a general decline in motivation with age. That is, it seemed that older employees were less motivated by extrinsically related features of a job, but more by intrinsically rewarding job features. Work motivation is strongly influenced by certain cultural characteristics. Between countries with comparable levels of economic development, collectivist countries tend to have higher levels of work motivation than do countries that tend toward individualism. Similarly measured, higher levels of work motivation can be found in countries that exhibit a long versus a short-term orientation. Also, while national income is not itself a strong predictor of work motivation, indicators that describe a nation's economic strength and stability, such as life expectancy, are. Work motivation decreases as a nation's long-term economic strength increases. Currently work motivation research has explored motivation that may not be consciously driven. This method goal setting is referred to as goal priming. Effects of primed subconscious goals in addition to goals that are consciously set related to job performance have been studied by Stajkovic, Latham, Sergent, and Peterson, who conducted research on a CEO of a for-profit business organization using goal priming to motivate job performance. Goal priming refers to the achievement of a goal by external cues given. These cues can affect information processing and behaviour the pursuit of this goal. In this study, the goal was primed by the CEO using achievement related words strategy placed in emails to employees. This seemingly small gesture alone not only cost the CEO very little money, but it increased objectively measured performance efficiency by 35% and effectiveness by 15% over the course of a 5-day work week. There has been controversy about the true efficacy of this work as to date, only four goal priming experiments have been conducted. However, the results of these studies found support for the hypothesis that primed goals do enhance performance in a for-profit business organization setting.
IdeaScale is a cloud-based software company that licenses an innovation management platform employing the principles and practices of crowdsourcing. The company was founded by Vivek Bhaskaran and Rob Hoehn in Seattle.
Government crowdsourcing is a form of crowdsourcing employed by governments to better leverage their constituents' collective knowledge and experience. It has tended to take the form of public feedback, project development, or petitions in the past, but has grown to include public drafting of bills and constitutions, among other things. This form of public involvement in the governing process differs from older systems of popular action, from town halls to referendums, in that it is primarily conducted online or through a similar IT medium.
Grievance Redressal is a management- and governance-related process used commonly in India. While the term "Grievance Redressal" primarily covers the receipt and processing of complaints from citizens and consumers, a wider definition includes actions taken on any issue raised by them to avail services more effectively.
