Suggestion Schemes as Communication Channels

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As a channel for both corrective and innovatory suggestions arising from the employees in the operating core of an organisation, a suggestion scheme is fulfilling its explicit role as a knowledge management tool. But in performing this function, a scheme can be considered as giving a „voice‟ to employees. The concept of voice is defined by Bishop and Levine, (1999) as: Any attempt at all to change, rather than to escape from, an objectional state of affairs, whether through individual or collective petition to the management directly in charge, through appeal to a higher authority with the intention of forcing change in management, or through various types of actions and protests including those that are intended to mobilise public support‟.
It is possible to interpret suggestions as assertions of the distinctive views of employees. These views may be more focussed on working conditions than the views of management. As such, suggestion schemes serve a purpose which overlaps with that of “Speak-up” schemes and grievance procedures, (Lewin and Mitchell, 1992; Luthans,1995; Townley, 2000). It is to be expected that many suggestions that represent the “voice” of the operating core, will take the form of either innovatory or corrective suggestions, and it is also to be expected that they focus on the internal rather than the external aspects of an organisations environment.


Examples of suggestions that carry the employees‟ voice are, for the most part, ones that could also be considered as corrective or innovatory. Suggestion schemes are not concerned with employees‟ motives and so there is no available data that could justify a definitive classification. However, two plausible examples are suggestions about employee safety in a utility company, one recommending the covering of exposed wellheads and the other the of marking wires with reflectors. A further possible example is a suggestion about the redesign of computer screens. An innovatory suggestion to print useful information on mouse maps might well be motivated by an employee‟s desire to reduces the number of tediously repetitious elementary queries.


In the experimental suggestion scheme, called U-Say, run at the University of Kent, students as well as employees were invited to submit suggestions via a web-based front end. In this scheme, suggestions were made anonymously and all accepted suggestions plus the feedback on them from evaluators were published on the web. The position of students within a university is complex, falling somewhere between employees and customers. Some of the suggestions were actually complaints and demands and a single suggestion could be rapidly followed up by closely related ideas, with the result that the suggestion scheme had some resemblance to a discussion forum on operational matters. To this extent, U-Say differed from all other schemes investigated in this study.
 
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