Of the many people you could turn to for collaboration, few can have a greater impact than your employees. Whether you’re trying to improve logistics and sustainability or educate your customers, chances are good that collaborating with your employees — at any level of the organization — will help you achieve meaningful improvements.
In fact, research from Deloitte found that 60% of employees involved in collaborative work said it sparked innovation — and 73% said it also improved their performance. Organizations that truly seek out and value the input of their employees often gain access to insights that help them move forward in surprising and beneficial ways.
Collaboration Drives Small, But Powerful Innovation
When we talk about collaboration and innovation, we often think of big, paradigm-shifting changes. But in reality, most employee-driven collaborations (and collaborations in general) are more focused on creating small, incremental innovations that build on each other over time.
An excellent example of this comes from Toyota. For over 70 years, the company has run its Creative Idea Suggestion System as a way to encourage employees to note problems they encounter in their daily work and come up with ideas for improvement. The system even accounts for ways to get supervisor support in implementing the proposed improvements and evaluating the result. Employees are also rewarded based on the outcome of their proposal.
According to the Toyota Times, this system resulted in over 810,000 suggestions submitted in 2023 alone (roughly 14.4 per person), a system that the company notes mostly relies on creating small innovations.
Much of the success of this program stems from the attitude of supervisors in addressing employee suggestions. As Executive Fellow Oyaji Kawai explains in the Toyota Times article, “When you’re young, you can’t make big improvements. But changing the position of a trash can so you don’t have to walk around it is also an improvement. Supervisors need to take such suggestions seriously, too. Otherwise, that person will not make another. I’ve hardly ever said no. Instead, I encourage them—that sounds great! Let’s try it and see what happens!”
Employee suggestions have often changed in line with perceived needs, with many of today’s innovations focusing on ways to improve the company’s carbon neutral efforts or to enhance digitalization, with some employees even creating their own apps.
Toyota isn’t alone in this type of employee innovation system. Costco achieves roughly $100 million in savings each year from its own employee suggestion system. Similar to Toyota’s system, employees are incentivized for sharing ideas, and managers are given autonomy to innovate. Changes ranging from the shape of cashew containers to adopting energy-efficient lighting have all resulted from this program.
Collaboration Improves Employee, Business Outcomes
Working with employees to find innovative solutions has a clear positive impact on the company’s operations. The cost savings enjoyed by Costco and the improved digitization of Toyota’s internal teams are two ways where it is easy to see how employee collaboration and innovation makes a difference for the company. But it is equally important to consider how collaborating with employees can make a difference for the employees themselves.
For example, one Stanford study found that even the perception of collaboration can have a significant impact on intrinsic motivation, with study participants staying with a task 64% longer when they were exposed to cues of working together. The collaborative study participants were more engaged and successful, while also experiencing lower levels of fatigue while completing their task.
One interesting finding from Toyota’s employee suggestion program was that it helped individuals feel more involved and that they were having a positive impact on the work environment. This helped them feel more valued and strengthened relationships between team members.
Direct collaborative activities (such as brainstorming sessions or collaborative projects) can increase productivity as team members share their knowledge and skills so they can work more efficiently. Exposure to different ideas can help team members expand their own skills or find solutions they wouldn’t have thought of on their own — which can solve their own problems and the problems of the company.
As your employees come to feel like part of a unified team, their attitudes toward each other and the problems they face will improve. Rather than focusing as much on themselves, they may become more focused on the achievements of the group and how everyone can contribute to move forward on goals as initiatives.
As Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone is credited as saying, “Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds. I may be given credit for having blazed the trail, but when I look at the subsequent developments I feel the credit is due to others rather than to myself.” As your team develops that mindset, they will continue to collaborate to achieve innovation rather than seeking individual glory.
Make The Most Of Employee Collaboration
While business partners and other organizational leaders can certainly help you unlock powerful innovations, you should never overlook your employees. Regardless of their level of experience within the organization, chances are, they have insights of their own that can lead to meaningful improvement. By valuing the collaborative contributions of everyone within your organization, you can achieve far more than you ever could otherwise.