Genuinely listening to employees and their ideas remains a struggle for many large organizations. With so much to do, it can be easy to ignore the insights and ideas that our front-line employees are sitting on, even when we know there can be tremendous opportunity in those insights and ideas.

A recent Accenture study found that 72% of organizations indicate they often miss opportunities to exploit underdeveloped areas or markets. And yet, we’re still not fully tapping into the potential of our employees to help us do that.

Many organizations, with the best of intentions, do the “easy thing” of setting up some fancy internal portal asking employees to submit their ideas for management review. The “best ideas” will be selected as winners, and idea generators might receive a Starbucks gift card or something.

But what the heck ever happens to all the idea submissions anyway?

Most of the time, they languish on that platform, never to be seen or heard from again.

So let’s stop calling those innovation platforms actual empowerment mechanisms because they’re not. Sadly, they’re no more than “where ideas go to die” platforms in many instances.

Like any other tool, it’s never about the tool itself: it’s about the process around it. The process around it is typically one of the platform owners not really making time for those ideas. Setting up the process to include some kind of robust evaluation incurred them with a burden they should never have taken on in the first place.

If the goal is to empower employees to make their ideas happen, there are better ways to do it.

Instead of having your employees submit ideas for you to “bless” or not, you can empower them, and put the opportunity on their plate to make it happen.

From: I shared my idea, and no one did anything with it.

To: Here’s my idea, and here’s what I’m going to do about it.

Why put the extra step in the middle of letting ideas sit around until some committee gets around to looking at them, coming up with some arbitrary criteria for evaluation?

What we should be doing is supporting employees’ efforts to make their ideas happen. What if, instead of dying on the vine, the process was having employees share ideas as well as actions they might take to advance those ideas. Then the “committee’s” role would be to connect them to other people in the organization who can offer support and help them complete those actions.

That way, you’re not evaluating the quality of the idea based on a little blurb on a website, you’re setting the person on a path to see what they can achieve and how their idea can be refined.

Ideas are cheap and action is what matters anyway, so why not see what actions your employees can take to see the idea really come to life.

I often say that money isn’t Step 1 for an idea, it’s Step 5,000 for an idea. Employees need to figure out Steps 1 - 4,999 to work to make their concepts real. You can empower them to do that.

Anyone with the courage and creativity to share an idea should be rewarded and further encouraged. We want that to be a norm across our organizations!

Architect a process to truly encourage that, not another stale competition.

Creating a portal is never a substitute for actually listening (employees who feel heard are 4.6x more likely to feel empowered to do their best work.) Listen, then give them permission to start chasing down and validating their ideas.

The behavior of soliciting ideas is great. Do more of that! Get your employees excited about generating and sharing ideas. But evaluating them too early and keeping people in limbo while they lose time and passion is a waste. Instead, encourage people to take action.

Share your ideas. Solve problems. Make a difference.

We’re building a community where your voice is heard, solutions are shared, and changemakers around the world can mobilize for change. If you are passionate about change, culture, and innovation, this is the place for you.