Employees Are Your Best Consultants

The best consultants for your business are your employees. They can help you with a wide variety of issues because they deal with them every day. Many times employees have great ideas, but are reluctant to come forward out of fear or simply because they feel their ideas won't be taken seriously. Develop a system that requires and allows all employees to be active "internal consultants". Suggestion boxes and anonymous systems tend to not work because employees don't feel compelled to submit ideas. Or they have in the past and their ideas have been ignored or someone else took credit for them. Setting up profit teams that submit and refine suggestions works in some organizations. Requiring work units to submit suggestions for their own areas on a defined, regular interval has worked well in others. In both cases, making suggestions and developing ways to enhance profits become a part of every employee's job.

Create a reward system that pays all employees for enhanced profitability. Make the rewards significant enough to incent the employees. Profit sharing is most common, but you can also pay on cost savings, productivity gains or any other unit of measure that makes sense for your company.