U.S. Office of Personnel Management - Ensuring the Federal Government has an effective civilian workforce

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Reinvention and Suggestions: How Do They Fit?

Since Vice President Gore's National Performance Review (NPR) last summer, we have had many questions about whether and how to integrate reinvention efforts with existing suggestion programs. At many agencies, lots of reinvention ideas were submitted. Agencies wanted to review them promptly so innovations could be adopted quickly. Some felt their existing suggestion programs were not well suited to the reinvention scene. As the reinvention movement gathers momentum, we expect that many agencies will want to revisit their current suggestion programs to make sure that they support reinvention efforts.

• Suggestion Programs
• Agency Reinvention Efforts
• Soliciting Ideas

Suggestion Programs. Agencies have been using a range of options. Some decided to handle reinvention ideas through their existing suggestion programs. Others chose to treat these ideas separately. This tactic was adopted especially in cases where the traditional suggestion program had become rather bureaucratic with delays in implementation and a strong focus on giving suggestions a dollar value.

Where more informal approaches to treating ideas separately have been tried, cumbersome evaluation processes were bypassed because the agency decided there was no need to document cost savings. Paperwork was kept to a minimum. Agencies still gave both nonmonetary and monetary awards to inventive employees. Modest monetary awards still went to the best ideas of the month or quarter. In some cases, the best reinvention ideas were spotlighted and put through traditional suggestion programs.

Agency Reinvention Efforts. Dealing with agency reinvention efforts over the past few months has made it clear that agencies will need programs that sustain their new reinvention environments. Being creative and exploring new ideas will be part of everyone's job. As the process of continuous improvement is implemented, isolating the benefits of any one idea will be more difficult. Suggestion programs will need to adapt to these changes.

Soliciting Ideas. To decide how your agency should deal with further efforts at soliciting ideas for innovations, consider whether your current suggestion program fits your agency's needs. Is your suggestion program designed to encourage employee participation and foster a sense of empowerment? Is it meant to advertise and otherwise help implement innovations? Or is there more of an emphasis on tracking and evaluating ideas to assure that recognition is appropriate? What are some other purposes that it has served? The answers to these questions can help you determine whether your suggestion program is suitable for the brave new world of reinvention.

Originally published on December 1993.