You're fine-tuning your strategic plans. How do you gather valuable insights from frontline employees?

One of the richest sources of insights often comes from your frontline employees. They experience operations first-hand and can offer valuable perspectives. To gather this information, adapt your methods to suit their access to technology while keeping your data consistent. For employees without tech resources, opt for face-to-face chats or paper-based questionnaires. This not only collects insights but also strengthens relationships. For those with access to computers, offer a choice between an online survey or a chat. Keeping your questions uniform ensures consistency across methods and improves the quality of the data you gather.

Incorporating frontline employee insights is crucial for effective bottom-up planning and fine-tuning strategic plans. Engage employees by fostering open communication channels and empowering decision-making. Invest in training and development to equip them with the necessary skills. Recognize and reward valuable contributions to boost morale. Implement flexible structures to adapt quickly to feedback. Align departmental goals with organizational objectives and regularly review strategies. Embrace innovative practices like Google’s 20% Time to drive innovation and growth. #Leadership #Strategy #EmployeeEngagement #Innovation

Including the voice of people in field is most important. However its easy to face strong opinions as field people are often very passionate and talks from experience and can sometime sway from the practical purpose of the conversation. My experience says to: 1. First Articulate what you are trying to achieve and link it to the benefits they will drive from it. 2. Since you are finetuning then address all other ways you already considered in the past to avoid going off topic 2. Take candid feedback from them on its practicality and their perspective 3. Use the 5 Why's to identify the root-cause of their opinion 4. Seek examples of any competition they know of and keep the door open for follow-up to keep them engaged and Co-Creator in this.

Frontline employees are a gold mine of insights. Extracting these insights should follow a robust process vs a one-off 'hackathon'. Like any good process, it requires defining the who (i.e., roles & responsibilities), what (e.g., specific problems, business lines), when (e.g., quarterly) & how (e.g., offsite with an external facilitator with application of best practices on brainstorming).

Frontline employees are key inputs for any successful business that prioritises feedback. An organizational culture that has a consistent feedback loop that's reliant on the frontline, will likely face an exponential growth curve. The reason I say that is because iterative systems and processes are the ultimate tools towards strategy refinement. And those who invest, nurture, and practice it first, win big. There can't be a bigger testament to this hard fact than Amazon, and more recently, OpenAI.