EMPLOYEE DRIVEN INNOVATION – LABS
Another good method to understand employees´ needs and develop working place together in continues way is to adopt the Employee Driven Innovation Lab – ideology.
The Employee-driven Innovation Learning Model (EDI -Learning Lab) is a model developed to manage workflow and organizational change and implementation of changes and is based on a dialogue between different stakeholder groups and equal work; the roles of authors lose their meaning, and everyone has the same opportunities to influence.
The role of a manager changes from the traditional leadership role closer to the role of the coach and the mentor, and the model has been proven to strengthen learning processes and employees' general interest in developing skills, thus completing the objective of the continuing education model.
For an increasing number of organizations, EDI-learning Labs mean creating dedicated innovation labs that bring diverse combinations of people together, thinking in different ways, sharing technical knowledge and insights, creating new products or services and reinventing work processes. The challenge in the Tourism Industry may rise from ever changing working teams and temporary working staff.
How does it work out?
- idea-box open for everyone ( digital or paper version) to share new ideas and feedback
- regular meetings to show interest to new ideas and to bring people together
- offer possibilities to bring good ideas into action
- give responsibilities and trust to employees
- providing personal meetings with manager/ team leader
- providing possibilities for employees to study and attend courses if needed
- good communication so that everybody knows what´s going on
It´s important to have motivated staff
Competitive companies need all their people to come to work to do two things:
- to accomplish their functional tasks in the best possible way
- to improve the business.
For Hospitality companies, “improving the business” can mean anything from empowering frontline workers to instigate incremental improvements in areas like productivity, Customer Service or quality. It can also involve a whole diagonal slice of employees in ground-breaking innovation by bringing together the conceptual and strategic knowledge of managers, with the tacit knowledge and practical experience of those in assembly teams or frontline staff like the ones working in customer service.
Task: give an example of how to implement Edi-Lab innovation model in your Company