Employee Driven Innovation
Banking sector is an industry which has a highly competitive environment, due to the increasing technological enhancements that take place across the globe. This sometimes lead for employees to feel demotivated as well as unsecured in their jobs. Therefore, employees tend to demonstrate reluctance towards change.
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| Figure1: Employee Engagement (Source: Florentine, 2016) |
In order to overcome this challenge, organisations including banks have come up with a strategy to engage their employees too in the decision-making process as well as innovation.
Kahn (1990) cited in Rao (2016) defined engagement as, “the harnessing
of organization members' selves to their work roles; in engagement, people
employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during
role performances.”
Through programmes such as Lean Six-Sigma Yellow Belt, Green belt and so on, banks are encouraging and training their employees to identify process simplification and streamlining opportunities and to provide their own suggestions to drive the same, which brings out both financial and non-financial benefits across the banks.
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| Figure2: Employee engagement (Source: Gartner, 2019) |
A study has stated that “employees can produce or implement
new ideas in a variety of ways, which involves creation and implementation of
new products or services. They can also influence the work practice changes and
how an organization adapts and evolves over time in more subtle ways” (Price et
al., 2012, p.77).
Through this employee driven innovation, the employee
engagement too can be achieved, from which, the employees will start feeling
engaged and empowered by the organisation. This approach also can be stated as
a bottoms-up approach in an organisation.
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| Figure3: Employee driven innovation (Dechamps, 2017) |
The study of Rao also that “apart from joining and staying
in the organization and having a dependable behavior, employee engagement leads
to innovative behavior where employee goes beyond individual roles to
collaborate with colleagues, make suggestions to improve the organization, and
work to improve the organization’s standing in the external environment” (Katz
and Kahn, 1978 cited in Rao, 2016, p.3). Rao (2016)’s study has further concluded
that “the best way for them to sustain is embed innovation into their culture,
by focusing on employee engagement”.
Conclusion
In light of the information detailed about, it is noted that
the banks can easily achieve their organisational objectives through the
engagement of employees on innovation. Following a bottoms-up approach on
innovation always helps understand the root cause of majority of the problems
or pain areas, since it’s the employees in the lower level has the ground level
of practical knowledge of the tasks. This also empowers employees to provide
their own suggestions and ideas, which can be transformed into larger innovative
projects that helps banks benefit both financially and non-financially.
References
Deschamps, J., (2017) The Eight Attributes of Bottom-Up
Innovation Leaders. [ONLINE]. Available at:
https://innovationmanagement.se/2017/02/28/the-eight-attributes-of-bottom-up-innovation-leaders/
[Accessed 16 December 2021].
Gartner, J., (2019) Employee engagement. [ONLINE]. Available
at:
https://www.hrzone.com/engage/employees/employee-engagement-why-small-businesses-need-to-do-it-too
[Accessed 16 December 2021].
