Employee driven innovation and employee engagement in a banking environment

 

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.

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.

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.

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].

Florentine, S., (2016) Employee engagement. [ONLINE]. Available at: https://www.cio.com/article/240190/16-employee-engagement-trends-that-will-shake-up-it-in-

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].

Price, O.M., Boud, D. and Scheeres, H., 2012. Creating work: Employee-driven innovation through work practice reconstruction. In Employee-driven innovation (pp. 77-91). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Rao, V., 2016. Innovation through employee engagement. Asia Pacific Journal of Advanced Business and Social Studies, 2(2), pp.337-345.