Contributing Ideas

32. Avenue for contributing ideas

33. Most popular employee issues

Engaged and passionate employees ranked high in the factors contributing to a workplace community. Engagement needs to be more than cake sales, however, and having an avenue for contributing ideas that benefit the entire organisation is important.

With nearly 90% of respondents reporting that avenues do exist for promoting ideas people feel passionate about, the key is what then happens—are the topics developed further or just placed into a bank of good ideas and not actioned. The latter will quickly result in disengagement.

In late 2020, SPACE initiated a Think Tank programme where employees came together and discussed issues that were important to them. The top two themes were sustainability and technology—echoing the data left.

Sustainability has become the number one talking point in just a few short years, and, we believe, will continue to dominate discussions for years to come. As mentioned at a seminar recently, organisations or products that are not sustainable will not survive.

It could be argued that the ‘people’ issues (accessibility, neurodiversity, and equality, diversity & inclusion) taken as a whole, are the single most important topic based on numbers alone. Neurodiversity is perhaps still a niche discussion topic at this point in time, for specific HR & OD professionals and design teams only.

Given that the majority of respondents to the survey were private sector, it is perhaps no surprise to read the ‘other’ responses focusing mainly on areas such as new ideas for income generation, opportunities for saving money and making efficiencies, and for encouraging entrepreneurial activities.