Focus on.........Tops Tips from Our Members

Aligning ideas promotions with project resource - Tara Keane, Nationwide Building Society

Evaluator's often reply 'good idea, but we don't have the resources to implement this currently', or 'good idea but we have just completed a project on xxx process, so it's unfortunate timing'. At Nationwide we are trialling an approach which aims to put link our ideas scheme, Brainwaves, with our corporate projects by doing the following:

* Working with the project management department (who run the major projects and programmes in Nationwide) to run Ideas Week promotions with either the top priority projects, or the projects which would most lend themselves to input from employees via Brainwaves.

* Brainwaves has been added to the project procedures, so project managers are encouraged to search for any ideas which may relate to the projects they are working on.

* The Brainwaves team are also working directly with project managers to send them ideas relating to key project topic areas.

Hopefully when people see the benefit of incorporating employee ideas into processes they are already resourced to look at, other project managers are more likely to do this in future.

We have just started this work and will send a further blog update when we get some results.


Tara Keane - Employee Engagement, Nationwide