How to Tap Into the Collective Intelligence of Your Workforce

Idea No. 3: Rewards and Incentives

We all, at the end of the day, go home, kiss our kids goodnight, pay our mortgages and go to sleep. Being a dad of two young daughters, I am very well aware of the innate need for me to provide for my daughters, and leave them a better life and better opportunities than I received growing up. This comes from our obviously Darwinian need to provide for the propagation of our ideas and values. I specifically mentioned mortgages as a metaphor for financial well-being—seemed like the right thing given our current economic crisis as a country.

Now it only makes sense, if you truly believe that employees are your single greatest asset, you would reward and compensate them accordingly for their intellect, ideas and their ability to contribute to the organization's success. I see too many initiatives where companies are literally too stingy to share in the rewards with the employees. This is extremely shortsighted and definitely will not encourage participation and collaboration.

If the fundamental premise of your organization's current practice of "ideas bubbling to the top" already works, stop reading this and consider yourself OK. If, however, you are even remotely interested in trying new ideas to democratize the notion of employee engagement, then collective intelligence's two components of Participation and Collaboration, coupled with Rewards and Incentives, should be an important pillar in your strategy to get the output you are looking for from your workforce.

Vivek Bhaskaran is the founding member, President and CEO of Survey Analytics. Vivek plays a key role in defining the company strategy, and is responsible for all aspects of company strategy and direction. Vivek completed his primary education in India before moving to Russia and then to the United States. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University, Utah. You can friend him at facebook.com/vivek.bhaskaran, follow him on Twitter at @vivek1105 or e-mail him at vivek.bhaskaran@researchaccess.com.