The employee suggestion box is dead

You don't remember the last time an employee left a suggestion in the box. In today's entrepreneurial world employee suggestions are worthless. You care about the ideas your employees are acting on. 

With free easy to use tools you can implement an "Execution Box". This is a private cloud based space to see who is working on what and build on experience for accelerated growth company wide. Here is a prime example may employer face.

When it comes to shared knowledge, most employers find themselves in one of two categories.

1. You have that great employee who allows you to get away, but chaos would ensue if they unexpectedly didn't show up for work.
2. Time and opportunities are lost because best practices are not shared through out the company.

Leverage social media behavior you staff is familiar with on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ to organize information. This will foster the discovery of great ideas and you won't be left disabled when your "right hand" employee suddenly leaves. Try out some of these tools today to protect your business from brain drain.

Company Intranet: Using a Google groups/sites for free or paid platform like Zoho Collaborate will allow you to setup a central hub for announcements, documentation on projects, internal FAQs, storage for common documents, and discussions. All shared knowledge is accessible to all employee. You do have the ability to restrict non-employees and keep some information exclusive to a team if necessary.

Microblog: While Twitter is the defacto microblog for individuals, you may be asking how can my company use microblogging? Check out Yammer or Socialspring. Instead of trading emails and Cc: everyone using a microblog platform for business can simplify things a great deal.

• It forces people think about what they are trying to communicate and to be brief. 
• Multi-media is simple to attach to you short form communication.
• Old messages can be searched with simple search terms.
• Free up the phone and email for you clients to reach you.

Wiki: Have your employees build a tiny Wikipedia just for you. Now anything that is learned is documented. Because anyone can update a subject the information is always current. 

Employee participation is the key to getting the value of any of these tools. With any of these systems you can quickly see what is being share, the quality of that information, and who is becoming the "go to" person. Make sure that person is acknowledged in public and throw in a little something extra on pay day. Think about where you would be if they never shared and were the only person who could perform a task in the company.