Summit team tackles Innovate ITD
employee recognition challenge

Encouraging employee involvement in the ITD Innovation effort has been an ongoing challenge ever since the department launched Innovate ITD in early 2014. With usership flagging, a team of Innovation Stewards from each district and division met for the recent Leadership Summit with the task of overhauling employee recognition. 

VIDEO: Check out the team's opening pitch at the summit.

“We went into the problem thinking we knew the solution,” said DMV Innovation Steward Tiffani Brown. “We needed a better ceremony...or we needed to get rid of the certificates. We each had our own solution.”

“We thought we knew our problem, but we needed to just listen.”

Hearing from employees that the current recognition process was not helping, the stewards asked for a reason. “We found that the information was difficult to unpack because people were very passionate about both sides of each issue, and we ended up with a bunch of conflicting viewpoints, but overall we started to see themes emerge,” Brown said.

Most importantly, the design-thinking, interview process helped them refine their problem statement. The real issue was - “How can we show Innovate ITD participants that their ideas matter?”

“We had tons of solutions to improve the process, but what we really needed was to figure out what the Innovate ITD contributors really wanted,” explained Team Lead Jake Legler, the innovation steward for the DEPP section.

The team realized that a necessary first step would be to involve supervisors – many employees said they wanted their supervisors to be aware of innovation contributions from an employee under their covering. To that end, the team is making website changes to better include supervisors in the innovation process.

Recent efforts to increase the visibility of the stewards and to include an intro to Innovate ITD in the onboarding packets for new employees should help increase usership as well.

Published 11-16-18