Here’s an interesting situation. An organization put in a suggestion box at the request of its employees. Within a week, there were over 135 suggestions in the box. But the company has only 36 employees!
If you view the contents as half-full, you might think, “Wow, what a great response!” If you tend toward the half-empty perspective, you might think, “Uh oh, there’s a lot of pent-up frustration among the staff.”
Despite my usually optimistic approach, I share the latter thinking in this case. It’s because I heard about this from one of the employees who told me that the suggestion box was one of management’s responses to high turnover and low morale.
Regardless of what one thinks about the suggestion box, I just hope this organization’s management takes it seriously and uses it as just one (but not the only) tool to listen to employees.