As a leader, are you not struggling to promote innovation within your organization? Many companies rely on innovation to compete and survive in this ever-changing era. In crowdsourcing, gathering information, ideas, and opinions is common, and working together digitally using social media, online forums, and dedicated apps. Benefits include cost savings, speed, and the ability to work with a wide range of people with diverse skills, ideas, and opinions that individuals and small teams often lack.
Crowdsourcing, in short, is about recruiting groups to solve common challenges.
Usually, crowdsourcing focuses on online thought groups such as employees, but not necessarily. While standard business innovation relies on in-house skills, crowdsourcing can depart specified problems to more thinkers.
Crowdsourced Creation
The position of a leader is to build a space and conditions that make it easy to come up with ideas through crowdsourcing. In addition, it is necessary to identify and empower a team that has the potential to create ideas through crowdsourcing, connect with vast resources, and generate desirable, innovative ideas from them.
The leadership of crowdsourcing ideas is agile. Therefore, it is not easy to find a standard ideation model. However, believe that crowdsourced thought leadership has been practiced for a long time, enough to conclude the best practices.
Provide Solid Terms
When your Team starts a crowdsourcing project, make sure they know what you need. Clarifying goals and providing project details to the Team will make the crowdsourcing experience the most productive. By creating an engaging and comprehensive project document, you’ll get answers that are closer to your goals.
By regularly reviewing the progress of your crowdsourcing team projects, you can take the Team in the right direction. By actively participating in the project, you can monitor the growth of your campaign and increase the team’s chances of producing better results. In particular, you can give feedback and instructions in the middle of a project.
Utilize a Corporate Social Network
Crowdsourcing requires a platform where the Team can communicate and systematically share ideas. The company’s social network promotes knowledge management by improving employee collaboration and understanding of implicit information. Many companies use software such as Slack to stay in touch with their teams. It can be a good platform for crowdsourcing ideas. Chat with teams, make voice calls, make video calls and get some ideas right away. It’s also a great place to brainstorm and give a little news.
Make a Change
If the same person working on the same problem for days, months, or years, no new answer would come out. The less friction between the functional areas, the better it will help you find innovative ways. Anything that prevents communication and collaboration between teams should be minimized.
Provide an Incentive for Participation
Workers can react well to small prizes, but money is also likely to be effective. A most common rule of crowdsourcing is that if any company makes capital from what it is accomplishing, in general, it has to pay in some form.
Convey a Strategy
When you’re innovating with your Team, crowdsourcing, who understands your organization’s strategic goals and priorities, you can get the best ideas. And especially if people are involved in developing strategic and annual plans. If everyone in your Team is working towards the same goal, you can provide visions that move the needle in the right direction.
Listen to the Participants
You need to answer team participants’ questions about the process and communicate any new and important information. For example, participants need to know if there are changes to the timeline. Online communication should be accurate, short, and focused on the subject. The idea creator should avoid sarcasm, dialects, and jargon that obscure communication during the idea creation process and abandon charisma and engage with each other in the right words.
Respect Each Individual in the Team and Reward Exclusive Ideas
Create a comfortable environment for your Team where the idea man can open his ideas without worries or worries such as his ideas are not appreciated. Reward the courage of each contribution in the process of idea creation.
Crowdsourcing project management also indicates holding a fair and fine review procedure. Doing so will help team participants understand why their ideas didn’t work and how they can do better next.
Do Not Restrict Programs to Specific Groups
Individuals who do not have technical learning or understanding of products or businesses develop better solutions than professionals. Employees who are close to a particular problem or task may lack an external perspective.
Encourage employees on other teams to join and accept ideas from everyone, from the CEO to the new intern. To help participants submit their ideas anonymously, use a dedicated tool to create as creative and honest ideas as possible.
Evaluate an Idea Quickly and Fairly
If your Team has a lot of ideas and only one person to sort them out, you consume a lot of time and power making decisions. Consider crowdsourcing to rank your ideas. When participants can see and vote on other ideas, they can narrow down the best ideas.
The State of Being Concise
While incorporating information related to crowdsourcing campaigns is useful, too much information can cause confusion and distraction. Ensure that all of the content in your team project document helps you get the Team in the right direction. If there is one misleading statement, there is a possibility that an idea that deviates from the desired direction will come out.
Provide Personalized Feedback
People in the Team come up with ideas; some are close to them, and some are off the mark, but it’s not enough to sit on your hands and fight hard. Give feedback when an employee is working on a project, and the results are not as expected.
Honest, Productive, and Encouraging
Through this experience, it’s important to be positive and encouraging, but we know that sweetening feedback isn’t generally a good way. An overly negative attitude and helpful feedback can make people around you go wrong. It’s important, to be honest, to eliminate an idea that isn’t working. However, being overly critical is, of course, not helpful. This way, even if you are a leading candidate, you will lose the motivation to participate in the project. Especially for people close to your needs, balance your feedback with productive and encouraging comments.
Create a Corporate Culture that Encourages Sharing of Ideas
This kind of culture is often seen in organizations that operate bottom-up rather than top-down. A bottom-up approach encourages all employees to participate at every step of the decision-making process. They are free to choose the most effective way to achieve their goals. In addition, you can share ideas and critical thinking that are not bound by stereotypes and work with a more open attitude. Therefore, crowdsourcing is easier for managers, employers, and HR professionals to use if these cultures are already rooted.
Bottom Lines
Crowdsourcing is a creative problem-solving technique that pools ideas from various opinion groups, but it needs careful thought and command to succeed. It increases productivity by finding innovative keys to collecting ideas, designs, visions, and data. Crowdsourcing can be productive and affordable. With the help of many brains, you can see countless ideas on any topic. And most of all, many of these ideas and solutions are things that you wouldn’t expect.
The best practice to gain the most out of crowdsourcing is to use an online platform or build one for you.