Harnessing Creativity at Kings & Company

Abstract

What started as a potentially valuable initiative at Kings & Company was threatening to degenerate into a routine system of rewarding a handful of employees who were brave and lucky enough to get their suggestions pass through multiple gates of evaluation. The company is in the business of manufacturing and selling home appliances in the Indian market. Its financials bear evidence of its success as a business. The CEO, Prakash Parekh, believed in the creative potential of individual employees and wanted to harness it to create sustainable value for the company. He, therefore, conceived of and implemented an employee suggestion scheme (ESS) whereby each employee could give suggestions to improve aspects related to his/her area of work, operations and business. The case describes how the ESS at Kings & Company has evolved from 2013, when it was initiated, till 2017. These changes are juxtaposed with a steady decline in employee satisfaction during the same period. Worried with such a trend, Parekh asks Uday Gupta, GM Human Resources, to review the ESS and recommend further changes, including dropping it altogether.