Suggestion schemes fail in a predictable way. The form goes up, the first two weeks bring in thirty ideas, a few of them are good, and then nothing happens to any of them. By week six the submissions have stopped. Six months later somebody proposes launching a suggestion scheme, unaware there is already one with thirty unanswered entries in it.
The reason is not a shortage of ideas and it is almost never the form. People stop submitting when submitting produces silence, and they work that out fast. A suggestion form is therefore about ninety percent reply process and ten percent question design, which is the reverse of how most of them get built. This guide covers both, in that proportion.
The loop that keeps it alive
Every suggestion scheme that survives has the same mechanism: every entry gets an answer, and the answer arrives fast enough that the person who wrote it still remembers writing it.
The answer does not have to be yes. Declining an idea with a reason keeps a scheme healthy, because the submitter learns that ideas are read and judged rather than filed. What kills a scheme is the entry that receives nothing at all, because it teaches everyone watching that submitting is pointless.
That sets two commitments that have to be made before the form is published. An acknowledgement goes out immediately, confirming what was received. And a decision goes out within a fixed window, stated on the form itself, with a reason attached whatever the decision is.
Two weeks is a workable window for the decision. Four weeks is the outer limit, because beyond that the submitter has moved on. Whatever window is chosen has to be written on the form, so the commitment is visible to the person making the suggestion and to the person who has to keep it.
A third commitment is optional and does more than the other two combined: publish what happened. A visible list of ideas received, ideas implemented and ideas declined with reasons turns a private process into a public one. Schemes with that list keep receiving suggestions for years. Schemes without it depend on individual goodwill and lose it when the person who cared moves on.
Anonymous, named, or both
This is the decision that gets made carelessly and then cannot be reversed without restarting the scheme.
Anonymous entries get raised that named entries do not. Anything touching a manager's behaviour, a safety shortcut that everyone tolerates, or a process a senior person introduced will arrive anonymously or not at all. Removing anonymity removes an entire category of the most valuable submissions.
Named entries can be answered, which is the whole point of the loop above. They can also be clarified, and about a third of suggestions need one clarifying question before anyone can judge them. An anonymous entry that is nearly a good idea usually dies as an unanswerable fragment.
The workable arrangement is one form where the name is optional and the consequence is stated plainly next to the field: leaving it blank is fine, and it means there can be no reply and no follow up question. Most people fill it in. The ones who do not had a reason.
Two details make the optional name genuinely optional rather than nominally optional. The form must not capture identity by another route, which means no automatic account capture and no hidden fields, since a scheme discovered to be doing that is finished. And the list of who submitted what should be visible to as few people as the process allows.
For anonymous entries that cannot be answered individually, the published list does the work instead. An anonymous submitter who sees their idea appear in a public list of decisions gets the confirmation the reply would have given them.
What the form should ask
Four fields. A suggestion form that asks for more gets fewer suggestions, and the ones it gets come from the small group of people who enjoy filling in forms.
What should change? One text box, no limit, required. This is the suggestion.
What problem does it solve? One text box, required. This single question does more filtering than any review committee. An idea whose author cannot name the problem is usually a preference, and an idea with a clearly stated problem can be evaluated even when the proposed solution is wrong. Reviewers frequently decline the suggestion and act on the problem.
Which area does this affect? A short list of choices, required. This exists to route the entry to whoever can decide, which is the difference between a two week decision and a two month one.
Your name and email, if you would like a reply. Optional, with the consequence stated.
Two fields that are often added and should not be. Do not ask the submitter to estimate cost or effort, because almost nobody can and the wrong estimate becomes a reason to decline a good idea. And do not ask them to categorise the suggestion by type, since the categories always turn out to be wrong and the reviewer recategorises everything anyway.
One optional addition is worth having for internal schemes: a checkbox asking whether the submitter wants to be involved in implementing it. The people who tick it are the reason some schemes produce results and others produce lists.
Where to put the form
Placement decides volume more than promotion does. A link buried in an intranet menu gets found by the people who were already looking. A QR code printed where the problem happens, on the wall by the machine or beside the counter, gets used by the person who just noticed something and has thirty seconds.
For a customer facing scheme, the same rule applies in a different form: a link at the end of an order confirmation or a support reply reaches someone with a specific thought in mind, while a page in the site footer reaches nobody. Whichever route is used, the form has to open without an account and finish on a phone, because an idea worth having is rarely had while sitting at a desk.
Triage, stages and who decides
An idea arriving with nowhere to go is the normal cause of the silence described above. Decide the route before the form is live.
| Stage | Who acts | Target | What the submitter sees |
|---|---|---|---|
| Received | Automatic | Immediate | Acknowledgement with a copy of what was sent |
| Being reviewed | Area owner | Within days | Nothing, unless clarification is needed |
| Accepted | Area owner | Within the stated window | Decision, with who is taking it forward |
| Declined | Area owner | Within the stated window | Decision, with the reason |
| Parked | Area owner | Within the stated window | Decision, with what would change the answer |
| Done | Implementer | Whenever it lands | Notice that it shipped, and credit |
Parked matters more than it looks. Many suggestions are good and impossible right now, and declining them outright is dishonest while leaving them open is worse. Parked with a named condition is the honest answer, and it gives a reason to revisit rather than a reason to resubmit.
Every stage needs a named owner rather than a committee, because a committee has no calendar. A monthly review meeting is fine for the difficult entries and fatal as the only route, since it turns the two week promise into a six week one whenever the meeting slips.
The mechanics follow from the table. Each entry needs an owner and a stage, both visible, so the difference between read and decided is not a matter of asking around. The reply needs to be sent from the same place the entry is read, so the answer stays attached to the record rather than disappearing into one person's sent folder. And the history of stage changes needs to be kept, because the most common question about any suggestion scheme six months in is what happened to a specific idea and who decided. Checking what the tools after the form actually do is more useful here than comparing question types, since rendering four fields is not the hard part.
Publish the decisions
A suggestion scheme is a promise made in public and kept in private, which is why so few of them last. Publishing the decisions moves the keeping of the promise into the open.
The minimum useful version is a single page, updated monthly, listing what came in, what was implemented and what was declined with a one line reason. Numbers alone are not enough. "Fourteen suggestions received" is a statistic, while "the label printer at the back was moved next to the packing bench, suggested in March" is evidence.
Credit the submitter where they agreed to be named. This costs nothing and is the most effective recruitment for the scheme that exists, far more so than a prize draw. For anonymous entries, publish the idea and the decision without the attribution.
Include the declines, with reasons. A published list containing only successes reads as marketing and gets treated as marketing. A list that says an idea was declined because the equipment is on a lease until next year tells everybody how decisions are actually made, which is the information people are really asking for when they submit.
If the scheme covers several sites or teams, keep one list with the area as a field rather than one form per site. The comparison across areas is where the interesting patterns are, and it disappears the moment the entries are split into separate lists that have to be merged by hand. Many of the questions people ask are about exactly this, keeping one list while several groups work inside it.
On rewards
Payments and prizes for suggestions have a mixed record and a predictable failure mode, which is worth knowing before one is introduced.
The failure mode is volume without value. Once there is a reward per submission, submissions rise sharply and the average quality falls, which loads the reviewers and slows the decisions, which breaks the two week promise, which kills the scheme. A reward tied to implemented ideas rather than submitted ones avoids most of this.
The alternative that costs nothing is credit and visibility. Naming the person whose idea changed something, in the published list and in whatever internal channel people actually read, is a stronger and cheaper motivator than a voucher. It also rewards exactly the behaviour worth encouraging, which is the idea that got implemented rather than the idea that got typed.
What to change first
Write the reply window on the form, pick the wording for the acknowledgement, and name one owner per area before publishing anything, because a scheme with a fast reply and a plain form beats a well designed form with no route out. Then commit to a monthly published list of decisions, including the declines. When the entries start arriving faster than one person can track by hand, see what one list from entry to reply looks like in Halict.
Q1. Should a suggestion form allow anonymous submissions?
Allow them, and make the name optional rather than absent. Anonymous entries surface problems that named entries never will, particularly anything involving a manager or a tolerated shortcut. State next to the field that leaving it blank means no reply and no clarifying question, and most people will fill it in anyway.
Q2. How many fields should a suggestion form have?
Four. What should change, what problem it solves, which area it affects, and an optional name and email. Asking for a cost estimate or a category reduces submissions and produces answers the reviewer overrides anyway. The question about the problem is the one that does the most work.
Q3. How quickly should suggestions be answered?
Send an automatic acknowledgement immediately and a decision within a window stated on the form, with two weeks being a workable target and four weeks the outer limit. Beyond that the submitter has stopped caring and the scheme starts losing volume. A decline with a reason counts as an answer.
Q4. Why do suggestion boxes stop getting used?
Because entries receive no reply. People submit two or three times, notice that nothing comes back, and conclude the scheme is decorative. Publishing a monthly list of what was received, implemented and declined is the single most effective fix, because it makes the process visible to everyone rather than only to the submitter.
Q5. Should there be a reward for suggestions?
If a reward is offered, attach it to implemented ideas rather than submitted ones, otherwise volume rises, average quality falls, and the review backlog breaks the promised reply window. Credit and visibility for the person whose idea changed something costs nothing and tends to sustain a scheme better than a prize does.