{"id":546,"date":"2024-05-07T11:39:01","date_gmt":"2024-05-07T11:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.horoscope-conseil.com\/?p=546"},"modified":"2025-03-26T19:15:20","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T19:15:20","slug":"what-if-companies-rewarded-employees-for-their-failures-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.horoscope-conseil.com\/index.php\/2024\/05\/07\/what-if-companies-rewarded-employees-for-their-failures-2\/","title":{"rendered":"What if companies rewarded employees for their failures?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Des entreprises ont mis en place des troph\u00e9es pour les meilleures id\u00e9es qui ont \u00e9chou\u00e9<\/span> Shutterstock<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A growing number of companies are encouraging their employees to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams in-house \u2013 a trend known as intrapreneurship<\/em><\/a>. Some managers do this by providing workers with the financial, human and material resources required for innovation. For example, Google has long encouraged employees to devote 20% of their working hours<\/a> to side projects unrelated to their daily jobs. Others firms unleash workplace creativity by clearly stating the types of innovations they\u2019re after. <\/p>\n

Encouraging measured risks<\/h2>\n

Another less obvious and yet potentially game-changing method consists in tolerating, if not celebrating, failure. It\u2019s common sense that rewards can act as \u201ccarrots\u201d to encourage intrapreneurship \u2013 a concept we associate with success. But what if failure were just as important? <\/p>\n

To create an organisational culture that boosts innovative intrapreneurial process, tolerating failure<\/a> can be a first step. This can encourage employees to be more confident and to take measured risks \u2013 provided that this tolerance is made explicit to employees<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also about encouraging the idea that learning can come from failure<\/a>. Every stumble can be transformed into an opportunity because it helps us uncover new problems or different perspectives. An intrapreneur faced with an impasse acquires knowledge that she or he would not otherwise have been able to obtain. If someone else took over the project, they wouldn\u2019t have been exposed to the same challenges, nor have the same learning as the original person.<\/p>\n

Pitching a failure<\/h2>\n

It is possible to go even further. In a case study<\/a> on the French energy company Engie, we looked at their decision to give \u201cbest failed ideas\u201d awards to employees who dared \u2013 and failed \u2013 to realize their innovative ideas.<\/p>\n

We analysed how Engie began to consider failed projects, not just to show a form of tolerance, but also to promote them within the company so that everyone can learn from them.<\/p>\n

Despite being based on good ideas, some projects end up failing. They can be seen as quasi-successes, however, because sometimes it\u2019s the company that decides to call them to an end. These are neither failures nor successes. Instead, they\u2019re near-successes, also known as \u201cnearlings\u201d. These projects did not achieve the desired results for the firm, particularly in terms of profitability, but when carried out rigorously, they provided learning opportunities for the whole company.<\/p>\n

The energy giant has even taken up the original idea of creating a category within its \u201cinnovation trophies\u201d called \u201cbest failed idea\u201d. The practice had already been popularised by Ratan Tata<\/a>, head of a major Indian industrial group. It was an initiative by the company\u2019s innovation manager to reward the best ideas that had \u201cfailed\u201d, and the group experimented with the scheme from 2016 to 2020. <\/p>\n

The selection procedure was not the same as for the other trophy categories, where project leaders apply spontaneously. Instead, the group\u2019s innovation director canvassed candidates directly, acknowledging that presenting a failure was not easy. <\/p>\n

The eventual winner of the \u201cbest failed idea\u201d prize had a project whose development potential the company doubted and thus wasn\u2019t financed. In a three-minute pitch, he was able to highlight what he had learned from the process, and the jury found his perseverance convincing. One of the members of the jury, a senior executive in the group, invited him to a private meeting \u2013 he had the intuition that while the idea had not been retained in its original context, it could be of use to his product line. Without this trophy category, the director would probably never have heard of the project.<\/p>\n

\u201cBest Nearling\u201d<\/h2>\n

And what if this type of initiative were to become widespread? Initiatives rewarding failure, which go beyond simply celebrating mistakes, are on the rise within large companies<\/a> such as Google, Australia\u2019s MacQuarie Telecom, the US accounting firm Intuit, the chemical firm Huntsman and the textile giant WLGore. Perhaps the name could be changed to \u201cBest Nearling\u201d to reassure employees who are reluctant to tell top management that they have failed, even if for the right reasons.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne poss\u00e8dent pas de parts, ne re\u00e7oivent pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'ont d\u00e9clar\u00e9 aucune autre affiliation que leur organisme de recherche.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Des entreprises ont mis en place des troph\u00e9es pour les meilleures id\u00e9es qui ont \u00e9chou\u00e9 Shutterstock A growing number of companies are encouraging their employees to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams in-house \u2013 a trend known as intrapreneurship. Some managers do this by providing workers with the financial, human and material resources required for innovation. For…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":558,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.horoscope-conseil.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.horoscope-conseil.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.horoscope-conseil.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.horoscope-conseil.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.horoscope-conseil.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.horoscope-conseil.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":559,"href":"http:\/\/www.horoscope-conseil.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions\/559"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.horoscope-conseil.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.horoscope-conseil.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.horoscope-conseil.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.horoscope-conseil.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}