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Employee Involvement—Developing Teamwork 63

an “out-of-bounds” idea off the board will save time. Such an approach is
inappropriate for three reasons: (1) The discussion is perceived as criticism,
and team members become less likely to provide additional ideas. (2) Not
recording items can harm the level of team synergy. Even ideas that are not
feasible have the potential to serve as a catalyst for generating other inno-
vative solutions that may be feasible. (3) Discussing the merits of items as
they are generated increases the time required to reach a consensus rather
than serving to decrease time. Effective approaches for screening and pri-
oritizing brainstormed ideas are available that will result in any impractical
ideas being quickly discarded.

Screening and Prioritizing
A technique known as Pareto voting is an effective and timely method
for reducing a long list of brainstormed items down to a critical few that
merit further evaluation by the team. My experience has been that Pareto
voting is perceived as fair and equitable by team members, thus meeting one
of the critical requirements for reaching a consensus.
This prioritization technique is based upon the Pareto principle, named
after the Italian economist of the early 1900s who identified certain mathe-
1
matical relationships related to the distribution of wealth. Perhaps it’s more
descriptive to refer to the Pareto principle as the “principle of the critical
few.” (The principle is also referred to as the 80-20 rule.) In our efforts to
improve safety, we unfortunately often spend the majority of our time on the
“trivial many”—the 80 percent—rather than the “critical few” items—the
20 percent that can provide the most benefits for safety programs. Effective
managers leverage their finite time and resources by identifying the critical
few actions having the most impact on results and then keeping the organi-
zation’s spotlight focused on these critical items.
Pareto voting is a quick and effective way to separate the important
from the unimportant, and it is consistent with the principle that about 80
percent of the potential benefits for an organization can be achieved by act-
ing upon about 20 percent of the potential opportunities. For example, if we
develop a list of everything that could be done to improve safety in the or-
ganization, implementing the most effective 20 percent of the actions will
usually provide about 80 percent of the potential benefits. Pareto voting
helps in identifying the critical few items that will provide the most benefit
in a timely, accurate, and equitable manner.
To illustrate the steps in Pareto voting, let’s assume that a team com-
prised of five employees, Susan (the team leader), Frank, Linda, Bill, and
Joe, has been asked to develop a recommendation for management on how
best to recognize employees in a facility for achieving all of the facility’s
safety goals. The team has been asked to ensure that the dollar value of the