"We wanted to get employees more customer-focused and at the same time increase their understanding of our strategy," explains Paul Palmstedt, VP of Corporate Communications at Electrolux. "By listening to our employees, we wanted to show them that listening to consumer needs is key to developing innovative new products, which is an important part of our strategy."

An important first step toward accomplishing this goal, he notes, is to remember that employees are consumers, too. They represent a vast insight that an organization can draw upon when trying to understand what its external customers want and need.

After conducting extensive focus group research and tests among employees, Palmstedt's team concluded that the employee-driven consumer panel would be an effective tool for eliciting employee expertise and support. Workers at all Electrolux's Swedish plants were invited by CEO Hans Stråberg to participate in the pilot. Employees also received a small booklet that explained the overall strategy.

Over 800 employees out of 6,500 in Sweden enlisted and have so far responded to three surveys. The questionnaires are distributed to workers via their home e-mail accounts, and participation is compensated with a lottery ticket each time. The surveys probe workers on their experiences with product usage: What are the biggest problems they encounter with lawn mowing? How frequently do they vacuum their homes? How useful would they find the new features offered on the company's latest line of refrigerators or vacuum robots?

"Our marketing teams submit questions for employee consumer input before they commission costly customer surveys," says Palmstedt. "It's catching on, too. We just got a call from one of our marketing managers in Belgium who wanted to piggyback a few survey questions even though we haven't rolled it out in that country yet."

This sort of customer survey data might not be perfect by strict statistical measures - the sample size may be small and the survey population is hardly representative of the market in general - but the technique does provide a quick and easy way to tap the pulse of the consumer. This leaves internal customers - employees - feeling useful and appreciated.

More importantly, the panel mines the creativity of the company's employees and forces them to consider their work from the customer perspective. This brings the people closest to the customer together with company leadership and management, fostering an atmosphere where they can communicate more openly, more frequently and more effectively with the people who have the authority to change and improve the business process.

Palmstedt says his team was overwhelmed by the level of employee interest in the consumer panel, dubbed "Family & Friends." "Some panel members can't get enough of it. They're e-mailing us asking when they'll get the next survey."

Cutting edge companies like Electrolux are finding that there are only so many product ideas that can be dreamed up by the CEO while taking a hot shower, brainstormed during a retreat by senior managers or evoked during a rain dance by an overhyped R&D oracle. Consistently out-innovating the competition is only possible through a process of ongoing communication with employees at all levels across the enterprise. There are an incredible number of brilliant ideas out there on the front lines, but sadly, most companies are structured so that decision-makers are thoroughly insulated from them. If your competition has built channels of communication where you've built walls, you're dead in the water.

"Employees are a great source for new product ideas," says Palmstedt. "But by running surveys like this, we want to show our people that we need to become better at understanding consumer needs and problems before we go to market with all our ideas. There are already too many examples of innovations that are chasing a need."

Now that the pilot has proven so successful, the next challenge for Electrolux awaits in one of its largest markets, Italy. It's one thing to execute this sort of program in tech-savvy Sweden, where at-home Internet penetration (even among blue-collar workers) is over 70%. It will be quite another story in Italy, where a large percentage of Electrolux's 12,000 employees don't have Internet connections at home. One solution is to let employees without Internet connections return their survey responses via prepaid postcards.

Palmstedt thinks that the medium used to submit the surveys probably isn't a big factor. Instead, he feels the success of the program lies in its simplicity: "The beauty of it is that it's quick, easy, and inexpensive, but it does the job. It's symbolic of our strategy to develop innovative products based on superior consumer insight.