How do you ensure that junior employees contribute their ideas?

Speaking from the perspective of how we do this in the Product Team, we follow an Agile process for estimating and planning. The Agile process naturally lends itself towards gathering wide feedback and actioning it, often referred to as “continuous improvement”.

Team’s have regular ceremonies that are structured to enable (and almost require) everyone to have input into the discussion. These take the forms of sprint retro sessions and planning / estimation sessions where individuals are able to contribute their ideas, feedback and points of view in a non-confrontational manner.

Retro ceremonies leverage techniques that make it more comfortable for everyone to contribute such as using written sticky notes to contribute feedback as part of the discussion. People often find it easier to provide feedback in written form as opposed to having to speak up, and we find we get much better outcomes by leveraging this approach.

Planning sessions often require estimation and a key part of our estimation process is that everyone provides an estimate for each user story. This process naturally lends itself to promote team wide discussion on any estimation variances for each user story, allowing everyone to contribute to the final scope and design.

All team members will also have regular (weekly or fortnightly) 1 on 1 meetings with their people lead for coaching and development purposes. This gives team members the opportunity to relay or validate any ideas they have if they don’t feel comfortable doing this in a group setting, although we do find that team members in our culture are ok with contributing directly.

We also aim to keep our organisation structure very flat and non hierarchical. I personally ensure I’m having individual conversations with all team members at every level at least quarterly. I find these conversations give our team members the ability to raise issues or improvements they see as Product team wide. They also enable us to ensure individuals are getting their voices heard directly at the top most level, whilst also providing a lens into the wider product team, creating cross team opportunities for individuals.