Sheryl Binderglass, the owner of the Fairway Golf Center in Piscataway, N.J., has come up with a surefire way to motivate employees to give her suggestions to improve her business: The employees have to turn in at least two comments or suggestions before they receive their weekly paychecks.

“It can be a comment or an idea or a suggestion,” she says. “And it can be positive or negative. . . . They are a fresh pair of eyes that deal with the public.”

As its name implies, Fairway Golf Center started out as a driving range in 1992. But today, it comprises go-karts, bumper boats, miniature golf, batting cages, and a lighted par-3 golf course in addition to the 140-booth, double-decked driving range. “Every 18 months we kept adding something,” Binderglass says. “My philosophy is to get them there and keep them there.”

The suggestion policy started five years ago. “We were talking about the fact that [the employees] are our eyes and ears,” Binderglass says. “We said, ‘Let’s make them part of the process.’ The more they feel they are part of the business they more they will take ownership and pride in the facility.”

Nothing is too small to merit a comment, she says. “We used to have a bucket of balls at the mini-golf counter and we would hand out the balls, and occasionally a kid would say, ‘I want a blue one; I want a green one.’ So a staff member came up with the idea of different slots for each color so the kids could pick out their own golf balls. . . .

“And one of the girls who had been working on a Saturday night wrote down that three different guests had commented that we had a lot of mosquitos. I’ve been on that course a thousand times, but we don’t stand still as much as the guests. They next day, I sent my maintenance man out to get a bug zapper and put it in.”

The program is fairly simple, Binderglass says. “When you come in to pick up your paycheck, there’s a paper with every staff member’s name on it and three lines next to their name. . . . Sometimes they need a little prodding—‘While you were down at the go-karts was there something that wasn’t working the way you think it should, or did you hear someone say something?’

“Yet on some weeks you get some staff who are so into it that they come in to pick up their paycheck and they hand you a paper with 15 to 18 on it. . . .

“The best is when three employees come in at the same time and are all looking over each other’s shoulders to see what the other person is writing, and that starts a conversation. Some of the comments are interesting. They say, ‘You may not have been around but Matt Brunelli took this kid who was crying because he ran out of golf balls and gave him a small bucket, and you missed that good customer service.’”

Some comments are not practical, such as the staffer who suggested putting a retractable dome over the go-kart track. And some have to be refined, Binderglass says. “One of the staffers (at the go-kart track) asked if they could have a bullhorn so when [drivers] get into the pit they can all hear us. After we broke our fourth bullhorn in three weeks we looked at what else we could do. One kid said, ‘How about a microphone at the podium?’ And we tried a microphone. So we’re on our tenth microphone, but its cheaper to replace than a bullhorn.”

One key to making the suggestion program work: Binderglass is zealous about following up on every comment. “At the end of every week I personally review every comment that comes in. Then at my staff meeting with my team leaders, I assign different comments to the appropriate department.

“Every month we take all of the suggestions, ideas, and comments and have someone enter them into the computer and print out a sheet and add our management comments as to how many we were able to do or why we could not do others’. . . . We post [the comments] for the staff members to see. We’ll list the idea, and what we did for it—the manager who took care of it—so they see that things are taking place and getting done.

“In terms of the managers, we group them by category so that I’ll have a mini-golf section, a go-kart section, a batting cage section, a bumper boat section. We can look at it and look for a trend,” she says.

Binderglass admits that it does create a lot of paperwork. “But to me it is one of the most valuable tools that we have. It can save me losing many guests in the future. Imagine if 15 guests that next Friday thought it was too buggy and decided never to come back. Here, I had a sharp girl who realized the problem and saw it as a way to improve Fairway.”

—Frank Elliott