For every business owner, your working team is the backbone of your company. Whether your business will succeed or not will depend a lot on your staff and how you bring out the best in them. One of the most effective ways to motivate your team is by encouraging them to apply innovative thinking while performing their daily tasks. However, getting your employees to apply creative thinking isn't as easy as it may sound. It requires a conscious effort to create the needed atmosphere that encourages innovation. So, do you feel your team is lacking in creativity? Are you looking for practical ways to drive employee innovation in your workplace? Here are a few tips you can try.
Bureaucracy is one of the main barriers to innovation in any organization. For one, it can make it close to impossible for people with innovative ideas to execute those ideas. Secondly, long bureaucratic chains can also inhibit a culture of innovation in itself.
When you force your employees to work within strict and stringent rules, you make it impossible for them to think or act outside the box, especially when they do not agree with or understand those strict rules. You want your workers to be able to share ideas and bring meaning to the work they do. Ensure that you remove all barriers to idea generation and sharing.
Another way to boost innovation in your team is to reward those who can try something new, no matter how minor the reward is. Doing this will help create an atmosphere where experimenting and thinking outside the box are valued. One perfect example of this is Google's 80/20 rule, which encourages the company's workers to spend 80% of their time on core company work and 20% (or one day a week) on innovative activities.
Also, take the time to reward those who excel at adding creativity to their work to boost business productivity, as that will encourage others also to take up the challenge. No matter how simple your reward is, it will go a long way to motivate the rest. For some reward and employee gift ideas, you can visit https://swag.com/blog/25-amazing-gifts-for-employees-and-why-they-rock?utm_campaign=Employee%20Gifts&utm_source=content&utm_content=employee_gifts
It is not a bad idea to start innovation-driven competitions among your employees. However, you need to be careful not to breed unhealthy competition to promote creativity. Unhealthy competition can lead to selfishness, as workers will be unwilling to share their ideas to protect them from being stolen by others. Rethink competition in a way that promotes creativity. You can do this by focusing on groups instead of individual rewards.
Your employees will hardly feel the need to be innovative when they don't trust your organization or feel unfairly treated. A sense of trust and belonging is enough to boost employee innovation as your team is then ready to focus their energies on developing creative business solutions that will drive your company's success.
