Every Business has different hidden resources that play an important role in success. Making Employees Creative or Creative ideas which are the Top in the list who gives their maximum efforts to grow the business.
They pay their hard work into the production, operation, indirect marketing, Research, etc.
The Success of any Business depends on How employees are treated and how much they value the company.
There are many ways Every business understands the value and get motivation and Safety into many things like health and safety at workplace conditions, personal development, work/life balance, and remuneration, and Motivation.
Employees are just not involved in the inner office Working conditions but also Outside of Business.
They valued the same as the Customer Services. Great Employee service represents great business as it leads to fewer dissatisfied employees, fewer mistakes, and lower operating costs.
Additionally, employees are likely to stay longer and add further value when they are involved with an organization.
Right Now, We have seen the trends in the Giant Tech Firms. they started taking ideas from their different level Employees.
In my opinion, there is always room for creativity and innovation for the employee. Where they can share their ideas with the Companies and the company will understand the same and implement if viable.
Creativity and Innovation have a direct relationship with the excellent working environment and higher Customer Service. The Creativity upliftment of any employee boost the operations and help the company to upgrade at the new level.
Technology Advancement increasing in every part of Business. The Rise of Creativity From employees also is increasing. We have also seen any evidence that the Tech giants are developed a unique policy where the employee has to spend some portion of a working hour at the side of the Project.
How To Boost Creativity Amongst Employees?
There is always a scope and room for creativity and innovation irrespective of the job type. And now, more and more businesses want their employees to be creative.
It is not just about following instructions anymore. Today’s work expects employees to excel in decision-making, problem-solving, critical thinking, and other aspects of creativity.
Even with mundane jobs like accounting, finance, law, there is some sense of creativity needed to find unique solutions to the usual problems.
So, now more and more companies are participating in boosting the creativity of their employees.
They also try to optimize their workspace to make it a more creativity-friendly environment, open to suggestions, bringing fresh ideas and modern-day office culture.
If you are a business owner, these ways will be very helpful to make your employees creative. Not just that, these strategies will help you to optimize your workspace to be more creative.
Some Effective Ways To Boost Creativity In The Employee At Business
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Effective Ways To Boost Creativity In Your Employees
- Providing stimulating intellectual challenges to employees
- Get an outsider to review your project to bring in fresh perspective
- Switch job roles between employees
- Don’t put restriction on creative and critical thinking
- Get your employees the tools they want to expand their creativity horizons
- Give your employees freedom to choose their own way to fulfil a goal
- Leaders need to provide a safer environment for employees to prosper creativity
- Diversify your team to empower individuals
- Have a physical workplace for your employees to interact and engage
- Praise your employees in their success
- Identify and reward creativity
- Encourage work breaks in the office
- Allow employees to make their own decisions
- Encourage problem solving across the teams, functions and projects
- Set up the right seating plan for your employees or teams.
Providing Stimulating Intellectual Challenges To Employees
One of the best ways to boost creativity is the problem-solving exercises. To solve complex problems, one has to come up with creative solutions with given resources and time.
Creativity is also about innovation, finding new ways to do things when one cannot do in a particular way.
And that’s what comes across to the employees when they go through intellectual challenges beyond their status quo.
Because in order to do so, they have to insert critical and creative thinking and that too in collaboration with others.
Companies can provide genuinely stimulating intellectual challenges to their employees to encourage their practice, flexibility, and innovation.
However, you don’t also want them to be overwhelmed with the challenge at hand, so it should not be beyond their capabilities. Also, it must not be too easy as it will bore them.
Once you start doing well with a challenge, you can gradually increase the difficulty levels with the problems thrown at them.
Get An Outsider To Overview Your Project
Outsourcing has been a long while now and it can be of great value when you want to spark creativity.
Many businesses perform a common practice called outthinking which means they leverage outsiders to look at their projects to get an extra opinion.
When outsiders are not related to the project in any way possible, their inputs really help to make projects really interesting.
It boosts the creativity of the overall project and makes employees or team members have a different perspective to examine and learn from.
Not to mention, how unique perspectives and suggestions bring value to the project and give insights to the team members, so they can do better.
Switch Job Roles Often
This is a very effective strategy to challenge the skills and capabilities of your employee, especially enabling them to creatively resolve new problems they face.
All you have to do is plan a particular day where employees have to step into the roles of their co-workers to perform different sets of functions or tasks.
Similarly can be seen where you give a leadership chance to a team member rather than a manager or series for a day.
These experiments will tell you a lot about the capabilities of the employees and what more potential they have.
But more importantly, it challenges them to act on their instincts and ideas, hence boosting creativity.
Creativity comes in most of the scenarios where people are thrown to unfamiliar places to figure out things or solve a problem or complete a task.
Don’t Put Restriction On Creative Thinking
To really increase creativity in your workspace, you first have to remove any restrictions on creative thinking as most companies have.
In the name of the organization, discipline and micro-management businesses tend to control or restrict the critical and creative thinking in the workspace.
Managers can certainly set a deadline to ensure that there is a sense of time with everything their employees do, and also a sense of challenge.
But then, you also have to make sure that the deadlines are not too tight to overwhelm them so much that they can’t think or do anything creatively.
The good thing about creativity is that it can be achieved on a low budget or even no budget. It is crucial for managers and leaders to support their team in their spending of resources.
Make sure you provide your team with whatever they need to creatively optimize the projects and achieve more.
Giving Employees Freedom To Choose Their Own Way To Fulfil A Goal
Whether you’re a manager or into the business administration, you can certainly give specific goals to achieve to your employees, but do not set things in stone in execution.
If you give them too much specific instruction to complete a task, they won’t be able to use their creative abilities to do it in their way.
Also, chances are that they could find a unique way to do things better and faster than what you might instruct.
Micromanaging is the enemy of creativity. If you put too much pressure on following a specific instruction or way to execute things, you lose employees’ ability to think creatively.
More importantly, what they learn from these creative discoveries to fulfill a task, they can utilize in other works.
Not to mention, how much it will empower the employees, their confidence, and self-esteem.
Another skill you will be preventing them from putting into practice is decision-making when you micro-manage them. It would also impact their strengths, personal and skill development.
Give Your Employees The Tool They Want
Employees are able to reach their full creative capacity when they have the tools they want.
With available resources only, employees can expand their horizons to push their creativity to another extent.
A lot of times, even if the ambition or intention is there, they do not have sufficient resources, especially when it is too tech-based.
However, tools here can also be the infrastructure, the system, environment, or resources that they might need to try new things.
Leaders Need To Provide A Safe Environment For Creativity To Prosper
As a leader, there is so much on them to assure the creativity factor in the operations and management of the business.
They need to take risks and have critical thinking which includes challenging limitations and assumptions along with the status quo.
When leaders make an example about doing things, employees feel safer to be free and practice their creative and innovative instincts.
As a leader, you need to create an environment where people can question the set ways of doing things, be innovative, and speak their minds.
The workplace environment needs to encourage employers to have fresh ideas and go creative with their work.
When it comes to supervision, leaders need to give their support but with some distance in order to give flexibility to employees about making decisions.
More importantly, creative pursuits, new fresh ideas, innovations, critical thinking, all must be praised and applauded to inspire and encourage the employees.
Ask Your Employees For Improvements
When you make decisions regarding the workplace, projects, or even internal management, it is crucial to ask your employees for improvements and their ideas.
Usually, the employees won’t come to management with their own ideas without asking because it doesn’t seem their place.
But really empowering the employees and including in the decisions regarding the workplace, infrastructure, office culture, and more, you make them participative.
They have to critically think of their surroundings and what they want from their workspace. This promotes creativity, problem-solving, and innovation.
In fact, employees are very much capable of finding fresh ideas and solutions to the day-to-day problems in the office.
It also boosts their self-esteem and makes them inclusive of the company, making them care about the company.
Ensure Bonding Amongst The Employees
Many offices or workplaces are so not connected to each other that some employees even do not know anything about the personal lives of their co-workers who have been sitting next to them for years.
That’s not how an organization can create a creative atmosphere for the employees to grow and improve.
Bonding is a key to a free workplace environment where creativity can blossom because without teamwork, collaboration, and personal relations, no one will be invested enough as a team.
Diversify Your Team To Empower Individuals
This is far too important to miss for an employer to understand when they are managing a team or multiple teams for that matter.
A diverse team with all kinds of skill sets, backgrounds, and experiences not just tremendously improves the results but also empowers the team members on an individual level.
They have a better chance to learn from each other and adapt to new skill sets. Also, when we talk about diversification in the team, it isn’t just about their professional capabilities but also their personal opinions and personality.
Employees with similar backgrounds are not able to stretch their minds up to that level to grab the creativity diversely.
Different Employees with comparable backgrounds, qualifications, experience, etc create Creative Clouds for the best working environment.
Such Diversity literally facilitates team bonding and unique ideas gathering from all departments.
Diversified teams are more capable of mounting a highly ambitious project as compared to other teams.
Also with such a wide palette of experiences and skills, they are able to do all kinds of projects under their industry.
Praise In Their Success
It is very important for the leaders and management to acknowledge the success of your employees and praise them.
When you have a tendency to applaud the good work done by employees, they feel validated and accounted for.
It helps them to understand how they are doing in their workplace. However, it is essential to find different ways to applaud or celebrate the success of employees and teams.
Make sure you neither overdo it nor underdo it. It needs to be completely based on the facts and figures.
But then, on a personal level, there must be a connection or personal relation to the leaders with every employee where they can be little encouraged on a regular basis.
When people are appreciated and acknowledged for the work they do, they invest themselves more into it, feel motivated and try to do better.
And only this positive-charged environment is receptive to adapting creative tendencies in their work because, without appreciation and satisfaction, creativity cannot thrive in the workspace.
Having A Physical Workplace
Employers must have a variety of meeting places for their teams to interact and get creative.
This is important because different types of workspaces evoke different personality types and energies.
So you have to make sure you do have both open and closed workspaces that cater to specifc types of employees, more importantly, to break down silos.
Don’t hesitate to try informal spaces such as long table workstations, hangout lounges or large quiet rooms for your teams to engage openly and freely.
To boost creativity and productivity amongst the team members, make sure you have designated “play areas’ ‘, activity rooms, and game rooms.
These places are ideal to enjoy the frequent breaks and get re-energized after an intense working sprint and then again get ready for it.
Concludingly, the idea is to allow various types of spaces for your team members to boost their creativity.
Setting Up The Right Seating Plan
The seating plan determines the energy of the space. It also decides how collaborative and interactive employees will be to each other.
And if there are teams, it is important that you offer a seating plan where groups can engage together and bounce off ideas.
If your infrastructure does not promote collaboration and creativity, it is hard to expect employees to go out of their way to do things differently.
Some companies have seating arrangements or desks in a way that their employees get to meet new people in the office every day.
Many seatings are arranged more near and a bit informal to promote collaboration and creative ideas to float in conversation.
It all depends upon what kind of company you’re in or what are your requirements or how your company functions.
The idea here is to adjust the seating plan according to the creative aspirations of the company from their employees.
Encouraging Work Breaks
Breaks are necessary in order to achieve maximum productivity and creativity. These breaks need to be strategically placed in the working hours with set durations to promote focus and efficiency.
Apart from that, breaks help employees to relax and have a sound mind while working.
Every intense working sprint must be followed by a short break where employees are encouraged to relax, enjoy and free their minds.
Also, it is on the management or the leader to assure that taking breaks shouldn’t be something that employers feel guilty about or are being judged.
Rather they must be educated about the benefits of breaks, how minds work and how to maximize the breaks.
Allow Employees To Make Their Own Decisions
Creativity doesn’t work if a person works on an instruction manual detailed to death as when they don’t have any control in their decision-making.
So it is crucial for management or businesses to give freedom to employees to make their own decisions.
Critical thinking, observation, decision-making, collaboration, and innovation must be part of their project management, then only they can be creative with their work.
To creatively empower individuals, you need to give them flexibility in their work when it comes to decision-making.
You can definitely have the authority over them to overlook everything they do.
Also, it is not that you need to give this to every employee but to them who are in the making of your product and executing operations.
The same goes for your marketing teams, PR, HR, and other departments. The only people you might leave here are the front office and back-end people.
Allow Problem Solving Across The Operations, Functions & Teams
The onus is on the employer to promote or create an environment for collaboration in their teams and across various operations and functions in the business.
With those collaborations, it is essential to allow them to do problem-solving with the challenges they face rather than resolved or administered by their leaders or managers.
Let the teams synergize together to find solutions creatively. To assure this, provide them the information and resources they need firsthand.
Also, it is important to create transparency between different team members and even departments to function better and empower their collaboration.
Working On Remote Collaboration & Communication
This pandemic very well pushed the envelope regarding the coming age of remote working, and hence it is crucial to make your business remote-collaboration friendly.
This goes without saying how crucial it is to adapt to remote communication technology and build systems on which employees can be comfortable.
In fact, remote collaboration can be leveraged to boost inter-communication and relationships between team members or employees.
Once you make your employees adapt to this mode of communication, whether you are able to work in physical space or choose to, you still will be able to use this aspect to increase productivity and creativity amongst employees.
Make Your Employees Get Out Of The Office
Short-sighted businesses might want or think that constantly churning out hours in the workplace will give them higher returns.
But strategically-driven long-sighted companies understand the value of their employees and how to maximize their productivity.
Instead of just being in the office all the time, they create frequent breaks for employees and encourage them to get out of the office for a little walk.
Employees do not need to go far from the office. The idea is to just freshen up and move their body a little so they can again get into working with full energy.
Also, movement promotes creativity. When you go for a walk, you get tons of fresh ideas, reduce some work stress and clear your head.
Many offices have their own spaces of gardens and balconies as well. A little walk outside the office or just from the desk can make them more creative at work.
Try Stand-Up Meetings
Stand-up meetings are a relatively new trend in office culture.
It works so great because when you are standing up, you are more focused on the discussion as there are no potential distractions such as a phone or computer.
These meets are going to be short and to-the-point because of the extra focus going into the topic also, the discomfort and sense of urgency due to standing.
This is a great way to boost creativity in the working space. Because the idea itself advertises to bring more creative solutions to the office culture.
Due to the high energy level in the stand-up meetings, it changes the whole dynamics of meeting all together as compared to seating ones.
Employees are more alert, thinking on their toes, no pun intended, and programmed to wrap up as early as possible.
Allowing Social Networking For Your Employes
Let’s start with a very good example of this. Tech giant company Dell allows their employees to speak for the company, represent them on their social media networks.
They allow them to do it in their own way and get creative, engaging and fun while interacting with Dell customers or prospects.
Neither the company is left on the peril of the customer service, marketing team, or PR to exclusively handle, and not anyone.
They do not give their employees generic corporate scripts to follow rather use their conversational skills and knowledge about the product to lead the way.
However, it is indeed transferred to the customer care representative when there is more to do.
This doesn’t only increase their brand awareness but customer satisfaction and bost brand image.
But more importantly, internally, they empower their employees to be creative and connected with the brand as they represent them.
It is suggested for corporations to allow their employees to partake in social networking. Usually, the fear is that social media might act as a distraction from productivity but that’s not the case.
Identify and Reward Creativity
To kick-start Creative things up, you can start and set an identification process of Every employee’s Working style. You can suggest or allow your employee to think up some creative ways of making work processes more efficient.
Initially, This task could be tedious or employees may not be part of this process but Once your reward the Creativity of someone.
The rest of the employees would enter the contest later. Each employee can be asked to provide one suggestion by the end of each week or month and you’ll assess which idea is the best.
This will be followed by a reward for the employee and equally important, implementation.
Give the motivation to be Creative
The motivation process is the same as giving a toffee to the Child. Motivating employees can be vital to the success of every business.
A motivated workforce means a highly productive, more attached to Company, loves the Company, and ready to shake hands to achieve the company goals, objectives at the desired Time period.
This is what motivation can transform the attitude of any employee of the Business. Motivation increases the strength of the relation of an employee with their Job and Company. There are different kinds of Motivation.
In some way, the Manager used to not only uplifts the motivation but also decreases the Negativity ones. Extrinsic motivation is the tactic most managers use, where employees work to achieve positive results or avoid negative ones.
The Manager should always be ready to share the importance of Creativity while at the time of working, or by giving a lecture or by practically. Personal motivation varies among individuals.
Freedom beyond Office Culture
More Freedom means more Outcomes, these rules being adopted by many giant Tech players. They know, If we bind the employee between “To Do” and “Not to Do” they all will become confused. There should be freedom of working hours, seating arrangement, etc.
Flexible scheduling lets creatives work whenever inspiration strikes.
Especially if the weather is nice, then, take your team outside of the office for a meeting or for brainstorming. You don’t need to take them far away.
You can even go to the outside of your building and sit on the grass and think about it. Having some fresh air clears your mind and helps you think better.
Research says that Many employees hide great ideas because they’re afraid you’ll shoot them down or even fire them.
A Room that Inspires Everyone
A room Where you have the freedom to take a break and spark your Inspiration to think out of the box.
This room should be with a unique Quote Poster, Success Stories, Music, etc. Anyone can go to this room and refresh their minds.
Besides all arrangements, we can transform a room in that way where your employees can together and have a lunch or coffee break. It is best to decorate this room in an innovative design that creates ideas.
Positive Working Environment
The Positivity can transform “NO” To “Yes”. sometimes, being too serious can kill creativity. Having fun during work and flexible working allows to be relaxed and helps to generate new ideas.
A stressful or Depressing work environment doesn’t give one the mood to think of doing things differently. We have seen many people, there Creative thinking doubles when they work on background music.
so the Company should consider offering to choose the music for the day as a reward for employees.
Similar Posts:
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- What Is Extrinsic Motivation? Definition, Examples, Benefits
- Revenue Per Employee Explained: Maximizing Your Workforce
- What Is Human Resources (HR): Here’s The Answer You’ve Been Looking For!
- How To Motivate Employees Without Spending Money? 20+ Ways
Business, marketing, and blogging – these three words describe me the best. I am the founder of Burban Branding and Media, and a self-taught marketer with 10 years of experience. My passion lies in helping startups enhance their business through marketing, HR, leadership, and finance. I am on a mission to assist businesses in achieving their goals.