How To Encourage Creativity In The Workplace

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With the modern-day scales of competition, creativity is the powerhouse that can drive a company into prosperity. Creative employees are normally more productive and instrumental to the growth of the company. In order to improve on corporate performance right from the employee level, companies have sought new and ‘outside the box’ ways to spur their employees to become more creative and innovative in their work. Whereas there are numerous ways of fostering and growing creativity in the workplace, here as some of the ways that creativity can be encouraged in the workplace.

Enforce employee diversity

Creativity thrives in diversity. Having employees with creative ideas, from diverse backgrounds, and having different levels of qualifications is one of the crucial ways of enforcing diversity. The unique mix of diverse employees ensures a heterogeneous environment of different ideas where workers can share a wide mix of ideas. This is as opposed to a uniform set of workers who can easily agree on issues in the workplace, therefore leaving little room for constructively-diverse thoughts. Such diversity can only be enforced during the hiring stage where the company should hire workers from different diverse backgrounds. A diversely-composed team would generally tends to disagree on many aspects of work such as strategies to resolve workplace challenges. The disagreement would be a healthy environment where ideas would be shared and defended appropriately.

Creating a positive working environment

A too serious working environment creates an atmosphere of fear and tension, an environment that is counter creativity. On the other hand, having an environment that is fun-filled normally inspires the workers to think creatively. The positive mood that is created by the fun atmosphere is normally regarded as a psychological ingredient that spurs workers towards flexing their thoughts more. Various companies have utilized this pretext to make their workplaces more suitable for workers. For instance, Google has implemented a 20 percent policy which requires that workers dedicate 20 percent of their working hours into personal projects which prosper creativity. Researchers propose unconventional ways of promoting a positive working environment such as having some light music and pets in the office. Such sounds of nature produce a mentally relaxing environment where creative thinking thrives.

Teamwork and personal projects

Both teamwork and personal projects can equally promote creativity in the workplace. Teamwork normally requires workers to appreciate the value of working together to resolve a challenge. The diverse ideas posed when such workers come together normally promotes tabling and defending of innovative ideas which can be cultivated to bring about positive growth in creativity among the workers. Team workers normally have their confidence boosted when they propose ideas at the team level and have the said ideas supported at the team level.

On the other hand, personal projects can also significantly promote creativity. Giving a worker a challenge to work on is a sure way of enforcing the worker’s ability to think critically and creatively as they target coming up with a solution. The extra personal chore that a worker is allocated makes them come up with spontaneous ideas which bring about creativeness.

Delegation of responsibilities

Micromanagement, the opposite of delegation of responsibilities, is an enemy to innovation and creativeness in the workplace. Delegating responsibilities to workers, especially the sub-management type of responsibilities makes the workers want to promote their active thinking as opposed to when the workers are micromanaged where they tend to limit their thoughts and confine themselves to the instructions issued by the management. Whereas the workers should not be entirely left unmanaged, leaving them with an ample space to make minor decisions puts a sense of responsibility and thus accountability on their shoulders. The resultant expectations empower the workers to work towards autonomy of thought.

Reward creativity

Nothing beats inspiring workers to become creative as rewarding their creativity. Rewarding the workers motivates them to maintain a certain course and standard of operations. The rewards also create a standard whereby workers tend to emulate their friends who would have received rewards. To increase the incentives of such workers to work towards being creative, the rewards have to be something tangible such as monetary tokens or even intangible such as being announced by the CEO during an annual meeting.

In addition to giving employees such a reward, it would also be essential to pursue additional mechanisms of encouraging the workers such as ensuring that the proposed ideas are implemented whenever possible. Pursuing such measures would encourage the employees that their propositions are being seriously regarded by the company.

Brian O'Connell
Business Writer
Brian is a semi-retired business owner with 15 years experience covering small business, entrepreneurship, careers, and financial planning. He has appeared in dozens of top-tier national business publications, including Time, MSN Money, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, The Street.com, Yahoo Finance, CBS Marketwatch, and many more,

1 COMMENT

  1. You bring up some great points, I totally agree that creativity thrives under diversity, you can’t have too serious of a work environment, and micromanagement is the enemy of innovation and creativeness. I believe it is important to make creative brainstorm sessions routine. Branching off of some of your points, I recently found an article that shares 4 ways to encourage creative thinking at an organization –> [https://info.arielgroup.com/blog/4-steps-to-finding-time-for-creative-thinking]. What would you say is the most effective method of fueling creativity in the workplace?

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