According to the World Economic Forum, creativity in the workplace is one of the 10 most essential professional skills needed to prosper. So how do you encourage it? We explain.
This speaks because creativity should not remain a surreal idea for any organisation. It should preferably be integrated with the natural culture of a given organisation. Besides, leaders’ creativity should be promoted by leaders as an integral part of the core values.
By doing so, you can inspire your team to develop the ability to think outside the box. In this blog, we look at some of the most creative ways to uplift creativity within the workplace. Before we move to that, let us first understand what creativity at the workplace means and why it is essential.
What is workplace creativity?
Can a mathematician or a quality engineer be creative? Is it essential for an accountant or a corporate lawyer to have an innovative mindset? You may feel that these verticals do not correlate with creativity. However, the prerequisites of creativity are not limited to the marketing department, graphic designers, or content writers.
Creativity is not only for the artists but is needed in everyone individual. Being creative in the workplace means that a worker should surpass challenges with novelty and relevant solutions. Besides, he should look at different problems differently rather than having the same problem-solving approach every time.
So, would you not want that each team member of yours has a knack for creativity? A creative team will deliver excellent results, invaluable for your organisation’s success. Next, let us look at some of the significant merits of fostering creativity in the workplace.
The significance of creativity in the workplace
Be an employer or a business leader; there are various advantages of a creative workplace that you can align with your organisation’s success.
These merits can actively enhance the magnitude of employee engagement within your organisation. Let us delve deeper into the vitality of creativity in the workplace through the following outcomes.
Positive working environment
With the influx of creativity in the working culture, you can create a positive workplace environment. This positivity will be marked by innovative thinking and seeing every challenge as an opportunity.
In such an aura, employees will not be deterred by problems but will be keen to take up more challenges as creativity will boost their morale.
A high-productivity culture
When workers endorse novelty and innovation in their working style, their productivity will keep improving. With an empowered sense of creativity gushing through them, they will be keen to take up additional responsibilities.
In the larger picture, creativity will hike the level of active employee engagement and reduce employee turnover. Besides, it will make your team members believe in their self-abilities, and they will battle each insurmountable challenge down the wire.
Improved cooperation
Team building, effective internal communication, and coordination between team members are critical for any organisation’s functioning. Even you would be making special efforts to enhance these virtues within your organisation.
Creating a creative culture will smoothly facilitate workplace relationships and cooperation to help you with that. It would not be incorrect to say that inducing creativity is one of the most fantastic ideas to encourage team spirit.
These are only a few of the significant upsides of workplace creativity. These will help you realise why cultivating workplace creativity should be one of the most sought after business strategies. The list of great benefits creativity has to offer to any business is otherwise long.
Creative problem solving is relevant to every business functionality area and can positively impact everywhere.
Having understood this imperativeness, you now need to recognise the most appropriate strategies for boosting creativity. We bring you some great and innovative ideas to lead the pursuit of encouraging creativity in the workplace. Being a leader and a top executive, it all starts from you!
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Creative ways to stimulate creativity within your organisation
Hire a diverse team
This is one of the most effective, trusted, and inexpensive ways of fostering workplace creativity. Creativity will get a hike by default when your team has people from diverse backgrounds, opinions, perspectives, and talents. Such a team can do wonders to add to your organisation’s success.
Various teams will have varied outlooks for every situation, and that is where you win as a leader. Besides, workplace diversity has other prominent benefits for organisations as well. This is the reason why recruiters are now keen to build diverse workforces.
Be a passive leader during discussions
You do not always have to be an active leader spearheading things on his own every time. Sometimes, you need to identify the leadership skills within your team members. So, during team discussions or even casual discussions at the workplace, you should avoid leading the course. Let others raise their hand and lead the conversation, and you can sit back and relax.
In this process, you will encourage a sense of empowerment, liberty, and creativity among your team members. More significantly, they will realise and unleash the creative potentials they have.
Encourage curiosity and inquisitiveness
When you facilitate your team members’ development, you should inspire them to be inquisitive. Give them the freedom to be curious and ask as many questions as they want to. Being curious will help them in active learning, improve their observational skills, and help them be more creative. It is a proven fact that curiosity and creativity go hand in hand as the former gives rise to the latter.
Henceforth, take away your team members’ reluctance that they might have for asking questions. Set them free to inquire and learn independently, and you will see positive results soon. After all, how would have Isaac Newton discovered gravity if he was not curious enough?
Keep room for mistakes
Leaders usually kill the creativity among their team members by going too harsh on them when they make errors. Yes, being an entrepreneur, you want your team members to be flawless because one mistake from their end can cost you a bounty.
But some small errors are acceptable and can be corrected with collaboration. If you are looking to create a highly creative team, there would be some small shortcomings or failures at times.
You need to accept such occasional mistakes and support your team members when they err. If you go too grim on them, it will fill them with deterrence, and there would be no room left for creativity.
Reward creative behaviours
If you see an employee solving a problem with creative and critical thinking, let it be an example for others. You can appreciate such employees’ efforts set benchmarks in front of the entire team. To add more, by rewarding creative behaviours, you can inspire other workers to make a conscious effort to raise the bar of creativity in their professional outlook.
Rewards are and will always be one of the best ways of encouraging new working principles within a business organisation. When you set rewards for something, it raises the workers’ spirits and invests diligence in achieving them.
Offer flexibility where possible
Setting too many limits and deadlines around your workers can limit their creative horizons. Yes, every organisation has some tight deadlines to meet and has to deliver on its commitments without a doubt. But you can be a little flexible with internal organisational goals. This flexibility will give the employees enough time to think, analyse, and develop the best results.
It is noteworthy that creative deliberation takes time, and you cannot always expect your employees to be creative and quick at the same time. Let them be a little flexible, work on a project according to their plan and mannerism, and this liberty will pay off in the long run.
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Prevent creativity from dying in the hands of the internet
These days the internet has made everything convenient and hassle-free for everyone. It is undoubtedly overhauling the world for the better and opening new horizons of success and growth.
But the digital revolution is also killing human creativity to some extent as searching on the internet seems everyone’s first response. This is where you have to be a little careful, especially when remote teams’ culture is thriving vividly.
How will workers think independently and identify their capabilities if they will keep finding all answers on the internet? What you can do is, organise offline brainstorming discussions and interactions. Additionally, you can ask employees to develop two or three unique ideas for a project or company goal.
Provide constructive feedback
When your team members approach you with a new idea or a unique thought, do not criticise negatively. Instead, you should first hear them out with curiosity, and then if you find any shortcomings, you can provide constructive feedback to them.
Your positive and constructive feedback will uplift their spirits, and they will view you as a leader who takes a lot of interest in creativity. If it’s about shoppable videos, new marketing, social media takeovers, etc – it’s all fair game.
If you like the idea, you can collaborate with them and then work together on refining the idea. Your employees will be delighted to see you working with them on their idea, and this will send out a positive message to everyone.
Get a few in-house plants
Do you know that there are some magnificent benefits of giving your office a touch of green? Keeping plants within the office premises has known benefits of boosting productivity, creativity, and enhancing moods.
Further, it helps the workers a great deal in stress management. Some reports suggest that keeping plants within the office can increase creativity among employees by nearly 15%.
To substantiate, as per a study by the University of Technology, Sydney, keeping in-house plants can reduce stress levels by more than 30%. Plants will clean the air, eliminate the toxicity from the workplace environment, and will drive all sorts of positive changes. Besides all these tremendous benefits, it also gives your office an aesthetic and environment-friendly appeal.
Define goals in a clear and precise manner
For your team members to bring out the best innovation in them, clearly define their goals. They should know with exactitude what is expected of them, and you should give them the autonomy to accomplish their goals in their ways.
This clarity and independence will provide them with an understanding of what is to be achieved and define how they will achieve it. You should know that taking away autonomy from teams can hurt their creativity because you cannot limit creativity in a set of pre-defined protocols and norms.
Focus on employee well-being
Employee well-being is recognised as the essential criterion for success by organisations worldwide. As long as workers do not feel well physically and mentally, their performance and productivity will remain crippled.
The same goes for their creativity because creativity comes from relaxed and cheerful mindsets. To encourage creativity among employees and for other business purposes, you should have a firm strategy to support employee wellness and well-being.
You can offer them empathy in challenging situations and have some in-house mechanisms or activities that help them bust their stress. Stress and anxiety can lead to creative blocks in workers’ minds, and you need to help them get over this hurdle.
In Summary
To conclude, as you can now decipher, the impotence of creativity in the workplace is immense and rewarding. Besides, there are various ways to cultivate a team’s creative culture.
Including some transform working culture, transformations isn’t a lot that you need to change within your organisation’s operating environment. It is the little things like more autonomy, enhanced flexibility, and curiosity among workers to serve the purpose.
Also, you need to be a more proactive leader and lead from the front by being creative and setting examples for your team. With more creativity, you will have more critical thinkers and leaders in your organisation, defining a new league of success for your business.
About the Author
Isabella believes writing to be the expression of her soul. She is a content editor at Assignmenthelp4me. She has been consistently captivating the hearts of diverse readers with her crisp and engaging content for a long time.
