23 October 2014 15:00
Blog
Inspire creativity not conformity in your employees
Creativity is a competitive advantage. Enabling your employees to be creative can take your business to the next level through their imagined innovation.
Follow our five steps to setting creativity in motion.
Have you found that as your business grows and as processes are put into place, that despite all your efforts, habits start to build? This conformity can stifle creativity and therefore innovation because everyone is following rules and in some sense, following the herd.
Creativity in your employees will always increase productivity and will often lead to real and exciting innovation. This means that you are leading the pack rather than following.
Follow our simple tips, and you’ll be well on your way to the front!
1. Create freedom – Creative teams need time and permissions to think and talk openly to one another. Encourage your team to try things out and experiment, and allow them to fail. It can lead to great productivity.
2. Be visual – Give your team a pencil each – start with a sketch or a doodle, it really does work.
3. Provide the right environment – Give your team an open, colourful space to work and meet, with visual stimulation on the walls which will encourage interaction and innovation.
4. Seek inspiration – Seek out other people who your team can take inspiration from, even if they are from a totally different sector. Yes you can learn from an alpaca farmer as well as a middle aged business veteran.
5. Don't brainstorm – What? Surely brainstorming is the key to creative ideas! Well, not according to recent research. Take a look at our blog about a new, more effective process – Brainwriting!
But how do you really embed creativity into your culture? Here are some ideas that go into a little more depth.
Encourage your team to question everything
All too often in the rush to get things done, managers will shoot the ‘Why?’ questions down. However, by allowing these questions to flow and be properly discussed, new ideas, improvements or even a whole new product can be created.
blur Group’s Global Head of Communications Ruth Speakman says: "We take so much for granted when it comes to conformity in work practices. How often do you hear phrases like: 'it’s always been this way', 'that’s just how we do it', 'follow the set process'. One of my favourite ways of encouraging creative approaches to seemingly set-in-stone processes is repeatedly asking 'Why?'. It’s a quick way of really getting to the nub of what a process is supposed to achieve."
Nothing is completely original anyway
Austin Kleon backs up the opinion of Picasso and Steve Jobs when he said in his TedTalk that nothing is completely original. All work is built on what came before. Every idea is just a remix or a mash up of two previous ideas, or more.
So, if our ideas are influenced by previous knowledge and previous innovations it makes sense to have more people in the room so that they can influence each other and build on each other’s ideas. It is therefore important to treat your team like a little art community that fuels itself when they gather.
Devote time to creativity
The most important part of creativity is giving your team enough time to imagine and embrace new ideas. It’s hard to come up with new ideas if you’re constantly at the coalface trying to get through the mountain of work you have.
Katy Roberts, Senior Community Manager at blur Group runs her team in such a way that means she can tap into their creativity to everybody’s advantage. Her advice to other managers who want to facilitate creativity without losing productivity is to: "Think about how you manage your team. Do you step in just to give your team a framework and then step out to give them the space to navigate the uncertainty themselves?
"There’s a very fine line between allowing people to come up with creative ideas and overshadowing that whole creative process."
Competition can stifle creativity
We all know that by adding women to a group you can enhance collaboration and creativity. But a new study finds that this is only true when women work on teams that aren’t competing against each other.
The study suggests that men benefit creatively from going head-to-head with other groups, while groups of women operate better in less competitive situations. The lesson here is competition is not a key component of stimulating creativity in groups, so remove that from the equation and more ideas will start to flow.
Nonconformity can’t operate alone
Steve Jobs (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Larry Page (Google) and Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn) all were/are non-conformists but this doesn’t mean that your business is going to succeed if everyone in it and everything you do goes against the norm. Achievements come when non-conformism meets with a disciplined and systematic approach.
When you are rolling out ways to facilitate creativity you also have to plan for how you are going to implement those ideas into a desired outcome such as more productivity, happier employees, happier customers, more profit and ultimately, competitive advantage.
This blog is by blur Group, the e-commerce company providing a better way for businesses to buy or sell services.
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