Creativity in work is a sign of successful processes and workflows, s0 if your business is lacking in this area, now is the time to change. Organisations around the world are striving for better solutions, and products are increasingly using creativity as a means to innovate.
The choices are evident as the opportunities to create new ideas become precursors to success for organisations. Here are five of the top tips for managing mundane work processes that are applicable for any organisation.
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Brainstorm
The first tip is to open your mind and increase communication. These are the basic tenets needed before brainstorming can begin. The group-wise thinking where regular sessions are held by many members discussing an issue is likely to spawn more ideas. The point is to generate a range of fresh ideas that may facilitate the business issue and not to worry about the feasibility or the quality of the ideas. Holding pre- and post-work brainstorm sessions are bound to contribute a flood of ideas and the best practice is to write them all down. Employees will get into the habit of thinking more about creating opportunities and less about consequences. Employees need to create convergent and divergent thinking-styles in order to succeed in idea generation.
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Pay it up
All employee ideas need to be documented and evaluated before implementation. This feasibility test and the commitment thereafter will give impetus to the employee to think of more effective and rational ideas. To aid in this behaviour, management needs to reward the employee whose idea is implemented. This should be a showcase for to demonstrate that this is not a farce. Management should use this showcase as an opportunity to illustrate the way the employee’s idea is benefitting the organization monetarily.
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Change the environment
The organisation needs to boost their idea-generating capability. Some of the proven methods for doing this are related to a change in the interiors, as open spaces open up the mind. This change can be a great morale-booster for your existing staff because their vision is unrestricted. The use of glass and softer shades on walls is likely to calm and aid the mind. Changing cubicles toward a more minimalist approach will also help with idea-generation. Scientists urge the use of classical music to aid in calm, but surgeons and hair dressers seem to work more intensely with music on.
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Team up
Encouraging the Human Resource Department to go out of its way to develop creativity teams for brainstorming sessions can help. Yes, it works when diverse people with diverse experiences and educational backgrounds are asked to collaborate on a project. It is also critical, as diverse teams from different departments will essentially have members of different ethnicity and cultural backgrounds. Because of this, maintaining office protocols regarding respecting each other’s views is a must, despite the fact that it is natural to have opposing viewpoints. To get a team to think more productively in terms of output, a bigger table and a collaborative attitude matter. There’s no room for ego regardless of one’s knowledge and experience.
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Management support
All of the above tips can easily be implemented, except this last one. Management growing out of stiff bureaucracy needs to embrace ideas from lower-rung employees in the organizational hierarchy. This is the key to rolling out the brainstorming ideas and officially endorsing them. Management support will help the employees to come out of their typical, traditional roles and auras which will, in turn, help to break the ice. Cross-departmental mixes, two-way communication and the encouragement of feedback, are some of the initiatives management should implement in order to bring about a change in the organization. The critical challenge is to bring about an attitudinal change in the form of employee contributions or in making idea-generation a compulsory productivity target for each employee.
The above tips are the basic elements which need to be followed religiously. The key to success; however, depends on management and employees sticking to it as a policy. Creativity and its essence will show its results over time as ideas that matter will be only a few when screened from the huge list. The challenge is to keep the idea-generation momentum going.