Fostering a culture of innovation can be harder than it sounds, as people are more or less resistant to change their long-standing ways of doing or thinking in a certain way. In this article, the Bayt.com experts present ways to keep your organization’s innovation culture alive.
Innovation is far too important a driver of growth and renewal to ignore. According to the Bayt.com ‘Innovation in the MENA’ poll, January 2014, 62% of professionals in the region say that their organization’s innovation efforts lead to better financial performance compared to their competitors. Innovative organizations are also rewarded with a positive brand image among professionals.
Here are six tips from the HR experts at Bayt.com to make sure that innovation is an intrinsic part of the fabric of your workplace culture:
1. Hire people who can think creatively
Creativity may not be a quality obviously apparent from a candidate’s CV, but you can look out for certain telltale signs. Look for professionals who have diverse work experience in an industry that is different from your own. For example, if you are looking for a business development professional, then a candidate who has helped manage logistics for an NGO may be able to approach sales in an innovative way. Including psychometric tests during the interview phase, that focus on problem solving skills using lateral thinking, is also a good idea. Creative professionals express themselves creatively outside work too, so look out for interesting or diverse hobbies mentioned on their CV.
2. Have regular brainstorming sessions
Brainstorming sessions, just like meetings, need to be done the right way to yield truly innovative ideas, or else at most times they can end up being a waste of everyone’s time. While an organized brainstorming session can bring to light innovative solutions, a poorly managed session can stifle creativity. For a brainstorming session to be useful, it needs to have a moderator who can lay out the objectives clearly for the group. The group members should also be given enough time during the session to individually make their own creative leaps of thought and then present to the group.
3. Encourage cross-disciplinary projects
You may be familiar with the well-known policy at Google Inc. where employees can spend 20% of their time on individual projects that may not be directly related to their job but may help advance Google in one way or another. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, eight in 10 professionals say that they enjoy sufficient slack time at work to explore new ideas, according to the Bayt.com ‘Innovation in the MENA’ poll. While most organizations may not be able to offer their employees the luxury of spending one quarter of their time chasing rainbows, they can still inculcate a culture of innovation by encouraging employees to work on cross-departmental projects. This is a great practice to make sure that your teams don’t live and work in a ‘bubble’ as isolated units. For example, the sales and IT teams can collaborate on projects of mutual interest. By encouraging other teams to participate, you bring out more creative and innovative ideas for solving problems, and with more ideas you find better solutions for long-standing problems.
4. Reward risk-taking
If we were to compare personality traits of entrepreneurs one trait emerges in all – the willingness and ability to take risks. It could be this one single quality that drives them through uncertain times. Risk taking can result in doing things differently, and this can be a great motivator for the person to make things work. By creating an environment of open communication, employees are encouraged to share their ideas and take calculated risks. 78% of professionals in the MENA region agree that their organization is encouraging when it comes to trying out new ideas, as per the Bayt.com’s ‘Innovation in the MENA’ poll.
5. Celebrate success
In most organizations we are so caught up in the daily rush of deadlines that at times we overlook taking stock of small achievements and celebrating them publically. Something as simple as sending a congratulatory email to a teammate who successfully got an account can make all the difference in their day. You can also make celebrating success a monthly ritual by having a small month-end celebration at your workplace and publically congratulating team mates for their individual successes. This acts as positive reinforcement for achievers and is a motivator to others who strive to be next standing on the winner’s pedestal. In the MENA region, 79% of professionals say that their organization rewards and praises their teams for coming up with new ideas.
6. Celebrate failure
Celebrating failure may not be the most obvious way to promote a culture of innovation. Instances of past significant past inventions and discoveries shows that innovations are also accompanied with a high risk of failure. A hundred prototypes result in one perfectly bug-free working model. While the person who is entrusted with the job of innovation may have a steep road to climb, it helps if his/ her efforts are recognized on the way. Thus failure and how companies deal with it is a big part of the innovation culture in a company.
This article originally appeared in bayt.com.
This article and all other intellectual property on Bayt.com is the property of Bayt.com. Reproduction of this article in any form is only permissible with written permission from Bayt.com.
