Organizations and culture fostering individual creativity
Why should organizations strive to be creative?
Creativity is positively linked to organizational effectiveness. It increases the quality of solutions to different organizational problems. It also helps in stimulating innovation, promotes team performance, and increases employee motivation. Fostering creativity and innovation not only makes the work environment more stressful but also paves the way to the introduction of new procedures that can enhance productivity and quality of work.
Some best practices
Organizations have to give their employees some space to try out new stuff by offering them resources. Some organizations already have imbibed some practices to foster creativity and innovation in their employees.
In 1945, 3M has institutionalized the 15% time-off policy, followed by Google with its 20% time-off practice. This Innovation Time Off requires staff from the engineering and technology functions to spend a certain percentage of their paid time to pursue projects outside of their assignments. It is also applicable to managers, where they are required to spend no more than 70% of their time on core business. Of the rest, 20% must go to related but different projects, and 10% to entirely new businesses and products. Google has a position, Director of Other to help manage the 10% time requirement. If an employee doesn’t have some sort of a 20% project going on, it is perceived negatively in the Google community. These could be hobbies, moon-shot assignments, or social work.
Cultivating autonomy and learning to experiment in cross-functional teams to lower the risk of failure and anticipate customer needs faster is very important.
Many innovative organizations already have policies in place to allocate resources, especially talent and their time, to projects with no immediate consequences. Such provisioning of scarce resources has to be included as a part of the organizational culture.
Role of Managers
Managers also play an important role in fostering organizational innovation. They have to learn to behave differently, leaving behind their routine activities and ways of working, when it comes to fostering change.
There is a possibility that they suffer from cognitive biases, often fuelled by a misplaced sense of importance, which can hurt innovation. There are five cognitive biases that hurt organizational innovation the most: fundamental attribution error, confirmation bias, sunk-cost fallacy, groupthink, and the bandwagon effect.
To bring about the desired transformation in ways of thinking and doing in the organization, Senior Executives should stop tying up every resource to visible opportunities. Before directly converging into a particular solution, divergent views have to given importance, which can help in effective problem-solving.
Keep your employees motivated
One of the best ways to cheer up employees is by providing incentives. But the incentives provided should not be generalized. It has to depend on the type of work and the risk factor involved with it.
For the routine, regular tasks, a mild reward for successful accomplishment would suffice, whereas for experiments, which are inherently risky, reward handsomely for a successful outcome.
Punishment during failure also follows a similar path. For a routine task, the punishment has to be severe when one fails to perform. But for a risky task, it has to be mild. This is also important as you don’t want failure to be a habit and further let employees be wasteful in their efforts.
Finally, everyone has creative potential. Creativity is more than a simple novelty as it involves developing new, imaginative, and appropriate approaches to solving problems. As it is one of the most important personal and organizational resources, it has to be nurtured and encouraged.
