9 Ways to Create an Innovative Culture

In today’s business world, learning how to build a culture of innovation is mandatory for organizations to stand out and thrive. It’s how businesses move past “the way we’ve always done it” to adopt new clever strategies that make going to work more enjoyable and wow the customer. But innovation rarely surfaces as a climactic “aha!” moment for one individual.

More often, it’s the collaborative culmination of dozens of observations, hypotheses, and micro-experiments that help us learn, adapt, and eventually solve problems. The challenge is that many employees are accustomed to learning a process step-by-step and performing it the same way indefinitely, avoiding failure at all costs.

You need to create an innovative culture to help your employees feel comfortable exploring their curiosities. To accomplish this, you need to adopt deliberate strategies that help your employees embrace the process of experimentation and feel supported enough to take risks.

Let’s explore nine powerful ways to foster an environment that encourages creativity, curiosity, and collaboration.

How to Create an Innovative Culture in Your Organization

1. Celebrate Employees’ Efforts, Not Just Their Outcomes

Since innovation is all about trial and error, your team can’t focus solely on wildly successful outcomes. Instead, they need to learn to enjoy the process without fearing failure. Be prepared that this mindset shift won’t come naturally to most people, so you’ll need to do some encouraging to help them get there. A powerful way to do this is to recognize your employees for their efforts, not just the outcomes they produce. This acknowledgment can reenergize individuals and motivate them to keep generating new ideas.

And as your staff is actively experimenting, they will need frequent, constructive feedback on their work. This will give employees the direction they need to develop creative solutions. To deliver effective feedback, focus on the employees’ ideas and be specific, honest, and realistic. You can help your employees become more receptive to constructive criticism by:

• Acknowledging their hard work
• Being open to receiving employee feedback about company policies and digital transformation initiatives
• Demonstrating a commitment to constant improvement

2. Encourage Cross-Department Interactions

Where diverse interactions occur, innovation is likely to follow. That’s why it’s worth it to break down your organizational silos by creating spaces and opportunities for cross-departmental collaboration.

The result? These interactions unite diverse skillsets and backgrounds, which can spark ground-breaking new ideas your competition probably hasn’t even thought of yet. The benefits of this collaboration can apply to multiple types of scenarios, too, like:

• Major Crisis: In the face of a crisis, you can assemble a dream team of leaders from various departments. Uniting diverse perspectives can lead you to more creative and well-rounded solutions during a crisis. This can also help mitigate the negative effects and help you respond more effectively.
• Daily Operations: Encouraging interdepartmental interaction also enhances problem-solving. Complex challenges benefit from diverse skill sets and insights, with employees offering unique perspectives based on their roles. A problem identified by one employee might find a fresh solution from a colleague in a different department.

3. Motivate Staff with Work That Fascinates Them

Exploring a topic or area of business that’s especially interesting or meaningful to an employee can be fun all on its own. But if you can direct that employee’s innovation efforts toward that area of interest, it can be extra motivating and get them used to the process of innovating.

To facilitate this strategy, you need to pair the work at hand with the individuals who have both the skills and the passion to do them. You’ll be far more likely to see innovation happen when the two connect.

4. Avoid Innovation Silos

When you’re trying to infuse innovation into your organization, it can be tempting to let a few select employees spearhead innovative efforts while everyone else maintains business as usual. Sure, those innovation specialists may emerge with incredible new ideas on the latest, greatest way to grow your business. But if the rest of the organization doesn’t have an innovative mindset, there’s a good chance they won’t be thrilled to trade “the way we’ve been doing it” for these new ideas.

To become a truly innovative organization, you must cultivate an innovative culture that brings every individual on board first. That’s because innovation is open, transparent, and collaborative by nature. It’s part of every employee’s mindset and responsibility.

But there’s one caveat: While you shouldn’t leave the innovating to a select few, it can be beneficial to assemble a core group of “innovation ambassadors.” These early adopters of innovation will consist of enthusiastic, skilled employees from across your organization. They will both help their peers warm up to the idea of innovation and show them how to do it within the context of their jobs.

5. Prioritize Open Communication

To get your employees to exchange ideas freely, prioritize open communication on all levels. It all starts with leadership setting the tone with a consistent celebration of internal and external initiative and innovation.

Transparency is key, with leaders openly discussing victories and setbacks while applauding the spirit of initiative and experimentation. Then, when change happens, seek frequent feedback from your teams. If you set a precedent for transparency from leadership from the start and effectively nurture communication, the feedback you’ll receive will be more valuable and honest.

6. Set Aside Time for Experimentation

We’ve all been there: Too many workdays (if not all of them) are filled to the brim with meetings and an endless supply of tasks. There’s just never enough time to get everything done. So it’s no wonder why it can be easy to let innovation fall by the wayside.

Set aside time for experimentation to avoid letting competing priorities delay innovation indefinitely. Work with your managers to establish a routine that makes sense for each area of your organization. Better yet, encourage them to work together to arrange collaboration hours for their departments to bounce ideas off each other.

Technology is constantly evolving, so setting aside time to pursue innovation will help you better keep up and take advantage of the latest and greatest technology capabilities that will serve your customers and organization.

7. Set Clear Goals

When your employees are first introduced to innovating, it can be intimidating to know where to start. That’s where setting goals with tangible outcomes can help. The trick is making the goals clear and measurable enough that employees understand what they need to contribute to help reach the goal, but also keep them loose enough to give individuals autonomy in how to reach it. For example, if you want to pull ahead of your competition in the customer service arena, you could set the goal of improving your customer complaint resolution rate by a specified amount. Then, let them know that they can flex their problem-solving skills any way they want to reach that outcome. This approach ensures that employees are free to find creative ways to achieve the goal but still have direction, making the prospect of open experimentation less daunting.

8. Interact with Employees’ Ideas

Why would an employee share an idea if they knew it wouldn’t get acknowledged or considered? To avoid this, you must set a precedent that lets employees know you’re excited to hear their ideas and will do your best to implement them. Even if the idea is a no-go, acknowledge it and explain why it won’t work. Or better yet, work with them to find a compromise. As we explored in tip #1, it’s more important than anything else to let your staff know that you appreciate their efforts.

And when an idea is viable, keep the employee who came up with it in the loop. It’s all fun and games when corporate accepts your idea until months or years pass, and progress remains dormant. Of course, most change can’t occur overnight. But innovation also can’t thrive in a culture where employees doubt whether their great ideas will become reality.

When delays happen, tell the employee, and reassure them that you’re determined to see the project through. Additionally, to keep delays to a minimum, you may want to consider looking for ways to limit bureaucracy within your organization. The fewer roadblocks that can slow down projects, the more you’ll be able to enjoy the results of innovation, and the more motivated staff will be to keep going.

9. Embrace Upskilling and Reskilling

Continuous learning is a core component of innovation, so encouraging your employees to embrace upskilling and reskilling is vital. Look for opportunities for staff to get additional training to gain new skills and problem-solving strategies. As they think of and test new ideas, they can put their new skills, ultimately strengthening their efforts and producing better ideas.

How to Build an Upskilling and Reskilling Strategy for Long-Term Agility

Upskilling & reskilling drive digital transformation success, promote organizational growth and agility, improve employee confidence and approval,  and more.

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Let Your Employees Lead the Way

Unlocking the full potential of innovation within your organization doesn’t just lead to breakthroughs and transformative growth. It can also strengthen your broader digital transformation. That’s because if people feel supported and inspired to enact change rather than forced to by upper management, they’ll be more likely to feel connected to your company’s future and empowered to shape it. Looking for more guidance on how to build an innovative future for your company? We’d love to chat- drop a question or comment in the chat to start the conversation.

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