5 Ways to Encourage Innovation in Your Workplace

1. Promote Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is a key ingredient in building an adaptive corporate culture and can provide the foundation for innovation. Essentially, it focuses on enabling individuals within a team to share ideas without the interpersonal risks of damaged reputations or standing within the company. 

While it is shown that up to 95% of innovative ideas will fail, you can’t find the successful 5% if people keep them bottled up due to a fear of failure. In order to foster this environment, you may need to convince your boss to innovate by showcasing the value of allowing employees the freedom to fail and learn. With the right Innovation Management tools and a culture that celebrates innovation, organizations are able to create a safe environment for innovators to present their ideas.

2. Prevent Burnout

Innovation comes from the human mind. However, it becomes almost impossible for  employees to develop ideas when they are physically and mentally exhausted. Forbes states that “creativity requires energy, peace of mind and perspective”. If your workplace environment strangles these attributes out of your team, it will be reflected in their lack of ideas and innovative contributions.

Burnout can be prevented by building a flexible workplace and ensuring an improved work-life balance. Aside from giving employees the energy to unlock their ideas, feeling valued by the company will translate to renewed optimism and willingness, as well as commitment.

3. Allow Time for Innovation

It is true that innovation sometimes occurs organically. However, high-performing companies enable their employees to make time for innovation. Swisscom allows its employees to dedicate 20% of their time to innovation with help from KICKBOX, and the results speak for themselves, with 4.8 million in benefits realised from revenue and cost savings that came from successfully implemented KICKBOX projects.

When employees are able to set aside time for innovation without outside distractions, ideas can become better formed during the innovation phases. Furthermore, it is a step that shows employees that the company places a lot of value on innovation. In turn, they will pursue it.

4. Involve Your Customers

Innovation, along with everything else you do in business, is ultimately geared towards retaining your customers. Ultimately, they know what they want from your company. By working alongside them and constantly requesting their feedback, your employees can find solutions to common issues far sooner. Encouraging innovative problem-solving that places the customer at the centre, is a catalyst for growth.

The My Starbucks Idea saw the coffee company ask consumers for their ideas and resulted in the birth of several winning innovations. A better understanding of client opinions can also encourage your employees to find innovations that enable the firm to enter adjacent markets.

5. Support Company-wide Intrapreneurship

Finally, true innovation is achieved when all team members are involved. Intrapreneurship, which encourages innovation from within the company, can be achieved by recognizing innovators in all divisions of the company. You must also incentivize them with a reason to care. When they know the mission statement and feel involved from the early stages, the chances are much higher that they will become invested.

For company-wide innovation to work, though, you must remove some of the barriers. If employees feel that their ideas need approval from too many people before being pursued, they will perceive it to be a pointless task. Tools like KICKBOX Intrapreneurship, help to streamline this process by eliminating unnecessary hurdles for innovators.

Encouraging innovation in the workplace is no small task. It takes a combination of the right company culture, and various helpful practices to ensure that employees feel encouraged to submit their ideas.