Whether this is at home or within the traditional office setting, workplace creativity can be an essential element of any productive company and office environment. Bringing creativity to the forefront of a business through working strategies, culture and environment will generally enhance employee creativity. This will inevitably have a knock-on effect on your business to be more innovative and productive. Workplace creativity can inspire your staff, creating a positive culture to work within and this can lead to a happier more dynamic team and company.
Let us start all this off with some quotes about creativity and imagination. They seem to be coveted by some very successful people!
“Creativity takes courage.” – Henri Matisse
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” – Albert Einstein
“Creativity is just connecting things.” – Steve Jobs
“To have a great idea, have a lot of them.” – Thomas A. Edison
“What is now proved was once only imagined.” – William Blake
“Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it’s easy to thwart.” – Adam Grant
“Creativity is not just for artists. It’s for business people looking for a new way to close a sale; it’s for engineers trying to solve a problem; it’s for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.” – Twyla Tharp
“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.” – John Cleese
“The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.” – Malcolm Gladwell
10. “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” – Albert Einstein
It is a blast from the past but the Adobe State of Create 2016 report showed that 77% of workers believed creativity would be a critical part of the staff skill set in the future. Well, we are in this future now and if we ever needed to be more creative this is the time!
Since COVID-19 things have changed, it's not just the office we have to look at, but home working too! We are now back in an office environment but there is no doubt things have changed. Homeworking is still a part of the working paradigm so let's first take a look at the home working before we then mix in the traditional office solutions. By now you will know people who love working from home and those that hate it. So, a well-integrated home and office work culture can be a real advantage. This brings me to the 'Work After Lockdown' study, which is a major research project funded by the Economic & Social Research Council, they investigated how working from home under Covid-19 lockdown will impact how the UK works in the future. Let's take a look at some of the findings and see if they are comming true:
Work After Lockdown: Working from Home under COVID-19 lockdown - Transitions and Tensions January 2021
In this report, it states that "productivity under lockdown was good. Nine in ten (88.4%) of employees feeling they had got at least as much, if not more, work done at home as in the office. Many people expressed a strong need for connection and social support." Also "Few miss the regular travel to work. Many miss the workplace as a source of social interaction – those opportunities to contribute new ideas, learn from others and feel connected to the organisation." And “'seven in ten (73%) of employees wished to adopt a hybrid work arrangement - blending working from home with the commonality of the office - and to retain the flexibility and control over their working pattern from which they have benefited under lockdown." This study shows that under difficult circumstances productively has been good however we really need to think about how we can sustain this long term, by bringing a creative workspace and working concepts into the home as well as the traditional office. Let's have a look at some solutions that will work to integrate both with joined-up thinking and continuity. We’ve listed some strategies to ensure that your business stays creative, focused and thriving!
Increasing Workplace Creativity:
Hire Diversely
If you are recruiting diversely, you should have a team full of people from all walks of life. Because of this, you will gain access to a variety of viewpoints and perspectives, which funds the growth of unique, innovative and fresh ideas. So hire diversely and your business will be able to identify opportunities and explore new solutions. Hiring diversely, therefore, guarantees an increase in workplace creativity.
Flexibility
If possible, allowing for flexibility in the workday allows employees to work when they feel the most creative. Studies have consistently shown that flexible schedules lead to higher rates of overall productivity, higher job satisfaction and most importantly, higher workplace creativity. Letting employees work outside of the box and outside of regular hours means they will be able to produce their optimal creative output. People are all so different in their creativity and energy patterns, so let's have a look at two artists that used their creativity constantly with amazing effect.
Pablo Picasso would often go to bed late and wake up late. He would get up around 10 am, have some leisure time to himself then arrive at his studio in the early afternoon around 2-3 pm. Then he worked until 3 am with a dinner break usually around 10 pm. Now, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Georgia O’Keeffe told an interviewer in 1966 “I like to get up when the dawn comes. The morning is the best time, there are no people around". After breakfast at 7:00 AM, O’Keeffe would then work in her studio for the rest of the day and finish for her last meal of the day at 4:30 PM. So we can see, all people are fired up at different times. Work flexibility can help get the best from peoples natural working rhythm, it can also help with their domestic commitments too. Enabling flexibility with people can make for a very happy and productive team!
Encourage Breaks
Burnout is not good for an individual’s creativity, and that is why it is so important that you actively encourage your employees to take breaks. If possible, you should let employees go for walks when they need it, having fresh air will clear the mind and help them think better which is also very important whilst working from home too. It is really easy to let the day slip away from you when you are working from home but forgetting to take ample breaks hampers peoples ability to recharge and refresh their creativity. We talk about this very subject and a lot more strategies for getting the best out of homeworking in our podcast 'The Guide to Survive and Prosper in the World of Lockdown and Homeworking'. It's worth taking time to listen to this as we talk to Sandra Marston, an esteemed counsellor and life coach who talks about how to deal with the new model of homeworking. Although this was put together for coping with the pandemic, all the strategies are still relevent and are effective at any time or situation. So please feel free to share the podcast link with any of your employees.
Structure Your Brainstorming
It is important that you structure brainstorming activity in order to reach optimum productivity and creativity. Allow everyone to present their ideas first. Then, once everyone has their ideas down, go through them one by one and make sure each idea is given the same amount of thought. Structured brainstorming allows room for growth within people, they feel part of the solution within the context of working toward the companies goals and it focuses on creative thinking!
A lot has changed since New York advertising executive Alex Osborn come up with the idea of group brainstorming in books he wrote in the 1940s. He was the person that made fashionable the idea that problem-solving and innovation are enhanced by harnessing a group’s collective knowledge and building on each other’s ideas. I know there are many sceptics on the topic of brainstorming efectivness but Paul Paulus, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington has been involved in more than 100 experiments and studies. He assessed group creativity and group decision-making and said "If done badly, brainstorming is unproductive, but it’s valuable when done right. Problems often need multiple perspectives.” His strategies for successful brainstorming are outlined in this article from success.com
Diverse surroundings
When an employee spends all their time at one desk and in one seat, it can become easy to feel demotivated. The best creative environments have a variety of options so individuals can work wherever they feel best suits them. If someone is getting fed up sitting at their desk, changing the environment and standing or sitting on a comfortable sofa can seriously affect their engagement and creativity. Therefore, you should offer a variety of options so that people can work where best suits them on that particular day. This also can be recommended for employees working from home. Give them permission to work outdoors as well as inside, let them know they don't have to be in their home office all day. Recommend to them that if it's quiet, sitting on the sofa with a cuppa and their laptop for a few hours can really help break the monotony. After all, diversity is the spice of life!
Meeting Spaces
Linking to our previous point, you should also offer a variety of meeting places. There should be some that are open and some that are closed. These different areas will encourage different personality types (which we discussed in our blog 'How Can Introverts Succeed In The Workplace?') and groups to work together in a space that best suits them. The same applies to connecting digitally. There are many software solutions that can give you very different flavours of connection, we looked into all these options in our blog 'How to Increase Workplace Communication'. The blending of connection and communication for your team via online services is imperative for creativity and motivation. We predict these online solutions themselves will become more creative in their offering in the future, improving upon the human interaction experience. It is important that you keep track of new solutions and use multiple forms of connection for remote and office workers. This multi-format connection approach will help employees to stay in their creative mode by using their preferred way to connect with people and their team.
There Are No Stupid Ideas
You should communicate to all of your employees that there are no stupid ideas. Some individuals may be scared to speak up and show their creativity because they are worried that their ideas may not be suitable. Therefore, you should reinforce the fact that you want to hear all ideas and no idea will be stupid. Just like good brainstorming we mentioned earlier, If you can actively encourage individuals to speak up, their creative flair will increase when they realise that they don’t have anything to be embarrassed about. You may just find the next big thing from your liberated employees!
Henry Ford's ideas were totally rejected in the beginning when he tried to present his concept to a group of industrialists, nobody bothered to give him any time, they thought Ford's idea of 'affordable vehicles for an average citizen' was not even relevant. He was however encouraged by one person and that was Thomas Edison and today we are reaping the rewards of his idea of mass production cars!
Who does not know “Harry Potter” and author J.K. Rowling? The manuscript of Harry Potter was rejected not once, but twelve times by publishers! But, she didn’t give up and we can now enjoy the life journey of Harry Potter. Let your employees know that no idea is ever off the table, there may be many that can't be implemented, but some just may be the game-changer you really needed!
Facilitate A Team Mentality
It is rare that a good idea comes from just one person – that’s why it’s important that you can work as a team. Creativity is a team sport, so you should make sure everyone is part of the team's shared goals. In the blog entitled ‘Characteristics of High-Performing Teams', we covered how selecting the right people with the right attitude and teamwork can produce a very high performing team. As a case study, we looked at the Mercedes F1 team careers philosophy and broke down these strategies for success in how these type of teams are built and managed (it's worth a read!). Teamwork, sharing ideas, trust and collaboration are all parts of optimal creative teamwork.
The Physical Workspace
Looking back at one of the headline statistics of the IES Working at Home Wellbeing Survey of 2020 was that there has been a significant increase in musculoskeletal complaints. More than half of the survey respondents reported new aches and pains, especially in the neck (58 per cent), shoulder (56 per cent) and back (55 per cent), compared to their normal physical condition. We are now bringing this blog around to something as simple as how you sit and what you sit on! This can make all the difference to your motivation and creativity throughout the day. A fundamental of working creatively is to be feeling in good shape while you are working. Making a home office a great workspace is as important as doing this in a communal office. Investing in your homeworker with quality working equipment like proper chairs and desks are as important as supplying great laptops with good screens! Don't leave it down to chance, help employees create a positive place to work with great equipment at home as well as in the office. Also, encourage your employees to make their personal space creative and tactile, maybe give them financial help with this. It is proven that people work better in more creative spaces. There is a good article in Medium about this '11 Creative Workspace Ideas to Trigger Your Creativity' It covers things like adding plants to your workspace, hanging art on walls, an inspiration board and a recharge space! A physically creative office, whether communal or at home is the fuel for being creative itself, your surroundings are an important factor, so do not dismiss this, it is a good strategy for general well being and productivity for employees and teams.
Conclusion
Admittedly, creativity doesn’t necessarily come naturally to everybody. But, if you can foster creative ways of working, have it embedded in your company culture and give people the tools to be able to achieve this, then you will find that creativity will naturally grow within your company.