8 Tips To Motivate Employees to be More Innovative

Employees are the lifeblood of any organization. They are responsible for carrying out the company’s vision and mission.

Therefore, it is important to find ways to motivate them to be more innovative.

This article will discuss tips that can help motivate your employees to be more creative and innovative.

• Make a Well-thought-out Plan for Innovation
• Encourage Healthy Competition
• Encourage Creativity
• Consider Employee Well-being
• Be Willing to Try New Things
• Create a Retreat
• Recognize and Reward Talent and Hard Effort
• Be Open and Honest About the Statistics

Make a Well-thought-out Plan for Innovation

Workplace innovation should be a strategic priority and an integral part of your company’s DNA.

Regardless of their tasks, every employee at your firm should be able to draw a clear line between the organization’s innovation strategy and their day-to-day responsibilities.

Here are some pointers to help you develop a solid innovation plan that will undoubtedly encourage staff to keep innovating.

Create and Execute a Meaningful Innovation Plan

The correct innovation plan should guide principles for increasing your company’s market share via continuous service and product innovation.

As a result, the strategy should aid in clarifying what is expected of each employee at every level of your organization.

Accepting Defeat

It is an undeniable reality that failure is associated with innovations. Instead of attempting to avoid this truth, your organization should accept it.

As a result, accept the prospect of failure and promote risky initiatives among your employees to assist them in approaching innovation openly and innovatively.

Encourage Healthy Competition

Competition may motivate team members to collaborate and combine their abilities.

“Friendly” is the crucial word here. You don’t want to attach performance to incentives or other perks on which employees depend, and you don’t want a competitive spirit to become excessive.

Keep contests for exceptional events or to produce a surge of production - too many, too often, and employees will begin to feel pressured by:

• Divide personnel into teams and make a competition out of who can finish their responsibilities the quickest to help increase morale during difficult work hours. The winning team receives a complimentary lunch from the firm.
• During the holidays, various departments participate in an office decorating competition.
• Create some costumed social club activities, with a reward for the winner.
• If you don’t want your employees competing against one another, make them work together against the time.

Encourage Creativity

In general, successful innovation requires good and open communication.

Your staff must be aware that top management is forthright about the need for innovation and the benefits it will bring to the organization.

It’s critical to provide consistent information about the organization’s innovation goals.

You should also highlight the possible rewards to the employees if they do everything correctly.

Developing a plan and fostering open communication regarding innovations are essential components. You can achieve this by:

• Investigate further to uncover less apparent answers to challenges.
• Encourage individuals to expand on the ideas of others while adding their twists.
• Ask questions, listen carefully, and have an open mind.
• Create a venue, such as a Slack channel, for your staff to exchange creative projects, articles, and ideas that they come across online. Sharing and debating what others are doing generates a lot of brilliant ideas.
• Encourage self-directed initiatives that spark the whole team’s creativity, such as a poster-a-day design project for a graphic design firm. Post your designs online and watch your business get some additional attention.

Consider Employee Well-being

Innovation in the workplace involves encouraging your staff to think creatively. It’s also about making sure people don’t feel threatened while being creative.

As a result, it’s critical to protect your workers’ psychological safety and reward them for successful inventions.

Provide Flexible Working Hours

Work and life balance is a major factor for workers these days.

With families, hobbies, friends, personal responsibilities, companies, and other obligations to manage, the ability to fit work around life rather than the other way around may be a big motivator.

Furthermore, various individuals perform better at different times of the day on a physiological basis.

Some people work best first thing in the morning, while others may work till late at night. So,

• Allow team members to work flexible hours, beginning earlier in the morning or completing later in the evening.
• Allow jobs to be reduced or adjusted to accommodate schedules, such as new parents working part-time hours, role-sharing, or allowing employees to work longer 4-hour days.
• Implement a self-management paradigm, such as the one used by Buffer. Members of the team do not have an office or even defined hours. They work as much or as little as they wish and choose and manage their projects. Yes, it’s crazy, but the crew is incredibly driven and making incredible results.

Provide Security

If your workforce does not feel comfortable and happy at work, no reward system will help encourage them.

True leaders make their team members feel comfortable because they know their jobs are secure, their ideas are heard and considered, and their personalities are not mocked. So,

• Ensure that employees who work early or late have a strategy in place if anything goes wrong.
• Share continuity plans with employees and incorporate their comments.
• Be upfront and candid about any corporate or economic difficulties that may affect it.
• If things are looking tight, get suggestions from your workers to help you decrease expenditures or produce new revenue.
• Protecting employment is the same as protecting everything else.
• By being present to your workers, you can demonstrate that everyone is working together to achieve common objectives.

Be Willing to Try New Things

Organizations must be willing to experiment to be creative.

Organizations must exhibit a hunger for innovative or novel ways of doing things, whether via market adjacencies, customer co-creation, or participation in innovation hubs.

Here are some ideas to help you get there.

Look for Market Proximity

This is an important part of innovation.

Adjacencies are new markets for goods that are closely connected to the job your organization is presently doing. But are distinct enough to create an opportunity or add value for your organization.

Expanding into these sectors might result in additional customers and strengthen your company’s market position.

Take Advantage of Open Innovation and Co-creation Possibilities

If you want to push staff to innovate, don’t be hesitant to engage your customers.

After all, your most ardent supporters are most likely to have outstanding ideas for new services and goods, especially if they are repeat customers.

Take Part in Innovation Centers

An innovation hub is a gathering place for corporate representatives to exchange diverse approaches to various breakthroughs.

This notion recognizes the value of a relatively diverse approach to invention and emphasizes the need for teamwork in issue resolution.

Investigate the outer world.

Inspiration comes from everywhere, and the finest inspiration does not come from the four walls of your cubicle.

It comes from real people doing real things in the real world. To achieve this, you may

• Bring office personnel to job sites regularly to witness how things are done on the ground.
• Spend time with your consumers in focus groups and other events to better understand them.
• Encourage employees to attend conferences and other industry events to understand what others are doing.

Create a Retreat

We’ve written previously on the good health and motivational effects of a brief snooze throughout the day.

If you believe your staff is looking a bit exhausted, implementing a napping policy could be a good idea.

• Transform a room or area of your workplace into a sleeping hideaway or quiet spot.
• Encourage workers to design their schedules so they may work during their periods of greatest effectiveness.
• Stock the kitchen with nutritious, energetic snacks and beverages.
• Bring in a post-lunchtime yoga teacher to help workers readjust.

Recognize and Reward Talent and Hard Effort

One of the biggest delights that may be received when individuals perform at their best is when someone recognizes their hard work.

Employees will strive harder to establish their value if they see you actively and tenaciously praising their accomplishments.

• Mention outstanding work in your monthly newsletter, on your website, or during a company meeting.
• Align your recognition platform and incentives with your business values, emphasizing rewarding people who demonstrate the firm’s ideals.
• Collect feedback from customers once work is finished and utilize it as one of the factors in your selection.
• Request those team members who are succeeding in their jobs be nominated by their coworkers.
• Create an annual award ceremony to honor these accomplishments and provide trophies and awards. Make it a huge deal, as if it were the Oscars.
• Involve team members in industry awards and urge them to look for possible accolades.

Be Open and Honest About the Statistics

Unless something goes spectacularly brilliantly or disastrously wrong, and they wind up in the media.

Most workers have no clue how their firm is truly functioning in the marketplace.

Instead of keeping the figures hidden, share them with your colleagues. To achieve this, you may:

• Hold a monthly meeting where you present the month’s data. This allows employees to ask questions and allows you to provide just a subset of the most critical KPIs.
• All board reports, strategy papers, and other materials should be accessible on the employee intranet.
• Make sure these materials are inaccessible formats so that anybody who wants to may view them.
• Encourage employees to ask inquiries or discuss business performance with you.

Final Verdict

These tips should help you motivate your employees to be more innovative.

Remember that innovation doesn’t happen overnight, so be patient and encourage a culture of creativity in your workplace.

You’ll see your employees coming up with some truly groundbreaking ideas with time and effort.