Creativity is essential for any organization if you want to keep your business moving forward.
There are numerous organizations that have designed a cool, funky, creative environment for their employees to help them relax and spark creative thinking to get their projects moving forward.
Other organizations make an effort to encourage staffers to get up and move, whether that’s around the workspace or outside the building. Going for a walk can lead to improved concentration and better brain function, and some research suggests that walking and talking with someone can lead to a more creative experience.
Just by supporting open-mindedness, setting up an inspirational environment and offering the right rewards, you can get the creative juices of your team members flowing like never before.
Thinking outside the box can work wonders
Why is it so important to broaden mental horizons?
Thinking outside the box generates excitement, passion and creativity. Additionally, teamwork is oftentimes essential when coming up with outstanding ideas and solutions, as two heads are better that one. We perform better when we collaborate and when we look at the number one human need that activates the heart, it is connection.
When you look at it from a decision-making perspective, imagine how many ideas and decisions you can collect from putting together a creative environment where people actually are encouraged to think on their own two feet. Treat your team members like the creative human beings they are, listen to their point of view and support them in developing their imaginations. Feed creativity by asking questions and build your ideas with the help of insight from others.
To create big ideas, you have to create the space and encourage that sort of behavior and culture. If you want your teams to think creatively, you need to motivate them with some form of reward.
Dopamine, curiosity and creativity
When exposed to a reward stimulus, your brain responds by increasing a release of the neurotransmitter dopamine that is well known for its role in movement, motivation and pleasure.
Bring it on! Your teams will magically come up with creative ways of improving the workplace, fostering imagination and solving problems. Increasing one’s imagination creates possibilities and can enable a person to pursue and accomplish many great goals.
Creativity also increases curiosity that drives the desire to learn. It opens up the mind to unexplored paths. Can you imagine a workplace now without encouraged creativity?
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Start solving your problems by encouraging creativity
If creativity is fueled by passion, then you need to focus on honing individual talents in order to express creativity and have your employees reach their fullest potential. A lack of such action is how employees become disengaged from any organization. They don’t feel valued because the organization is not using their talents and strengths; they become bored and always feel tired.
If you want happy, productive and prized members in your team, you need to start igniting their creativity to get them motivated.
Here are some examples to get started:
- Creative environment: first, create an environment that encourages creativity. You could decorate one area of your office with some nice, bright colors and designate that area to your employees, giving your team some sense of ownership
- Work hard, play harder: allow your team to play. You can have colored markers, flip charts, Lego, play dough, paint, music and anything that sparks the creative process during brainstorm sessions
- Brainstorming: set a fortnightly meeting where you can brainstorm and work on a problem or project. This gives your team the right intention before entering your meeting
- Goal board: create a board where you have goals or strategies that your company is striving for and each week you can focus on one goal or problem to solve or work on
- Homework and teamwork: you may give your team some pre-work where you have one agenda for the meeting and they all have to come into this meeting with one suggestion or solution to your goal or problem
- Reward creativity: of course, this followed with a reward for the best suggestion or solution that your team is all agreed upon. This is just as important as the implementation of the suggestion or idea
- Establish engaging rewards: incentive could be movie tickets, a bottle of wine, a Thai massage, a voucher or money. You could even go a step further and have a board to acknowledge and encourage creative thinking
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What can management gain from creativity in the workplace?
Developing a creative culture takes time and it begins with management, being more open-minded and less judgmental to the suggestions of their team. Patience is a virtue; you need to allow time for your team members to develop their creativity in the organization and to put their ideas together to find optimum solutions.
Most leaders are expected to think creatively and come up with innovative solutions to organizational problems. However, by cultivating and utilizing the creative abilities of your team, it is likely to produce an even more prosperous selection of creative ideas and solutions to organizational problems.
Do you know why? We all think differently. A diverse group collectively possesses knowledge and a variety of perspectives; this goes back to why two heads are better than one.
The benefits of creativity in the workplace are countless; here are just a few examples of the amazing results you will experience:
- Increased engagement
- Increased interaction
- Increased staff morale
- Increased passion
- Increased motivation
- Increased problem solving
- Increased productivity
- Increased team bonding and collaboration
Encourage a mindset of continuous learning, creative thinking and increased innovation and you will in turn increase your chances of retaining quality, committed people and creating an engaging workplace.
Originally published March 9, 2017.
