Creativity is essential for any organization if they want to keep their business moving forward.
Many organizations have designed cool, funky, creative environments that help employees relax, spark creative thinking, and push projects forward.
Other organizations are making efforts to encourage staff to get up and move, whether around the workplace or outside the building. It’s possible, and some research suggests that taking a walk or talking to someone can lead to more creative experiences.
By simply supporting an open mind, setting up an inspiring environment, and providing the right rewards, your team members can be more creative than ever before.
An out-of-the-box way of thinking can do wonders
Why is it so important to expand the horizons of the mind?
Thinking outside the box creates excitement, passion and creativity. Additionally, teamwork is often essential to coming up with good ideas and solutions. We improve performance by working together. When we look at the greatest human need to activate the mind, it is connection.
From a decision-making perspective, imagine how many more ideas and decisions you can glean by putting together a creative environment that encourages people to actually think on their feet. Treat your team members like creative people, listen to their opinions, and help them develop their imaginations. Nurture your creativity by asking questions and build your ideas with the help of insights from others.
To generate big ideas, we need to create spaces and encourage such behaviors and cultures. If you want your team to think creatively, you need to motivate them with some kind of reward.
Dopamine, curiosity, creativity
When exposed to rewarding stimuli, the brain responds by increasing the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is well known for its role in movement, motivation, and pleasure.
bring it on! Your team will magically come up with creative ways to improve the workplace, foster imagination, and solve problems. A heightened imagination creates possibilities that enable a person to pursue and achieve many great goals.
Creativity also fosters curiosity, which drives the desire to learn. It opens the mind to untrodden paths. Can you imagine a workplace where creativity is not encouraged?
Inspire creativity to solve problems
When creativity is driven by passion, we need to focus on honing individual talents to express creativity and enable employees to reach their full potential. Lack of such behavior is the way employees turn away from any organization. They do not feel valued because the organization is not leveraging their talents and strengths. They get bored and feel tired all the time.
If you want happy, productive, and valuable members on your team, you need to ignite and motivate their creativity.
Here are some examples to get you started.
- Creative environment: First, create an environment that inspires creativity. You can give your team ownership by decorating your office area in nice, bright colors and designating that area for your employees.
- Work hard, play hard: Allow your team to play. You can use colored markers, flip charts, Lego, dough play, paint, music, or anything else that stimulates the creative process during your brainstorming session.
- Brainstorming: Set up bi-weekly meetings where you can brainstorm and work on issues and projects.This gives the team the right intentions before joining the meeting
- Goal board: You can create a board to set goals and strategies your company is working towards, and focus on one goal or problem to solve or work on each week.
- Homework and teamwork: You can give your team the preliminary work that there is one meeting agenda and everyone on the team must attend this meeting to present a single proposal or solution to a goal or problem.
- Reward Creativity: This is of course followed by a reward for the best suggestion or solution agreed upon by all the team. This is just as important as the implementation of suggestions and ideas
- Establish attractive rewards: Incentives include movie tickets, a bottle of wine, Thai massage, vouchers and cash. You can even go one step further and have a board of directors to recognize and encourage creative thinking.
What can executives gain from creativity in the workplace?
Cultivating a creative culture takes time, but it starts with managing and becoming more open-minded and less critical of your team’s suggestions. Patience is a virtue; time should be reserved for team members to be creative within the organization, to organize ideas and find the best solutions.
Most leaders are expected to think creatively and come up with innovative solutions to organizational problems. However, cultivating and harnessing the creativity of your team can result in an even richer selection of creative ideas and solutions to organizational problems.
Do you know why? Everyone has their own way of thinking. Diverse groups collectively have the knowledge and different perspectives. This goes back to why two heads are better than one.
The benefits of creativity at work are countless. Below are just a few examples of the amazing results you will experience.
- Increased engagement
- Increased interaction
- Improved staff morale
- growing passion
- Increased motivation
- Increased problem solving
- Increased productivity
- Improved team bonding and collaboration
By encouraging a mindset of continuous learning, creative thinking and innovation, we are more likely to retain a high-quality, dedicated workforce and create an attractive workplace.
