Building Innovation into your Company Culture
After spending a week at SXSW last month, it was a great reminder that environments of innovation can be created with intention.
The conference in Austin hosts around 300,000 people from around the world spanning various industries, who share ideas that result in impressive collaborations.
All businesses strive for innovation in, often, similar fashion because it provides a competitive edge in this fast-moving world. A lot of large corporations have dedicated teams focusing on investing in innovation and testing new products in the marketplace, and they’re generally focused on coming up with new ideas to not only generate additional revenue streams, but also to streamline current products and processes.
While large corporations can afford to allocate portions of their budgets towards dedicated innovation teams, this isn’t always a possibility for smaller organizations. However, that doesn’t mean smaller organizations can’t be innovative.
Here are some things companies can do to create innovative environments within their existing teams:
Encourage Collaboration
Promote Diversity
Cultivate Innovation Programs
Normalize making mistakes (as long as they’re teachable moments that result in improvement)
Hire talent with ‘growth mindsets’
Encourage Collaboration
Part of what makes some startups so exciting and effective is they’re small teams of people working together towards shared goals. While each person is designated a specific role, everyone helps each other achieve objectives, sharing ideas in the process. Collaborating with people whose focuses span different areas of the business is built into a startup’s DNA. Continuing this when a company gets bigger can encourage the idea sharing to continue. Creating Slack channels that span multiple organizations can also foster the idea sharing across the company.
In addition to this, it’s really important that physical office space is built in a way that supports seamless employee interaction. Even though employees may work remotely, on a part-time basis, it’s still important to invest in office space that fosters easy communication and collaboration. Most tech companies in Silicon Valley excel at this. Steve Jobs, to use one example, intentionally designed spaces at the Pixar office with innovation in mind because he understood how important this is.
Promote Diversity
The reason diversity is such a critical part of businesses is because the assumption is that diverse characteristics of employees in a company will produce diversity of thought. Promoting diversity of thought is key to creating cultures of innovation because it makes it ok to disagree, provided support and compromise are part of the process of finalizing ideas. When people are allowed to disagree and debate which idea is best, you will get optimal solutions to your problems. Moreover, when your workforce looks like your customer base and workers are encouraged to voice their ideas, your employees can generate the best products and solutions for your customers.
Cultivate Innovation Programs
Doing anything in a new way, in life, requires time and energy. If you want employees to help you creatively solve problems for your business or think of new product lines for your company, you have to give them time to build new things.
One great way to do this is through hack-a-thons (for tech employees) or contests (for non-tech employees). If you propose a problem and give teams of employees time to solve them, you will be surprised by what they come up with. You can incentivize these events with prizes and then use the ideas to improve your business.
There are several different ways to implement this but creating a structure and timeline are key to success when you want to start this type of innovation initiative.
Normalize making mistakes (provided improvement follows)
Everyone makes mistakes—that’s a fact of life. What differentiates exceptional company cultures from lackluster ones is how employees’ mistakes are handled. In the healthiest, most innovative companies, people are held accountable for their mistakes, treated with humanity and, in turn, they typically learn from them. Smart employees make the effort to be better next time, and whatever they learn can help other employees be better as well.
In the best cultures, employees even celebrate mistakes, share them with others (so everyone can learn), and use the lessons to develop better products and teams.
Hire talent with ‘growth mindsets’
A big part of creating any organizational culture is hiring for the culture you want to create. That doesn’t mean that you only hire people who think a certain way, it means you hire people with a growth mindset who can be flexible and are always willing to learn in an effort to grow. It’s always possible to teach hard skills to employees, but changing a person’s personality or helping them create a growth mindset when their mentality is fixed and rigid is a much bigger challenge. Ideally, you will find candidates who have all the attributes you are seeking, but always look for people with a growth frame of mind. An employee with a growth perspective is also the type of person who learns and whose mistakes make them better.
Companies have a great deal of power around creating innovative cultures in the choices they make, from who they hire to the type of innovation programs they create. If you want to encourage a culture where cutting-edge ideas are being generated regularly, give employees the space and the time to do so and you will be impressed by what they can achieve.