Configure Your Workplace for a Culture of Innovation

Ever heard of a casual collision? Clue: It has nothing to do with nonchalant motorists. This is all about employees meeting, talking and happening upon an idea so game-changing it leads to innovation.

This is what can happen when your talented, hand-picked people have the chance to collide, and the time and space to develop the spark of an idea. It’s why offices these days are more likely to be open-plan and peppered with “breakout” spaces. This layout encourages interaction and collaboration.

The stalwarts of Silicon Valley are all up to it. Google makes its employees wait in line for its famous free lunches just long enough that they might strike up a conversation with the person next to them. Facebook offers a host of extracurricular classes and workshops where people can socialize, and it lets employees join a whole different team for a month-long secondment.

There is no exact science to making innovation happen, but there are ways to gently encourage it, even without a Silicon Valley budget.

In April, Google posted two guides on innovation on re:Work, its curated platform for sharing management ideas. One says: “In Google’s experience, innovation happens when you make it a valued part of the way people think, work and interact every day. It’s about creating the right environment, hiring the right people and then getting out of their way.”

Here, we will focus on the work environment, and specifically reconfiguring your physical and digital workplaces to support team and inter-departmental collaboration.

Comfortable breakout spaces, large canteen-style tables for eating lunch and more frequent opportunities to socialize are just three ways to encourage collisions. Encourage teams – who may otherwise be siloed – to interact and collaborate. Maybe you send the member services and sales teams off camping together, or start a softball tournament with the proviso that all teams entering must include players from at least three departments.

As for the flow of creativity, rip up that tidy desk policy, which may restrict ideas, according to a study by scientists at the University of Minnesota. It found that when participants worked in a messy room they came up with more interesting concepts.

One of the researchers, Kathleen Vohs, said, “Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights. Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe.”

But what about virtual collisions? Organizations also need to find ways to support telecommuters, as well as introverted employees, so they have just as much opportunity to interact, collaborate and create with their peers.

First, think about ways you could configure your internal technology to be more social. The digital workplace technology that is most successful in terms of employee engagement will have social media feeds at its core – accessed via the intranet homepage.

An employee’s feed will show relevant employee-generated and business-generated content. We know from our data that peer-to-peer appreciation drives the biggest response, and that employee-generated content does more to engage than anything produced by management.

One idea I’ve seen work well is #peerappreciationday when the whole company is invited to post and thank an individual who has helped or mentored them.

To make sure employees feel comfortable posting and interacting with content in the work environment, senior managers need to be engaging with employee content and encouraging more of it.

Second, make sure your communications tools are the same across the company. The problem we have now is that we’re spoiled. There are too many good technologies that let teams communicate and collaborate in real time. What happens is the marketing and PR team picks Slack, HR picks Trello and sales uses Google Hangouts.

When those teams try to talk to each other, they either have problems or they switch to a different and unfamiliar app. This acts as a blockade, stopping people talking to different teams. And you can’t innovate if you don’t talk.

Third, make innovation an official part of your strategy and spread the word through your internal communications channels. A PwC report titled “Financial Services Technology 2020 and Beyond: Embracing Disruption” suggests organizations avoid basing their culture on past objectives and instead encourage employees to contribute fresh ideas. One example it gives is to develop an Innovation Center of Excellence to “focus on driving imagination, creative thinking and inventiveness more deeply into the organization’s culture.”

What this does is let your people know what’s expected of them. When they see the best ideas are encouraged, rewarded and rolled out across the whole company, it’s more likely to happen.

What credit unions mustn’t do is let the spark of a game-changing idea die before it has had the chance to be nurtured.

Nigel Davies is the Founder of Claromentis. He can be reached at 0044-7771-776-454 or nigel.davies@claromentis.com.