Creativity in Your Workplace Will Solve All Your Problems

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.

Some organizations go as far as having regular brainstorming sessions when working on a project to allow employees to contribute and build on a project.

This creates immense engagement as their people have a say and they are involved in the creation, getting their buy in.

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 of the Box Can Work Wonders

Why is it so important to broaden mental horizons?

By encouraging thinking outside of the norm, it generates excitement, passion, and creativity.

In addition to this, teamwork is essential when coming up with outstanding ideas and solutions.

Two heads are better than one.

We perform better when we collaborate and when we look at the number one human need that activates the heart – its connection

When you look at it from a decision making or ideas 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.

And… if you want your teams to think creatively, you need to motivate them with some form of rewards.

Dopamine, Curiosity, and Creativity

When exposed to a reward stimulus, your brain responds by increasing the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine that is well known for its role in movement, motivation, and pleasure.

Bring it on… more dopamine, thanks!

Your teams will magically come up with creative ways of improving the workplace, increasing 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 behavior of wanting to learn new things.

It opens up the mind to unexplored paths.

Can you imagine a workplace now without encouraged creativity?

Your team would be afraid to try something new; they would be doing the same old, same old.

It definitely would not stretch them or challenge them to embark on new endeavors.

What kind of culture do you think you will have created without it?

Start Solving Your Problems – Encourage Creativity

If creativity is fueled by passion, then you need to find out what the passions of your teams are, what their talents or skills are and focus on honing these talents to express their creativity for them to excel and reach their fullest potential.

A lack of such action is how people 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.

Unfortunately, this is also the reason why so many employees are deeply unhappy with their job and feel like they don’t love what they do.

If you want happy, productive and prized members in your team, you need to start igniting their creativity to get them motivated.

So how do you get started?

What do you do?

Here are some examples to get it happening:

1. Creative Environment – First, you have to create an environment that encourages creativity. You could funk up one area of your office with some nice, bright colors and call that area Make Creativity Yours, giving your team some sense of ownership.
2. 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.
3. Brainstorming –Set a fortnightly meeting where you can brainstorm and work on a problem or project and call these meetings Inspired by Creativity.This gives your team the right intention before entering your meeting
4. Goal Board – Create a board where you have goals or strategies that the company is striving for and each week you can focus on one to goal or problem to solve or work on.
5. Homework & 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 that you may be focusing on.
6. Reward Creativity – Of course, this followed with a reward for the best suggestion or solution that your team is all agreed on. This is just as important as the implementation of their suggestion or idea.
7. Establish Engaging Rewards – Incentives 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 up so to acknowledge and encourage creative thinking.

What Can You 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 by 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 moral
• 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 increase your chances of retaining quality, committed people and creating an environment of fun!