STIMULATING CREATIVITY IN YOUR BUSINESS

Few would disagree with the premise that creative thinking is a good thing for business. But how many of us have instituted practices that successfully harness creativity among our teams? Whether you’re creating a new product, designing a better solution for an administrative issue, or coming up with a one-of-a-kind event for an incentive program or meeting, it’s important to encourage and reward creativity in your business.

Here are some steps to developing a more creative environment:

• Institute an internal reward program for employees who come forward with original ideas. The reward itself can be as low-key as passes to a movie theatre chain or a Starbucks card. Often the reward is less important than the recognition. Be sure that you communicate the recognition to everyone in the company. This establishes the fact that innovation and creativity are a valued part of your company’s culture.
• Management must respond to creative ideas in a positive way. Sometimes an idea that may seem crazy and impractical turns out to be the seed of something brilliant. If an employee gets a negative or disinterested response to their idea, they are likely to stop expressing themselves and the company loses this valuable resource.
• Create a culture that nurtures creativity by having “creative days” or “time outs” to bring your team together to focus solely on creative brainstorming. In the incentive/meetings/events industry, everyone wants the event that has “never been done before”. Taking time away from the office to focus on creating new concepts is a most rewarding exercise whether the topic is something “sexy” like creative event planning or something more administrative.
• Take a look at your physical environment. Some offices just feel like creative places. Paint your walls with rich colors. Hang intriguing art on the walls. Try to bring plenty of natural light into your work space. Your staff spends the majority of their waking hours at their desks. Paying attention to the physical environment can make a huge impact on attitude as well as creative thinking.

We encourage you to try some of these things in your company. If you have any success stories of how your raised the bar for creative thinking in your company, we would love to hear them. info@fourCE.org

fourCE.org develops strategies for companies to reap maximum benefits from incentive marketing programs. We work with both users and suppliers of incentive programs to enhance their success through implementation of customized management and marketing solutions.