Promoting creative thinking in your company is essential for success. Creative thinking helps develop new products and services, drives growth, and increases your competitive edge.
You can support creative thinking in your organization in a variety of ways. These suggestions can help.
Choose among these methods to promote creative thinking in your company.
Include Creative Thinking in Your Culture
Emphasize experimentation, risk-taking, and innovation within your organization. For instance, create a safe space for employees to share, develop, and implement ideas. Also, encourage employees to celebrate successes, learn from mistakes, and do better next time.
Embrace Change
Emphasize the importance of staying open to change. Creative thinking helps adapt to changing circumstances, solve problems, and fill evolving business needs.
Support Goal Setting
Encourage managers to help their employees set creative goals for innovation. Ensure the goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) to increase the odds of achievement. Also, provide the necessary resources, tools, and technology to reach the goals.
Foster Open Communication
Support ongoing communication throughout all levels of your organization. For instance, create cross-functional teams that value everyone’s ideas and contributions. Also, use collaboration tools to facilitate communication and project management.
Encourage Collaboration
Support collaboration among colleagues and coworkers. Combining employee ideas, perspectives, skills, and experiences stimulates creative thinking and innovation.
Prioritize Ongoing Learning
Continuous learning contributes to creative thinking. Ongoing development through mentorship, training programs, and other educational resources supports employee engagement, performance, and productivity. The results include higher job satisfaction, employee morale, and attraction and retention rates.
Recognize and Reward Creative Thinking
Provide employee recognition and rewards for innovative ideas and solutions. Include specific examples of creative thinking, the results, and the impact on your organization.
When appropriate, provide a bonus, pay increase, promotion, or another reward. Showing you value creative thinking encourages employees to continue to offer innovative contributions and results.
Hire Creative Employees
Emphasize creativity throughout your hiring process. For instance, look for signs of creativity in each candidate’s skills, experience, accomplishments, and awards. Also, discuss examples of candidate creativity in previous roles and their impact on the organization during interviews. Use your findings to determine how a candidate could help your company innovate.
Do You Want Help with Hiring Creative Employees?
HireCall can match you with creative employees to support innovation. Contact us to get started today.