Developing a culture of innovation

- Are you missing out on game-changing ideas from your employees? Do you have the processes or tools to encourage a culture of innovation? Let's look at six top tactics. Here are the ways you can demonstrate your commitment to a culture of innovation. Firstly, and most importantly, employees need to feel safe to take risks without repercussions. It's called psychological safety. Businesses can support this by having policies and recognizing when employees have tried new ways of operating, even if it has not succeeded. Secondly is walking the talk. Ensure leaders are actively asking questions, actively listening, owning and sharing any mistakes they have made, and showing that it is okay to fail and learn from it. Thirdly, implement a reward system for innovation. Recognizing and rewarding innovative ideas and contributions can motivate employees to think creatively and to take initiative. Dell is a famous as a brand for their internal innovation program IdeaStorm, while Cisco, Coca-Cola, and LinkedIn have all undertaken more recent, similar internal programs to encourage ideas that the business can act upon whilst projects suggested to then receive funding. On top of having specific programs, there are ways to ensure that innovation is baked into everyday working life too. The fourth tactic is to create a physical and mental space for innovation. Designate creative spaces within the office with resources like white boards, brainstorming tools, comfortable seating and open areas with natural light. The fifth tactic is to encourage collaboration and networking. It's easy to spot ideas for yourself and your own team, but you may have great ideas for other teams and only getting to know them better and the issues they have enable you to solve some of those challenges. Organizing internal networking to understand other teams' challenges or seating teams near or within each other, or having more formal ways of addressing their challenges like workshops. Working in mixed discipline project teams will enable closer working relationships as well as people being able to understand other team challenges too. Try to develop as much diverse thinking on work challenges as possible. Finally, the sixth tactic is to leverage technology and tools to enable collaboration and ideas sharing, whether that is digital whiteboards or messenger tools like Slack or internal communities to help ensure you have the channels and tools to share ideas. So to implement these, evaluate what you can have an effect on. Not all of these will fall within your remit, but evaluate this. How can you ensure your leaders support the culture of innovation? What are the three actionable steps you can take to ensure your team has psychological safety? How can you reward and recognize employee ideas more formally? Are there enough physical creative spaces and what can you do about it? How can you understand other teams' challenges? And have you got the right tools for digital collaboration? And if not, how can you get them?