What is a Culture of Innovation?
A culture of innovation is defined as a work environment where new ideas and creative-thinking is promoted, nurtured and cultivated across all levels of the organization. Such a work environment encourages employees to seek out new ways to improve processes, products/ services, customer relationships, employee well-being and social responsibilities.
A culture of innovation is not about forceful thinking, that is in fact an innovation blocker. Instead, it seeks to promote openness in observation through a peaceful work environment and harmonious collaboration.
Often many companies say and seek to be innovative in their culture, but they miss out on investing to create the environment where innovation flourishes. Work culture factors such as office politics, lack of acknowledgement of ideas and work, promotion of inter-employee competitions, excess criticism, hire and fire, ignoring conflicts etc, are all inversions of what a culture of innovation looks like and in fact they deters from it.
A culture of innovation is encouraged from the top-down, however, it truly flourishes from the bottom-up. Meaning, the management’s job is to set the right culture that is free of conflicts as much as possible, where proactive credit is given where due, where failure is not a source of discouragement and fear is not a motivating factor, etc, then innovation comes up from all levels of employees without much managerial intervention. New ideas seem to flow on their own, people work together in better harmony and employee motivation climbs.
There is another big reason to promote a culture of innovation, and that is, it creates a good place to work. The work culture itself evolves for the better. There was a time when creative employees would still drag themselves to work for a company because opportunities were perceived to be limited, and perhaps they were. Today, the number of companies have grown rapidly, especially in the last 20 years as the internet age dawned. Talented and creative employees largely no longer want to work for companies where the culture is too negative to do work through original inspirations and creative freedom.
Therefore, a culture of innovation is good for innovation and growth itself, but also has many positive ripple effects that make it even more desirable to incorporate.
How to Create, Cultivate and Grow a Culture of Innovation
Now, let’s drill down deeper into what helps create a culture of innovation:
- Encouragement to test and try
The simplest and the most ignored part of the culture of innovation is to encourage tests and have room to try new ways and approaches. This means discouraging criticism or mockery when some tests don’t work out as planned. Of course, the right methodologies need to be followed, such as doing basic research, understanding feasibility, applying pre-test filters etc. But even if the tests and tries don’t amount to much, keeping employees encouraged and motivated will pay off in more than one way.
It is always great to remember that trying and striving also requires a certain level of will and courage, and that is something to be cherished when seen in your employees and teams. Most leaders today will agree that there is a big space between recklessness and attempting something new.
As we know, some of the biggest breakthroughs in innovation whether it be processes, products or strategies, have been made after a lot of trying and testing, and none were without failures or initial flaws.
- Collaboration through good-will
Where there is good will, there is good innovation. Just take a step back, and you will notice that people around the world that are more open and free, produce exponentially more innovation. Where there is repression as a tactic of control, there is also repression of innovation. Innovation out of fear is always destructive, and innovation out of good will and harmony is always productive.
Now with that understanding, what should organizations and companies do? The same thing from the above lesson – reduce fear and control and promote good-will collaboration.
Look at some of the best companies to work for today that we know of and some that are yet big but don’t innovate or can’t. The correlation will be apparent to you. Typically companies when they are small, people know each other, such places begin as hubs for innovation. Then as they grow larger, some companies abandon or fail to recognize their core ethos of good will, and fall into control-based management styles that dissolve innovative attitudes and cultures.
- Leadership support and proactiveness
The role of company leadership in creating a culture of innovation is centered around creating the space for employees and teams to innovate, while providing the direction of innovation. However, it is important to note that leaders themselves can help in innovation through ideation and passing on the framework to teams to fill in the details.
For example, a VP of product may have the market insights on feature gaps that exist and direct the team to innovate to fill these gaps. The team leaders and members may add to this in the form of more related features or sub-features that can be incorporated in this exercise.
Above all, is the leadership’s responsibility to make room for innovation through support, morale boosts and appreciation of work already being done. Appreciation is a universal uplifter of morale in the form of acknowledgement and is not just a mere ego boost as some may see it. What we appreciate tends to grow and bloom, whereas criticism causes a shrinking in one’s ability to think and see opportunities clearly.
- Space to grow
Giving employees a space to grow creates the motivation to innovate, do better and fill that space through added contributions. If all your positions are already filled, a sense arises in employees that there is no room for growth and expansion, and the inspiration to innovate also takes a dip alongside it.
Of course, your key positions needed to function effectively need to be filled. However, you may have noticed that certain sub-functions or sub-roles where horizontal growth is possible, can be taken up if existing employees chose to expand their role through added contributions and showing interest in added responsibilities.
And this is not some secret strategy, you can clearly tell your teams that “here are the role/ function gaps intentionally kept open for now and whoever can show the innovation and growth capacity to fill this space, it’s theirs”.
- Hire well and retain
The worst work strategy that has come out of the corporate space in the last 20 years is hire and fire. Today, after much failure of this method, there is a growing recognition that this is bad at all levels of work morale and stiffens innovation or even day to day functions.
Instead, flip it to hire well and then retain. The key is to hire well, meaning, invest in understanding during the interview process if the employee can really do what they claim and is that what you need. Once hired, there is immense value in retaining employees.
First is the money and time part, you save a lot of it by not having to invest in hiring, onboarding and on-job learning. Remember, every job has a learning curve because every company is unique in its people and workflow structures. Second, the more you retain employees the more understanding they have to contribute to innovation. It takes time for anyone to absorb and learn “what is” and start to imagine “what may be possible”.
Furthermore, when employees are free of fear of being unduly relieved of their duties and are in a safe mental space, they can perform their daily functions better and their mind points them towards expansion – which is innovation.
- Employee and team autonomy
Autonomy in the workplace is key for innovation, because it gives room to think and try, take responsibility for outcomes and not get bogged down by constant interference and intermediate judgements. Autonomy does not mean a lack of collaboration where it is actually needed, it is instead step back on monitoring and control. In fact, when team members feel autonomous and the responsibility of it, they automatically become more collaborative to get the work done in the right way.
Workplace autonomy is important at all levels of the work structure. First is employee autonomy, where each team member or individual contributor or even freelancers have the room to do their work and take decisions without much interference from managers or other teammates. This gives them the space to think and see clearly and add their own unique approaches. Next is team autonomy, where an entire team gets the freedom and the responsibility of what work they are responsible for collectively. Even further is management-level autonomy where each C-level executive feels autonomous and responsible for their own roles and fulfilment.
Freedom with responsibility for outcomes is a cornerstone strategy for creating a culture of innovation.
- Customer-Centric focus
Innovation at work is not limited to only customers, they very well be internal or social. However, given the source of income for any business is indeed the customer, ultimately customer centricism should always remain as the North Star.
Customer centric focus in innovation is especially important for product, service, marketing and sales teams where their work directly impacts customer acquisition and experience. It means that when innovation is being done for anything that faces the customer, the question needs to be asked – “how exactly is this helping the customer?”. It is really that simple, empathy with the customer is the key to customer centric innovation.
Many company leaders sometimes go through the entire customer journey while pretending to be a customer. It’s a fun and effective strategy to see how your team responds, what the gaps are and where innovation is actually needed to elevate the experience.
