How to Encourage Creativity In Your Team While Working From Home
/Inspiring creativity within your team is more important now than ever before. Here’s our top 5 tips on how to do it while your team is working remotely.
Creativity is an important part of every business's success. If your team is overflowing with inspiration and ideas they are more likely to have increased employee engagement, collaboration and problem solving.
In fact, a study by the Workplace Research Foundation found that investing in employee engagement by just 10% can increase profits by more than $2,000 per employee. On top of this, employees who are highly engaged are more likely to have increased productivity by 40%! If we consider this, it’s clear that it’s in the best interest of leaders to ensure their team’s creativity is blossoming
While maintaining a creative culture may seem like a challenge when separated, we think we have the unique opportunity to boost it during these times! Here’s some ideas on how you can continue to inspire your team’s right-side brain thinking:
Share your Spotify playlists
Music can increase creativity and focus. Encourage your team once a day to share the Spotify playlist they’ve been working away to. Take this one step further and start a team collaborative playlist and get everyone to contribute their favourite songs for everyone to listen to during the day!Afternoon virtual walking meetings
There’s nothing like a change of environment to spark a bit of creativity. Turn your 15 minute afternoon virtual meetings into afternoon walking meetings! Studies from Stanford University have actually revealed that a person’s creative output increases by 60% when walking!Make an online anonymous suggestion box
Try http://freesuggestionbox.com/. This allows your team to open up and share their ideas in a space where they feel comfortable. Eventually you’ll get to the stage where the team shares their ideas widely, but you’ll need to work up to this.
Start a ‘Things That We Tried And Learned From’ Channel
If you’re using Slack, start a new channel called TTWTALF (‘Things That We Tried And Learned From’) or if not you can start an email thread with the same subject. This opens up the team to know that it’s okay to try new things and for them to fail. After all, it’s not a failure, it’s a learning experience! This way, your team will feel supported in suggesting new out-of-the-box ideas without the fear of failure.Encourage your employees to spice up their office space
Some companies go above and beyond to inspire creativity in the office with their space. Google is known for their creative work environments, with basketball courts, aquariums, and napping areas. We’re not saying to install a basketball court in every one of your team’s homes, but you can encourage them to spice up their office space with some indoor plants and artworks. You can even suggest the creation of a vision board to pop up in their office space. Then, once everyone is finished, get your team to hop on a video call to give the rest of the team a little tour of their space!
