6 Ways to Encourage Employee’s Innovation

You can help your company stay competitive and improve its production just by promoting employee innovation. Taking that into consideration, understanding how important it is to encourage employee innovation in the workplace should be your priority.

Provide your employees with an opportunity to show how innovative, capable, and creative they are. Having innovative workers results in a happier workplace, positive company culture, high job satisfaction, and superior employee retention. It’s an excellent way to motivate your team and improve your company’s productivity.

Why Is It Important to Encourage Innovation in the Workplace?

In many workplaces, competition is high, and businesses evolve rapidly, but one thing that can set a company apart is how innovative its employees are. If you let your company take the same approach to every situation, you may avoid vital business opportunities that can promote its growth.

Encouraging your employee’s innovation challenges them to think differently, which has some inherent benefits to the company. Your company can become more attractive to new hires and talents. It can also improve the workplace’s internal processes’ efficiency, letting the company produce better products while maximizing productivity.

However, the best aspect is that it significantly increases your employee’s engagement and collaboration with the company and among each other. It improves the workplace’s environment and leads to higher job satisfaction among the workers.

How to Encourage Innovation in the Workplace

It’s essential to look for ways to encourage employee innovation, knowing how vital it can be to the company. Here are six ways to promote your employee’s innovation and inspire them to be creative.

Support an Innovative Culture

If you want to foster an innovative culture with innovation staff in your workplace, you must encourage your employees to share their ideas, explore new initiatives, and be open. Most workers don’t propose creative ideas if they don’t feel safe enough to do so. It would be best to let your employees know that there isn’t a risk in sharing the things they come up with.

Try to be approachable and welcoming towards any idea your employee may have and follow up on them. You can allocate some resources and time to support these ideas. Hosting meetings, retreats, and placing suggestion boxes are some of the things you can implement that improve the innovation process.

Reward and Recognize New Ideas

Rewarding and recognizing people that bring creative ideas is a great way of non-financial incentives to improve motivation staff and show appreciation for their efforts. Even if it never reaches implementation, try to be thankful and encourage the employee to keep coming up with new ideas.

You can also carry out employee innovation programs that reward employees who provide valuable ideas, as it can be a great way to encourage them. Some ways to do this are making an award scheme, using an online platform for rewards and recognition, giving gift cards, and many other things.

However, avoid giving out big rewards as it may have the opposite effect. Your employees may flood the company with numerous mediocre ideas that you can’t implement with the hope of getting the reward. It can stifle creativity and make employees generally unhappy. Constant positive and effective employee feedback and some small prizes have a significantly better effect on the company.

Hold an Innovation Tournament

Implementing this activity to encourage innovation in the workplace instead of holding meetings and placing suggestion boxes can have exceptional results. You can host a tourney that lasts for a certain amount of time and center it on a specific theme.

Hosting the tournament around improving a particular product, resolving an imminent problem, or figuring out an appropriate untapped market are some examples. However, if you don’t give the tournament enough direction, it may not provide you with a helpful result.

Every proposal would be considered, and the best ones reach the next round and so on. There are many ways to reward whoever wins the last match. You can give them a team, allocate their budget, and support them to help their idea become a reality, or you can make it a company-wide goal.

Upgrade Your Resources

Making it easy for your employees to convert ideas into reality is an excellent way to encourage innovation in the workplace. Giving them appropriate resources or upgrading the ones they have can help. When your employees don’t have the proper resources, it can be hard to implement even the best ideas.

There are many ways to go about it. You can provide your team with the best tools and software to save time and effort for innovative thinking or improve their physical working environment. Providing your employees with an ergonomic office desk and office chair lets them work comfortably and motivates them to keep collaborating with the company.

Encourage Research

Letting your employees do their own research is a great way to encourage their innovation. When their passion and interest take the reins, they may become motivated and look into new technologies, allowing them to develop new creative ideas for the company.

Utilize Vacation Time                              

Encouraging your employees to use their vacation days even if there is some work looming over their heads is a good thing to do. Taking time off work can let them recover a great amount of energy, helping your workers be more productive once they come back. If your employees use that time to perform some inspiring activities, they may come back to the office fully refreshed and with new ideas.

Encouraging Remote Working Team’s Innovation

Although working from home provides a comfortable work environment and increases productivity, working in isolation can be difficult. The lack of communication may reduce morale even if your team is still achieving their goals together. Employee innovation plummets, and some members may feel less pressure to finish their work.

However, with collaboration tools, project management websites, and social media, keeping your team in touch with each other is notably easier. Implementing some virtual team bonding activities while applying some of the mentioned ways to encourage innovation in the workplace can improve the team’s motivation and productivity. It's still slightly harder, but you can quickly overcome the obstacle of distance with some effort.