Workplace innovation gives businesses a competitive advantage while solving the pain points of customers and clients. To instill workplace innovation, offices must adopt new techniques and strategies to harness the creative side of their employees. While many companies acknowledge the need for workplace instigation, they don’t exactly know how to do it.
If you’re a business owner or a team manager who’s looking out for practical, easy-to-implement workplace innovation practices, you’re at the right place. The use of correct innovative business practices can boost your employee productivity, creativity, and efficiency.
This, in turn, leads to the improvisation of existing products and services to better suit the current market needs. In today’s businesses, innovation is a key aspect as it helps businesses survive in the market, boosts business sales, improves brand identity, and streamlines ROI.
Towards the end of this article, you’d know the key benefits of including innovation-boosting practices among employees as well as easy ways to include it in your workspace. Moreover, you’ll get an idea of how workplace innovation is helping companies get more productive and attracting new hires to further add to the business value through real-life examples.
Let’s get started.
How Is Workplace Innovation Boosting ROI?
There’s no doubt workplace innovation is doing wonders in building a solid brand rapport. Let’s find out how exactly it works.
A. Customer satisfaction
With the ever-changing business trends, customer expectations are higher than they have ever been in the past. Customers look out for innovative products and services that increase their productivity and efficiency as well as lower prices. Businesses continue to innovate their products and services to cater to customer demands.
Think of a Amazon business strategy to bring innovation in every aspect of eCommerce with the mission to promote customer-centricity. Here are a few of the ways Amazon has revolutionized the online retail business:
- Kindle (eBooks)
- Prime (fast and free shipping)
- Prime Now (one-click ordering)
- Dash Button (one-click ordering)
- Alexa (Amazon’s virtual assistant)
- Prime Air (deliveries via flying robots)
- Cloud Computing (faster web services)
B. Competitive Advantage
When a company’s employees focus on bringing innovative concepts and potential solutions, it positively impacts the company’s reputation in the market. Customers perceive up-to-date companies as high-value as they’re investing money, time, effort, and workforce towards finding new and effective solutions. This gives them a competitive edge compared to businesses that aren’t aligning with the current innovation trends.
Among many examples of innovation, Apple’s continuous efforts to bring innovation to their electronic products to help relieve the pain points of customers have made them a pioneer in workplace innovation.
Similarly, companies that fail to innovate at the right time and occasion face major setbacks and are unable to survive in the market. A few examples are Nokia, BlackBerry, and Motorola. We conclude staying competitive in the market leads to more sales and ROI, ensuring business sustainability.
C. Enhanced Productivity
While business leaders may think workplace innovation is only relevant to the advanced changes in products and services to better suit the current market requirements. It’s not always true.
Workplace innovation also focuses on workplace productivity. It’s about spending less time on clerical tasks and investing more time in problem-solving, brainstorming, and creativity. Optimizing the workplace processes works great in getting things faster, cheaper, and more productive.
Bigger companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, etc, focus on staff-driven innovation. They give their employees the ability to think out of the box, come up with ideas, and be vocal about them.
To promote employees’ creativity, everyone works as a team throughout the workplace hierarchy without having the fear of speaking up about their ideas to the company leaders. This healthy workplace culture promotes:
- Workplace creativity
- Workplace motivation
- Workplace productivity
- Workplace collaboration
- Innovative business processes
- Higher employee engagement
- Company’s social development
One of our favorite examples is Southwest Airlines where all employees are treated equally and engaged in “blue-sky thinking” exercises. For they believe great ideas come out of ordinary humans irrespective of prior knowledge, experience, and expertise. And that sums up the power of creativity to boost innovative business trends.
There are many ways to drive workplace innovation, however, we’ll be discussing the most relevant and practical innovation aspects that are linked to attracting more hires in the next section.
11 Ways to Drive Workplace Innovation And Attract New Hires
In any business, the ability of employees to voice up their ideas, opinions, and beliefs is the most crucial aspect when it comes to workplace innovation. Follow these 11 ways to help businessmen identify the key points that bring workplace innovation.
1. Reward Your Employees
Like all human beings, employees tend to perform better when they feel heard, appreciated, and recognized for their work efforts. Company managers should keep an eye on the employee’s performance to improve the chances of sustainable improvement. Reassuring them when they bring good business results boosts their confidence and helps them vocalize their innovative opinions.
Employee recognition should not only come from the administrative staff. Colleagues and peers can also bring a considerable positive impact through appreciation and encouragement. The employees that receive recognition and rewards tend to produce more workplace innovation.
Here are some of the ways you can reward your employees:
- Bonuses
- Gift cards
- Stock options
- Salary increments
- Offer Remote work
- Workplace celebrations
- Tickets to Luxury Hotels
- Employee of the day title rewards
- Offering tickets for business events
- Reimbursement of commuting expenses
2. Conducting Continuous Employee Feedback
Another great way to innovate your workplace lies in giving regular feedback to the employees. In today’s time, employees are more conscious of self-growth and professional competency. They crave continuous feedback on their performance to improvise it to better cater to their position requirements.
It’s important to note that an employee’s engagement is directly linked to constructive feedback. According to a study, around 43% of the employees that are highly engaging receive feedback every week. The feedback gives them a chance to do things better and ultimately boost workplace innovation.
When it comes down to collecting employee feedback and team performance, employee satisfaction surveys are conducted on an annual, biannual, or quarterly basis. The surveys focus on the pain points that may be affecting an employee’s performance, engagement, and retention.
