Inspiring innovation amongst your employees can be extremely difficult. Most great ideas for enhancing corporate growth aren’t discovered at your research center or by brainstorming in the conference room. They come from the employees who regularly serve your customers and regularly experience setbacks. Identifying ways to encourage these employees to become more outspoken remains a challenging feat.
Below are 10 tips that will help your organization encourage and inspire employee innovation:
#1: Introduce An Innovative Management Space
You may not have the time to sit around and discuss ideas that lead to business innovation. An innovation management platform can help create a space for employees across the organization to exchange ideas and collaborate. Eureka moments can happen anywhere!
#2: Involve Everyone
It’s essential to involve all employees in the idea creation process. Every employee brings a unique perspective. Developing ideas together, not only helps build brand loyalty, but also increases employee engagement.
#3: Create Conversations
At any company, innovation typically grows from ideas planted by senior management. It is up to employee effort to help grow those ideas a reality. Idea discussions should be open conversations where everyone is involved, on the same page, and working together.
#4: Pull Employees In
Employees have an incredible potential to provide outstanding insights and ideas about organizational practices, customers, and broader business goals. Employees need to be motivated, involved, and participating in the idea process. They shouldn’t have to be forced to reveal their thoughts. Pulling employees into the innovation management process is easier with organizational-wide transparency.
#5: Run Idea Campaigns
Idea campaigns are a proven way to capture hundreds of ideas, improve productivity, cut costs, and drive improvements from the bottom up in a short time period. In addition, idea campaigns provide employees an opportunity to stand out with a different way of thinking.
#6: Promote
The more diverse your participant pool, the more diverse and creative ideas your company will receive. Try to promote your idea campaigns to as many eligible participants as possible. Remember, if people do not know about your ideas campaign, they will not participate. One way to nudge employees to take initiative and participate in idea campaigns, is by offering incentives.
#7: Build Employee Engagement
Collaborative efforts between management and employees can help form stronger relationships. Boost employee engagement by peer-to-peer awards for good work. Another alternative, is to create an ‘ideas leaderboard’ where employees can see or build onto other employee ideas. Through a encouraging, supportive, and engaging environment, your company can help transform these ideas into realities.
#8: Transparency
Transparency and honesty are the two major keys to creating a culture of innovation. It’s important that employees understand what their peers are working on and feel comfortable sharing knowledge, ideas, and constructive feedback. Using a social collaboration platform can be helpful in this effort by providing employees with a platform to share innovative ideas that might otherwise go unnoticed.
#9: Senior Management Support
Employees need to understand how their ideas can contribute to an organization’s success. This means that they have to believe in its overall purpose and be given access to organizational resources. It relies on senior management to equip employees with the necessary tools to contribute.
How PROBIOMED Leverages Employee Recogntion
Learn how PROBIOMED transformed its company culture by using employee recognition and rewards to acknowledge each other’s hard work.
#10: Rewards and Recognitions
Lastly, developing and maintaining an effective reward and recognition system is a key aspect of encouraging innovation. Employee reward and recognition systems are not just a positive thing to do with employees, but a way of encouraging future efforts. These systems show employees that you care and are celebrating their success.
You hired the people who work for you because of their talent and skills. Now, it is time to start putting all of that talent to use in new and innovative ways. Become a company that fosters open collaboration and communication, and provide employees a platform to create new ideas.
Inspire Innovation With MangoApps
A well designed, innovation management platform, like MangoApps, allows employees to submit, comment, and refine an idea. With MangoApps, your organization can empower employees by providing a platform for them to communicate and share ideas.
