Nurturing Creativity in the Workplace

This article was originally published along with Dave’s other business-related content and advice at DaveRocker.org.

Building creative work teams is necessary to establish a creative and competitive business. However, employing and generating creative innovations takes more than just employing and asking employees to be more creative-minded. Business leaders must foster creativity within their workplaces.

Here are some ways business leaders can foster creativity in the workforce:

Encourage Experimentation

Supportive workplace environments can build a strong sense of community, but also foster stable and more experimental environments when developing ideas. More often than not, a team’s trial and error process can create a viable solution. To be innovative, leaders need to provide the opportunity for experimentation. Mentorship, transparency, and can help give your business team the resources and knowledge to be more creative.

Open Spaces & Collaborative Environments

Oftentimes, workers thrive creatively in open spaces and collaborative work spaces. Workers can solve problems quicker when they interact with coworkers often. Workers can develop their approach to ideas by brainstorming or seeking the advice of others in their immediate environment. Open spaces can foster a great sense of community, productivity, and creativity.

Positive Focus

Depressing work environments don’t breed happy, creative minds. Psychological studies show that positive moods help nurture creative thinking. Positive moods offer flexible thinking and wider perspectives. As workers become happy, they become more open-minded and more explorative of alternatives. Leaders can initiate positive work spaces by providing strong bonds between coworkers and a unifying sense of purpose. Building positive focus includes these features:

• Team building activities
• Learning/teaching resources
• Flexible schedules/Worker satisfaction
• Transparent leadership
• Mentorship opportunities
• Profit for purpose models

You can follow Dave Rocker on Twitter by clicking here.