Business Case for Activating Creativity at Work in South Africa
As a company, BetterWork has a singular mission: activate creativity in everyone at work. We believe this is important chiefly because creativity is a solely human trait that allows us to better approach complex problems. To be creative is to be human. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of design, which can be defined as the arrangement of elements to achieve a particular outcome.
The link between creativity and design then becomes important because there is a growing body of knowledge and research that proves that there is tangible business value attached to good design and, further, that organisations that practice good design tend to be more successful than those that don’t.
McKinsey & Company recently completed a comprehensive four-year study on the business value of design. From it emerged several key areas that were shown to improve a company’s value and productivity, all related to design, and in it was found a strong correlation between the highest scorers and superior business performance.
Encouraged by this research, we sought to explore the value currently placed on creativity in South Africa and how manager/leaders in various industries view creativity and its impact on the people they lead.
Does it really matter? If so, how much?
We also sought to discover how the creative capabilities of people were enhanced and what the main challenges were to improving the creative capabilities of people in the workplace.
We interviewed leaders in industries ranging from banking, government, and hospitality then collated the emergent themes.
A great starting point for rooting this topic in the South African context would be the recent The GoodWork Society event on Creativity at Work.
The GoodWork Society is a non-profit organisation which aims to start dialogues and initiatives aimed at improving the quality of work in South Africa. The event brought together an audience of 80+ attendees and panelists from diverse backgrounds. We aimed to bring all these professionals into one room to unpack and discuss creativity in the workplace, particularly in the South African context.
Several interesting themes emerged relating to the description of creativity and one thing that was agreed by all is that, first of all, creativity is not a type of person — e.g. ‘a creative’.
Rather, it is a capability that is inherent in all human beings, at all times.
What is Creativity at Work?
First, we aimed to establish how leaders define creativity in the workplace.
A marketing manager for one of South Africa’s largest resort chains described creativity, in the context of work, as a two-fold challenge. From the employees’ perspective, he defined creativity as generating solutions to positively change the way things are done, starting with the smallest things.
He placed an emphasis on the need to start small, not to take a ‘big bang’ approach but rather allow people to solve the smaller, immediate problems related to their work, gain confidence and then begin to incrementally impact the people around them from their immediate stakeholders and their department to the entire company.
This also becomes important as younger employees often get discouraged by push-back from senior leaders when trying to apply themselves creatively, so a way to overcome this could be to encourage everyone to start small, gain proof points and gradually address the larger challenges.
On the employer’s side, it’s related to tools and motivation. This means leaders empowering employees with the right tools to be creative in the workplace and finding ways to motivate their teams to be creative.
Creativity in the context of work is strongly linked to advanced creative problem-solving skills, which directly impact an organisation’s ability to create work that resonates with South Africa’s diverse audience.
Creative problem-solving skills are also critical for the advancement of individual team members, giving them the ability to create new value and innovate within their roles, which is critical for leaders.
One of our respondents, who recently became the country manager for a fast-growing Pan-African startup, described it as a proactive approach to finding the best way to get things done with the least resources. He stressed the importance of taking initiative in presenting new ideas and exploring new tools to gain efficiencies as a big part of what creativity is at work.
What’s the upside of activating Creativity at Work?
Is there a tangible business benefit to creativity in the workplace in South Africa, or is has creativity in the work context become another vague buzzword?
There is an upside to investing in creativity at work. Unanimously interviewees agreed that there is a tangible business value to enhancing creativity in the workplace.
The benefits of investing in creativity a work:
1) The quality of the solutions produced by teams
2) Work/output that resonates with the end user/customer
3) Quality of life and fulfillment of people in their work
4) Decreased waste of resources
5) The identification and exploitation of new opportunities
Enablers of Creativity at Work
We sought to understand what enables creativity at work? Three levers of change were identified: an enabling environment, empowerment (education, tools) and most importantly, the backing by leaders to learn in the work — even if that meant making mistakes.
‘Having the space to absorb risk, the most successful organisations are the ones that encourage you to push boundaries but cushion you when you fail. Creativity isn’t a ‘once-off’ endeavour. You need to be given space to make those mistakes and not have it suppressed because trying something might negatively affect the bottom line.’
A leader in the public sector expressed that this was one of the most difficult challenges in terms of enabling creativity. The consequences of failure in the public sector can be severe as there is media scrutiny that comes with the use of public funds.
There were also several external factors cited, such as people not seeing themselves as ‘creatively competent’ in the first place. This might be hindered by societal conditioning that goes beyond the workplace itself.
When asked about the fact that the majority of workers in South Africa don’t occupy roles which encourage creativity, a marketing manager of a resort said this is true as the reality is that we’ll always need reliable 9–5ers. He felt that it’ll always be a small minority of workers who seek to explore ways to improve their current job and apply themselves creatively and it’s the role of leaders to make growth opportunities available and actively seek these people out.
Further, it’s important to note that creative output is a team sport. He cited an example of a change initiative within his organisation which saw cross-functional teams, including the receptionist and cleaners, all come together to improve the customer experience.
This resulted in an increased turnover of R10m (~$70,000) for the resort, made possible by the insights provided by a cross-functional team of people, some of whom might not regard themselves as ‘creative’ but whose experiences were crucial to the growth of the organisation and deeply impacted the customer.
Another respondent, a social innovation manager in the energy drink industry, addressed diversity in creative problem solving ‘… there’s a need to bring more diverse people in when solving problems and to take a bottom-up approach and not a top-down approach. The person closest to the problem is often the best person to solve it, but it rarely happens this way.’
A manager in a large African Consulting firm stressed the importance of autonomy in enabling creativity. He believes that giving his team broad guidelines and avoiding micromanagement is a key enabler for creativity.
He gave an example of how he has recently allowed his team to decide where they want to work from on Monday and Fridays, he designed this experiment because he believes that people often know best when and where they’re most productive and inspired.
Barriers to Activating Creativity at Work
Motivation, buy-in from stakeholders and finding the right mix between team members, culture and leadership style were identified as potential barriers to activating creativity at work.
Motivation is a Generational Game
Generational gaps were identified as part of an issue of “motivation”. South African workplaces see teams made up of several different generations of people, exposed to different value systems who are motivated by different things. Interviewees grappled with how they might appeal to differing value systems in the creative process. Applying yourself creatively at work often requires an intense, extra effort over and above the completion of set tasks. It requires people to look at their work and think about its impact on those affected by it, ask ‘why?’ and seek to make improvements.
The dynamic cultural makeup of South Africa is a challenge for leaders, especially in light of untransformed executive teams/decision makers who operate from a very different set of values. Young, diverse leaders are not regularly breaking into these circles of influence.
This tension can lead to apathy and demotivation as attempts to try innovative solutions are often shot down by senior leaders who might not see the value in them or might view them as too risky. This was expressed by leaders in both the private and public sectors.
Funding Creative Experimentation at Work
A manager in the banking industry highlighted the difficulty in getting buy-in from senior leaders to experiment or spend company funds on enhancing the creative capacity of teams. Creativity, in her industry, is often viewed as ‘fluffy’ and not as important to the bottom line as achieving set KPIs and completing routine tasks guaranteed to generate turnover. This was also part of the problem in the public sector, in which creativity and innovation are empty words that must always give way to traditional thinking and predictable set policies, this is mainly because the environment is rule-based.
Funding was also cited as a general challenge, particularly when it comes to justifying the cost of up-skilling employees to senior leaders. The majority of leaders mentioned that there is a benefit to engaging an external service provider who can come in, guide teams and leave them better off, but finding the right people and tools to do this is difficult.
Red-Tape & Politics Blocking Experimentation
An interviewee, from the Energy Drinks industry, mentioned the politics of the workplace as one of the hindrances to enhancing creative capabilities at work. Push-back from senior leaders who seek to protect the status-quo or design strict KPIs for teams that stifle their creativity or simply do not value time spent enhancing creativity by taking risks in the work.
In the public sector, the process of innovation can be antithetical to the way departments function. Innovation requires experimentation and this comes with failure. In the public sector, this would simply be accounted for as waste, which would negatively impact the public view of the department or ministry.
Federation
Achieving true cross-functionality and interaction across teams was also mentioned as a hurdle, where the difficulty lies in the compartmentalisation of creative work as well as the lack of richer interactions between different types of workers in organisations.
The Challenge Ahead
Ultimately, leaders and managers in South Africa are aware of and do place great value in creativity, see its business value and are looking for practical ways to enhance creativity and foster the right environment for it. South Africa’s deep inequalities, which see people exist in such disparate spaces and realities, holding different values makes realising this ambition to activate creativity at work difficult, but not impossible.
This is made even more complex when we consider the generational gap prevalent in most South Africans workplaces which makes the differences in values and outlook even more profound.
Alongside generational issues lays a willingness to fund meaningful work. Investing in an enabling environment, or investing in creativity with minimal disruption to everyday work and delivery remains a huge challenge for business leaders in South Africa.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. There are good stories to tell where leaders who have encouraged creativity in the flow of work in South Africa have achieved remarkable success and have proved, that there is an immediate and tangible return on investment for activating creativity in everyone at work.
Watch how BetterWork activated Creativity at Work at ATKV and helped them to unlock R10M in revenue.
