How to involve employees on a proper innovation environment
We’ve been long talking about the need of big corporations to get out of their comfort zone and bet on innovation. Dynamic markets and speed of technology are making it easier for smaller competitors to reach the same practices and competitive advantages of those who always thought could never be overcome. Wake up!
In this landscape of high competence, every business is in the constant search for the holy grail of competitive advantage: the newest technology, the best prices, the easiest access to providers… But this search often lose sight of what is truly important to have as your main competitive advantage: the team. The people by your side is actually the most valuable, rare and hardly imitable resource your company is going to have.
Per se, Human Resource Management practices don’t enable firms to create a sustainable competitive advantage, but a shift towards this goal is more than possible and needs to happen. Corporations need to find the balance of human capital resources and HRM practices with the proper enhancement of the employees’ skills, abilities and knowledge through motivation and new opportunities.
Besides being the core asset whose performance allows the company to be ahead of the market, the team also shapes the organizational configuration that englobes everyones’ contribution to the firm’s innovative capability. There’s no doubt that investing in the creation of social capital creates significant value to the company; and it’s been demonstrated that this is achieved by devoting efforts to the encouragement of informal social relations and interactions in between employees.
“Investing in the creation of social capital creates significant value to the company”.
Going out with your colleagues to have a couple of beers can trigger product innovations… We are telling you.
Social and relaxed moments increase the well-being and integrity of the team and this spontaneously translates within the firm into smoother cooperation, better collaboration and more efficiency from the side of the employees. In this line, the role of the corporation is still essential to provide horizontal structures that act as sacrifice reducers to the employees; the best you can achieve is to make your team feel their job is the passion.
Startups constantly repeat and try to demonstrate their cool and young spirit in that way, but is that enough?
It’s interesting to see how Kim and Lee (authors of The impact of organizational context and information technology on employee knowledge‐sharing capabilities) categorize the different fields affecting such knowledge sharing capabilities: organizational culture, organizational structure and information technology.
Organizational culture entails making people participants in business strategy and it is crucial! Because managers define team members’ role and preach with their own actions. The support from top management takes the shape of suggestions about what to share and how to do it properly. Understanding of individual visions and goals articulates a sense of involvement and contribution, and leaders have to let the other know what is expected from them to share.
Remember that respect and trust between the two figures in a relationship get blurred when celebrating occasional meetings in which the authority boundaries are not so strong.
By organizational structure, we refer to needs for the proper sharing flow within a company. Power and authority concentration limit flexibility when collaborating and involving people from different departments while opportunity enhances the employee’s motivation. This is why there should always be margin for free actuation. Spontaneous interventions are also reduced depending on how rigidly defined are the corporate procedures to be followed during interactions and information exchange, and on how formality is understood at the corporate.
The IT participation has different meanings. Why? Because implementing and investing in visible ways to promote the creation and maintenance of knowledge sharing, can be done via software and IT through visible processes! We all know that relatively recently created technological solutions are representing a good fit here to the degree that they focus on end-user at the bottom level: especially people management SaaS solutions mean a fast-remote possibility. Is up to you to let them avoid face to face uncomfortable situations with a convenient tool at their hands. Consider here that this kind of development has a constant thought on being user-friendly, which brings empathy to the organization.
I am going to finish pointing top priorities for mangers. How do I implicate myself? As a proper leader, you should be aware of the importance of involving employees in resource sharing, you can directly explain to them the essence of such practice and turn into a core activity in the company. This is also applicable to the fundamental role should assume social interactions, making employees participative and open to each other is better understood when turning it into a core corporate value.
Each action you take towards your team counts, sometimes it may not be really visible just communicate!
If you want to know more about this and other innovation management topics, reach us on marketing@byld.xyz
