Nowadays, many experts and consultants are pushing the benefits of allowing employees to innovate and be creative in their workplaces. Allowing more creativity and employee initiative is often a win-win for the company and its workers. However, managers want to know how to get there. What are the steps to actually get employees off of a more hierarchical, traditional process, and into a place where they feel comfortable coming up with ideas, and contributing them?

Here are some tried and true steps of a strategy to promote employee creativity, and take off the kid gloves, to allow individual workers to contribute their own ideas to the business.

Throw Out the Rule Book

A whole lot of workplaces are entirely too structured. Employers rely on the structure to promote stable, predictable results. But in these days, with so many businesses essentially looking and feeling like so many others, it’s time to roll the dice and take a new approach. That means having employees figure out some things for themselves. That means doing away with the thorough checklist and everyday micromanaging that ties employees’ hands. Yes, there is the chance that some things won’t get done with exact and perfect consistency — but in most cases, the business benefits more from the initiative that this approach allows.

Give Employees “Initiative Tools”

A lot of people won’t really come up with ideas on their own, without some guidance. Give employees creativity documents, surveys or other resources that will allow them to get their ideas down on paper. Encourage them to document existing workplace processes and then comment on them. You’ll see people come up with ideas that they would’ve otherwise kept to themselves.

Fund Professional Education

Companies that don’t get a vibrant response in terms of employee innovation may not be investing in the right amount of continuing education for workers. No matter what industry your company is a part of, front-line workers can be more empowered to deliver their own creative ideas when they are allowed more access to education in their fields.

Check-In

Another reason that employees may not be contributing new ideas to the workplace is that no one is actively checking up, and listening on how they’re doing day-to-day.

Just as with everything else, including scheduling, workplace conflicts, quota productivity and more, managers have to get out there and listen. They have to give face time to employees and ask them directly – how’s it going? What are your ideas? What do you have to give us?

Reward Growth

Another aspect of this strategy is incentives. Employees need incentives to do things that are ‘extracurricular’ or outside the scope of their initial job role. It’s unfair to expect people to produce more without extra incentives, just like it’s unfair to give them more work and responsibility without better pay. Create rewards for employee innovation, and watch the results pour in.

For more, keep reading the Full Steam Staffing blog as we reflect on how we have helped clients in the Ontario, California area, and what we have learned as a top local staffing firm.