Although the digital age has allowed remote work to flourish, society is still finding its feet in terms of balancing productivity, communication and home life. Creativity and innovation are essential to any business, but when a team works remotely, communicating and producing creative ideas can be enormously challenging. However, this can be helped.
Employees will be more likely to produce quality creative ideas with the guidance of a company leader. If you’re that person, there are many ways you can facilitate innovation and inspire people to reach their full potential.
Do Check-Ins
As a leader, you might be concerned that your staff feels too stressed or overwhelmed by their work. You might also have trouble keeping up with all the questions in your inbox every morning. Check-ins are an excellent solution to both these issues.
Schedule regular check-ins with your workers — bonus points if they’re at the same time each time. If someone knows they’ll get to speak to you once every two weeks for 15 minutes, they are likely to save all their small questions for that meeting and only reach out at other times for more significant issues.
Not only will you be able to resolve small issues, but you also get to know them as people. This will ensure they feel comfortable talking to you about their problems and, therefore, don’t spend time worrying about them at work.
Use Digital Tools
In a traditional office setting, co-workers can easily pop over to one another’s desks to talk things out. When working remotely, this is not possible, making it essential to have something that makes communication simple. Using digital tools to facilitate better communication is a surefire way to keep your team up to date. It’s also a good way for people to communicate their ideas efficiently and collaborate on new ones.
However, when using digital tools, protect your corporate data. Cyber-security threats are all too real, with 23% of organizations saying they had more cybersecurity incidents since people went remote.
Allow Autonomy
While it might be tempting to tell your employees exactly what to do and how to do it, allowing autonomy will be more effective for productivity. When they’re free to do things in a way that makes sense to them, they will also feel more trusted and safe in their roles. Allowing people to solve problems creatively will lead to them being more creative in other areas.
Encourage Informal Conversations
Although work is important and staff will likely be conversing broadly about their jobs, encourage them to chat about informal things, too. Talking about someone’s weekend or hearing someone’s funny story might inspire creative thinking about a project. People often find inspiration in the conversations they have with others, so if team members are allowed to step away from a work-related discussion to have a casual chat, you might find problems are solved quicker.
Listen
Your employees know as much — if not more — about projects as you do. However, people often don’t listen to those around them when they’re trying to come up with solutions.
If you can listen to the problems your employees are facing, you might be able to offer an innovative solution. Likewise, if you listen to employees’ suggestions, you can find a gem of an idea.
Engage in Teambuilding
Just because your team is not all in the same building doesn’t mean you can’t host team-building exercises like any other enterprise. There are many virtual team-building exercises you can do to bring everyone closer.
Team building is a great way to encourage innovation because when people are more comfortable with one another, they may be more willing to share their ideas. Doing so will undoubtedly lead to innovation.
Reduce Meetings
It’s essential to stay connected with a remote team. However, hosting too many virtual meetings could hinder innovation. Not giving your employees enough time to allow their creative juices to flow limits how much time they can spend doing revenue-earning work.
Schedule meetings on the same day and time every month so everyone knows how much time they have to work on creative projects before preparing for any meetings. Try not to have any last-minute meetups. Scheduling meetings around 2:30 p.m. is the optimal time for productivity.
Celebrate Small Victories
People are happy when they are recognized for the hard work they have put in, so celebrate every win. Whether it’s something minuscule or a large-scale accomplishment, express your pride and gratitude in the person.
Doing so will make the team member feel safe and happy and want to keep impressing you and others in the business. This desire to do better will lead to the person being more innovative in their work.
Innovation Excitation
Innovation is one of the most exciting parts of being on a team. Hearing ideas from others and finding ways to meld many minds to create one brilliant product is incredibly rewarding. You can ensure you and your staff have this experience by leading them in a way that fosters trust and safety, ultimately leading to innovation.
