Top 10 ways to make your workplace more creative

The best way to encourage creativity is by rewarding it. Provide financial or non-financial rewards, like recognition or other incentives.

Providing freedom for creative expression in the workplace is crucial. For instance, let employees decorate their personal work area as creatively as they wish. Develop channels for employees to voice their ideas by using a suggestion box or something similar. This will encourage employees to share freely their ideas and thoughts.

Make it clear to employees that creativity and innovation are valued and embraced by the company. This will heighten awareness and encourage intentionality to cultivate creative initiatives in the workplace and among the employees.

This can be a physical area or a designated time during the work week where employees can gather to brainstorm, think, and explore creative ideas and solutions.

Play time, outings and fun activities bring the mind into a relaxed phase that is conducive to idea generation. Research has shown that positive moods can spur creativity. It is important to cultivate a fun and positive working environment that supports the flow of creative juices.

Leaders have to demonstrate their openness and receptiveness towards creativity in the workplace. By their example, the culture of creativity will then be embraced and carried out throughout the organisation.

If at all possible, build a team with diverse backgrounds, talents, personalities, and cultures. The cross-pollination effect of diversity within the group may spur a wealth of new ideas.

Learning new things or acquiring new skills can inspire and increase our capacity to be more creative. Organising learning sessions on issues outside of the normal field or industry can be fruitful for the imagination.

A more systematic way of promoting creativity in the workplace is to set up innovation teams. Each innovation team can be tasked to come up with ideas, such as on how to improve a particular aspect of work processes.

Criticism or cynical attitudes kill creativity. Responses like – “This is impossible!” or “This has never been done before!” and other similar comments emanate from closed minds. Resistance can destroy ideas and stifle creative culture, and should be avoided