Workforce engagement is key to creativity, and creativity = profit

One definition of creativity is the capacity to develop ideas, solve problems and exploit opportunities. Isn’t that just what is needed in organisations to create success out of the recent downturn? Certainly chief executives in a Boston Consulting Group survey thought so, because creativity was a their number one strategic objective for seven out of the last eight years ( in 2008/9 not surprisingly it was survival).

Creative businesses and their people are more productive in every way. Whether it is their efficiency,  their creative approach to cost cutting, the development of new product ideas or in a myriad of other ways, creativity equals profit, so it’s hardly surprising that the survey results came out as they did.

So what has all this got to do with workforce engagement? More on that later, but first why do we employ people at all, now that so much of the repetitive work can be automated?

The answer is of course to deal with the non repetitive tasks. Developing new products, new and better ways of doing things, and even producing the equipment that automates the repetitive tasks. In other words for their creativity.

Human beings are inherently creative, a fact that is perhaps best demonstrated by looking at small children. Just give a small child a cardboard box and it becomes anything from a tank to a house, in fact anything their imagination can conceive. Unfortunately as we grow up we become more constrained. Experience teaches us to restrict our imagination, or at least keep its products to ourselves, and with work in many organisations still being organised in the restrictive and controlling ways more suitable for the days when  most work was manual and repetitive,  any creativity we might exhibit is crushed at birth.

So how do we change this situation. In my view the only way to release this inherent creativity to the benefit of the organisation is to change the workplace environment, to make it a place where the workforce are allowed to use the creativity they are born with in positive ways. If you don’t you will continue to get one of two responses, at best apathy, and at worst active disruption and rejection of the organisation’s objectives. Just one example of how destructive and expensive this latter response can be  comes from an organisation I worked for some years ago. Here a group of the warehouse staff demonstrated their creative talent by developing a very elaborate, ingenious , and unfortunately very successful,  scheme to steal products on quite a large scale. How much better if we had been able to harness that ingenuity for the benefit of the organisation.

So my thesis is that creativity does not have to be created, it is there already but suppressed. It has first to  be released, and then nurtured, and yes, you can train people to be more creative, but unless you create an environment which supports and encourages creativity, the money spent on the training is completely wasted.

This is where workforce engagement comes into play, because properly done, it develops a work environment where everyone in the workforce can contribute, and is most importantly is valued for their contribution, irrespective of their job title. In these circumstances you will be amazed by the flow of ideas that is generated across the organisation, some will be new but many will have been around for a long while, but not discussed because ” it’s not my job to think”. Well in this new environment it is everybody’s job to think, and amazingly they can, and they do, and what’s more they feed off one another’s ideas making them bigger and better.

This is not a magic wand, providing a quick fix, although properly implemented using a consistent process it’s amazing how quickly things begin to change. What it is,  is a long-term self-sustaining solution to the lack of creativity seen in many organisations. After all taking this approach you are now utilising the ideas of everyone, rather than  the few who were previously charged with the responsibility to be creative, and if each one only contributes a single good idea you will have difficulty keeping up with implementing them all.

So before trying to train creativity into your organisation, start by creating the environment to release the hidden creativity in a resource you already pay for, your staff. Of course  the benefits of workforce engagement are not restricted just to improving creativity, but I’ve discussed these in previous posts, so if you are interested have a look at them, and of course if you are interested in how to create the engagement in your workforce I would be happy to discuss this with you.