Employee motivation: Is the solution to treat them like customers?
September 24, 2010Improve customer retention by learning more about your worst customers
September 27, 2010
Innovation, new ideas, new ways of doing things, better ways to engage with customers, better ways of working as a team, finding new markets, new partners, insights…..etc.
All of these things can happen by themselves and often do. Like the time that you find yourself in the shower and are struck by that great idea ……that eureka moment.
However, most of the time those ideas happen more by accident and randomly than by deliberate action.
Real, continuous innovation doesn’t happen by accident so needs to be a deliberate and integral part of your growth strategy.
The two main challenges to embedding real and continuous innovation into a business tends to be twofold:
- Time
- Money/Resources
The first challenge is getting caught up in the day to day operations of business and not putting aside time to think individually or as a team. A great and well-known example of a company putting this into action is Google and their 20 percent time. This is where Google engineers are able to spend one day a week working on projects that aren’t necessarily in their job descriptions. They use the time to do things like develop something new or fix something that is broken.
Secondly, many companies can try to solve or source innovation problems by throwing resources or money at the issue. However, have you ever heard the saying ‘Necessity is the mother of Invention‘? Often, the best solutions to problems or new ways of doing things have come from situations where there have been no or very limited resources available. Can you simulate these conditions in your innovation?
What are you doing to make your innovation real and continuous?
7 Comments
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You are spot-on Adrian!
Add another dynamic to the challenge of initiating and sustaining innovation — in many companies there is some history of process improvement, particularly in the form of Business Process Reengineering, that has eliminated any slack time from the activities of many employees. With no time to think, but only time to act, there is little opportunity to participate in support of innovation. And one wonders why engagement scores might be low!
Daily time to think, places to think and resources to stimulate collaborative thinking (public white boards, etc) are the stuff of companies that want they employees to create the future together.
By the way, I recently wrote a post on similar topic “The high price of not giving yourself time to think” which you can find at my own blog, http://www.BestCustomerConnection.com. I like your efforts to direct this toward innovation in the workplace.
Keep writing on this topic, Adrian!
Hi Marc,
Thanks for dropping by and your comment. I think that you are absolutely right. Companies need to make sure that they develop an innovation mindset and that is supported by their environment and the tools that their employees have if they want it to be sustainable.
Thanks for the heads up on your post. I’ll head over there now to check them out.
Best wishes,
Adrian
Helpful blog, bookmarked the website with hopes to read more!
Thank you for that and for dropping by.
Adrian
Thank you so much for writing all of the awesome content! I am looking forward to reading more blogs.