Powerful reasons to embrace creativity in your business
With New South Wales now beginning to open up, it’s a stressful time for many. Encouraging creativity and fostering innovation can be effective ways to move your business forward, quickly. It can also engage the hearts and minds of your employees.
You might be surprised how many other benefits there are too — for you, your employees, and customers and your bottom line.
By Michael Mekhitarian
The 'next' normal
Scrolling through LinkedIn the other day, I came across a really thought-provoking piece from well known speaker / author Simon Sinek.
He was suggesting that rather than considering this current moment in time as the ‘new normal’, we should simply consider it the ‘next normal’.
Meet disruption with creativity
Sinek argued that the world is constantly in flux, and that we’re placing too much emphasis on the pandemic and not enough on the opportunity in front of us. Right now, he orpposed, is a pivotal moment — a chance to ignite our creativity.
Simply put, rather than just finding new ways to do the same things we’ve always done, perhaps we should take the opportunity to turn everything on its head.
Of course, that’s not possible for many businesses right now. Some are struggling to find their feet.
However, it is an idea with merit.
Creativity helps people bond, and it reduces stress
“The times, they are a-changin’” as Bob Dylan once sang. And rather than try to keep up, we might be better to explore new paradigms altogether.
In business, this means facing high levels of disruption. And one of the best ways to do this is to embrace creativity, to encourage innovation and actively enable people at all levels of your business, to share their ideas.
We’ve known for a long time that there are numerous benefits to fostering creativity in the workplace, including:
- Increased staff engagement
- Increased staff interaction and collaboration
- Increased staff morale
- Increased passion
- Increased motivation, less fear of failure
- Increased problem solving
- Increased productivity
- Increased team bonding and collaboration
- Improved ability to attract and retain employees
Great ideas can come from anywhere
Each of these are expressed here as benefits to your people.
Each will also, as a natural on-flow effect, have their own positive impact on customer service and creating customer loyalty and delivering financial results to the bottom line.
All of these benefits are important, but the last point — increased bonding — is what many workplaces need right now, especially those businesses that have endured long lockdowns, coped with dispersed teams, with staff working from home, or staff ‘on pause’ and not working at all.
Creativity may just be one of the most effective ways we can help our people to reconnect right now.
There are a couple of other additional benefits that I think are worth discussing here too.
The benefits of creativity for wellbeing
If we empower people to think about things differently, to bring innovative ideas and solutions to their teams and roles, we can help them find an interesting distraction away from any other ‘negativity’ floating around as we all adjust to these changing circumstances. This is because creativity creates curiosity and drives the desire to learn.
What’s more, fostering creativity can assist employee wellbeing. A number of recent studies have proven that creative activities release dopamine, a natural chemical in the brain which is known as the ‘feel good’ chemical. It can help to reduce anxiety, depression, and stress, and some studies suggest that it can also help people to process trauma.
Regardless of the industry you’re in, there are ways to be creative and to find innovative solutions — to deliver better customer service, to streamline processes and deliver efficiencies.
And good ideas can come from anywhere. So now is the perfect time to foster creativity — to re-engage employees, and to reap the benefits of fresh perspectives that may help your business to keep moving forward, especially while the external environment is still uncertain.
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