How to promote Innovation in the Workplace

Most of the innovation these days is happening in startup companies. While the members of startup companies may lack in experience of working yet they come out with the most unique and innovative products.

I started my career in a startup at the age of 21, while I was still doing my Masters degree in the US.

What I learnt from my startup journey was that the two most important factors which determine the success of any organisation are: innovation and organizational growth.

The two are also interrelated. If you are part of the leadership group you have to look at innovation and that’s where the concept of employee empowerment comes in. So that they become decision makers themselves.

Innovation takes time. It takes time for employees to develop insights, generate ideas and elaborate and test business models. Many companies that list innovation as one of their core values expect that innovation will somehow just “happen” in employees’ increasingly limited moments when they aren’t busy addressing the immediate demands of their job or “putting out fires”.   Innovation requires dedicated time – significant blocks of time to “get into the zone,” to focus and concentrate.

Innovation is also a social process. Innovation is more likely to result from structured group discussions than from solitary independent work. Hence, it is very important to schedule lots of face- time for generating, elaborating, and reviewing ideas. Some tasks, like insight research and interviews can be done independently, but bringing the team together to synthesize and discuss the collected findings is also equally important.

So innovation is a mix of both concentrated efforts as well as social collaboration. What we need to ask ourselves is that are we providing the people who work in our organization the right environment in the workplace to develop this culture of innovation and improve employee engagement ?

Does our workspace in its present state allow our employees to do the above ?

The Activity-Based Workplace (ABW) Solution

It is increasingly common to find work environments with centrally located social hubs and designed with a food component and neighbourhoods of work points including phone booths and team areas nearby. As people move more throughout the space, they need to have access to task-specific solutions whether its collaborative , social and solo work places.

Our core philosophy is “Style+Quality”. So we have this concept of a live office where we actually test out these concepts of spaces and all new furniture designs in their own office first and let all the employees use it to understand and then improve the solution.

People want to feel a connection to the place they work. When workplace engagement goes up using the concepts of Activity Based Working, employee engagement goes up thus boosting their productivity which augurs well for the overall productivity of the company.

The other thing which I learnt is how important the development of the right culture, a sense of belonging to a cause to which the founders and early employees are committed to can determine the success of failure of the company.

Knowledge workers of today have a myriad of choices of places to work . Work is the place we spend most of our time so it should not feel imposed on us.

Organizations depend on individual members excitement and involvement. Therefore organizational leaders have to develop the qualities of a great motivator. Good motivators motivate based on reason and intellect. However great motivators motivate based on emotion. It’s important to find various ways to keep the emotional level of excitement, passion and involvement of your members high. This is again where workspace design comes in.

Our workplace has to mimic the above thought process . In order to break down the hierarchy. ABW helps in Organizational growth and development by providing people the freedom to work the way they work, break out of the hierarchy and enable people to become decision makers themselves.

So its a cultural shift and step by step process. As a first step what we can do is build the right environment for the employees to take that time off and start experiencing the workplace as the starting point of innovation and organizational growth.

To learn more about how our company can help with the ideas to create your new workplace and foster innovation and organizational growth, write to us at: