When your business is reliant on its creative output, it is important to maximise the team’s capacity for individual thought and innovation.

Creative thinking is not only useful in its ability to allow for an element of freedom within the workplace, but it also facilitates in creative problem solving and the planning of the business’ next moves to drive the company forward. Here’s how your organisation can foster creativity:

Give your team freedom

An element of freedom within the workplace affords employees a more creative mindset. If there is a strict criteria on how work should be done, creativity may be stifled. Moreover, if an individual is placed under excessive stress and scared to think outside the box, their work will be void of all imagination. In turn, this will result in your organisation’s failure to go above and beyond your competitors.

Support each others’ ideas

When someone within the organisation does come up with a good idea, it is important to acknowledge and consider their suggestion. This demonstrates that the process of an individual’s creative
thinking is valued by the company.

Team collaboration

It is notable that 75% of workers rate teamwork and collaboration as ‘very important’ to what they do. It is beneficial to encourage both individual and group-based innovation. The discussion of ideas allows a team to borrow and combine elements of everyone’s thinking which may lead to strong, considered solutions to the problems at hand.

Office design
Numerous studies state that the layout of an office – the colours, the furniture, the space it occupies – can have a significant impact on the brain’s ability to think creatively. Whilst attacking the office’s walls with the brightest paint you can find, might give you a headache; an element of colour and art on the walls can help spark productivity within the mind.

Sound

Additionally, the sound of an office can impact the work that is done inside it. Whilst silence is useful when performing highly focused tasks, creativity often flourishes with a level of ambient noise. Try allowing music in the workplace at certain times.