During the pandemic, many companies had to quickly adjust their products and services to adapt to new challenges. Some did this to address emerging customer needs and expectations.
Others took things a bit further and even innovated solutions to address the pandemic at a bigger level. For example, many textiles firms began producing masks. Unfortunately, other companies failed to embrace that innovative approach. Many were driven out of business or continue to flounder today.
Today, many of the same pressures and challenges remain. Businesses that are going to succeed in the future must focus on creating cultures of innovation.
This approach will drive success in every area, including sales, revenue generation, and recruiting. More importantly, your ability to build an innovative team directly impacts your organization’s ability to weather the next challenge.
Build a Team that Innovates by Focusing on Diversity
Diversity efforts aren’t just about treating people fairly or addressing injustices. Organizations that focus on creating diverse cultures also create innovative cultures. Diversity leads to a wide range of perspectives, experiences, and ideas. All of these things help to foster creativity.
People who work in diverse environments are more likely to feel safe and welcome. That’s important when innovation depends on people feeling comfortable enough to share their ideas and give honest feedback to others’ ideas.
When you consider diversity in your recruiting and hiring practices, remember that most successful organizations focus on 2D (two-dimensional) diversity. This focus means that they value both inherent and acquired diversity.
What Is Inherent Diversity?
Inherent diversity traits are those that candidates and employees are born with. These traits include gender, race, and sexual orientation. When organizations have teams that reflect a wide range of inherent diversity, they bring perspectives and ideas that come from first-hand, lived experiences.
What Is Acquired Diversity?
Acquired diversity traits are those that come with life or work experience. For example, having lived and worked in a country with a decidedly different culture is acquired diversity. So is having worked with people with disabilities.
While these aren’t the same as a first-hand, lived experience, someone with acquired diversity may bring a deeper understanding of different issues and perspectives.
Encourage Collaboration and Sharing
When a new problem or challenge arises, it can be difficult to identify the best solution. One of the best ways to foster problem-solving is to make it as easy as possible for anyone in the organization to learn and acquire information.
This encouragement can be done in two ways. The first is to encourage team members to share information freely, not just within their teams or business areas. Instead, create an environment where information silos are dismantled.
The second is to centralize company knowledge. You can do this by creating a knowledge base of processes, procedures, frequently asked questions, training videos, manuals, guides, and insights.
This collection will allow anyone facing a challenge to access the information they need and gain a holistic understanding of the organization and its customers. This approach doesn’t just help team members solve problems; it can also help them identify opportunities.
Invest in Employee Development
Innovative teams create innovative products and services. The most innovative teams can be identified by their breadth and depth of experience. While hiring people with that in mind is great, you should also invest in employee development within your existing staff.
When your team members are skilled, technically adept, and have mastered their roles, they are better able to design and improve products and services. Some of the steps you can take to provide employee development opportunities include:
- Offer to cross-train workers
- Create a mentorship program
- Provide tuition reimbursement
- Work with local colleges or universities to create career development programs
- Create in-house training programs
- Give workers opportunities to pursue professional certifications
In many cases, workers may need guidance and advice to make the most of the employee development opportunities you provide to them. Part of employee development is understanding the goals that each worker has, and helping them create a roadmap to gain the experience and knowledge they need.
Allow Experiments and Failures
It’s going to be virtually impossible to drive product innovation in a work culture that is afraid of expressing and pursuing big ideas. To do that, you have to be willing to accept failure, even embrace it.
Remember that successful startups are launched from innovative, risky, and disruptive ideas. You’ll never continue the same innovation that brought your company into existence if your teams feel as though they will be penalized in some way for trying out ideas that don’t always work.
Of course, organizations cannot simply take on any risk and the loss that comes with major failures. You have to balance the willingness to experiment and allow people to fail with your need to invest in solutions that work, meet customer needs, and avoid the financial consequences of product failures.
You can do this by encouraging rigorous testing and research, then providing the resources your team members need to experiment. For example, if you build software products, you can invest in a dedicated server for experimenting and testing. Don’t forget that workers also need time to explore and test their ideas.
Consider Google’s 20% time policy. This policy allows workers to spend 20% of their on-the-clock time working on ideas that they believe will benefit the company. While you may not want to go that far, the company has certainly had inarguably good results from allowing workers to dedicate time to pursue ideas and projects.
