Productivity and creativity are often seen as opposing forces. Creativity is framed as organic, unpredictable, and hard to quantify. Productivity, on the other hand, is perceived as structured, planned, and tied to performance metrics.
However, by facilitating and embracing creativity, businesses can actually increase meaningful productivity across their teams. The reason for this increase is that purpose is a deep and effective motivator for people, regardless of their background. It’s a universal driving force.
Essentially, creativity is the spark that lights company missions, and it's these missions that inspire employees. People aren’t deeply motivated by deadlines and quotas; those are surface-level motivators. Research from Mckinsey shows that 82% of employees say that their organization’s purpose is crucial, and 70% say their work defines their sense of purpose.
Let’s dive into some of the ways leaders can encourage creativity in the workplace to spark motivation and drive productivity.
3 key elements to fostering creativity in the workplace
Embracing creative thinking in business unlocks a wealth of possibilities, driving teams to generate groundbreaking ideas and align their efforts with purpose, ultimately leading to heightened productivity levels. While many organizations might accept this equation, they may struggle to implement it. How do you foster creativity in the workplace? Here are three ways leaders can bring additional creativity to their workflows:
1. Vision
It’s critical that business leaders facilitate and encourage creative, innovative thinking, but ideation without vision can be frustrating. Leaders are responsible for communicating their vision and helping team members understand how the work they do helps accomplish a common objective.
In essence, creative thinking needs an anchoring vision to fuel and guide productivity. People aren’t motivated by project management software, endless meetings, and directionless tasks. Team members are driven by common goals, collaboration, and visualization.
Plus, without a creative vision and purpose, checklists, action plans, and roadmaps typically associated with productivity are meaningless.
2. Experimentation
While some leaders might view experimentation as the antithesis to productivity, that’s not always the case. In fact, the nature of creativity embraces the potential for failure that accompanies experimentation.
Creative exploration is crucial for team members to test out new ideas, learn from their experiments, and feel supported in an environment that encourages innovation. When team leaders foster a space for teams to identify those cutting-edge solutions and new ideas that’ll move the business forward, productivity can drastically increase.
Visual collaboration platforms can help create this ideal environment. When compared to static documentation, visuals (such as diagrams, flowcharts, mindmaps, etc.) encourage a space for experimentation and learning since it’s a much more dynamic format. Collaborative AI is another tool you can use in a visual collaboration platform to help spark creativity and foster diverse ideas.
3. Structure
That’s not to say that there aren’t any risks involved with experimentation, but there are ways to structure creativity to mitigate potential risks and maintain momentum toward overall objectives. For example, leaders can facilitate specific events geared toward unleashing creativity, such as hackathons or mind mapping sessions. These types of events inspire creative thinking but provide helpful time boundaries.
When brainstorming sessions leave teams feeling overwhelmed with ideas, it can be a good sign that it’s time to implement some creative structure. Without the ability to synthesize ideas and turn them into action plans, even the most creative ideas can lie dormant and clutter up workflows. One way to add additional structure to creativity and experimentation is to use a prioritization matrix. With this kind of framework, teams can determine which ideas need to be turned into action plans first.
