Dustin Verdin is the Executive Director of Business Innovation at Zipline Logistics, where he leads all innovation and technology efforts.
The phrase “innovative culture” is often used in business to place a company at the cutting edge of new technology, processes or ideas. Many of the world’s most successful, well-known brands are also known as the leading innovators in their field.
Most organizations want to follow this lead and build a culture that breeds innovation, but many business leaders struggle with the fact that there is no single “right” path to creating an innovative culture. Leaders tend to overcomplicate the process, muddying the waters by bringing in speakers or scheduling extra training. While these are not necessary wrong There are more important factors to consider when working towards an innovative culture.
What is Innovation?
Innovation is an organization’s internal creativity that allows ideas to be shared and changes made to increase performance, gain profit, or improve efficiency—which looks different in every organization. Some large companies have brought back research and development (R&D) departments, and smaller companies may have small teams dedicated to implementing changes.
Building an Innovative Culture
Many leaders believe that building a culture of innovation rests entirely on their shoulders, which is true in some ways, but it doesn’t have to be as high-pressure as it sounds. To build the most effective culture of innovation, leaders must realize that they must not bring it in from the outside. the organization; innovation comes from within the organization. That is, it comes from the people who do the work and use the tools of the business every day.
When an atmosphere conducive to beneficial change is fostered, the onus is on leadership to foster ideas of individuality and make it obvious that they care about the thoughts of their employees. Every employee has ideas about how the business should work — processes with unnecessary steps, tools that could be better, or strategies that could be used as alternatives.
Rather than creating an entirely new thing, an organically innovative business culture draws from what already exists.
Organizational Changes Vs. Gradual Improvements
It’s easy to think of innovation as company-wide changes that fundamentally change the way employees do their daily work. With today’s artificial intelligence at the center of many discussions about the future, business leaders are scrambling to implement changes quickly to stay ahead of competitors.
Sometimes huge changes are necessary, but focusing too much on this area can lead to missed opportunities for small implementations that can have a big impact on the business. When considering potential changes, leaders should consider the ROI of time spent on implementation.
For example, say an employee comes to their leadership or technology team with an idea for a small user interface change to one of the tools they use every day. The employee says the change could remove unnecessary steps in a process and save them 15 minutes a day. The IT team estimates that it will take two employees a day to design, test and implement the relatively simple back-end change.
At first glance, two workers spending an entire day making such a small change may seem like the wrong investment of time. However, over a week, that employee could save over an hour of productivity time, and if an entire team or department uses the improved tool, that time savings adds up quickly.
For this employee, 15 minutes a day is 65 hours a year in time savings and for a team of 12 people, totaling over three months saving eight-hour work days. This one day of work for two employees to make the change seems extremely efficient when looking at the time investment in the long run.
On the other hand, if a business is considering designing an entirely new tool for employees to use in their day-to-day work, that’s a much bigger time commitment. A project of this scale involves brainstorming, planning and testing and can take months or even years to complete.
Additionally, in the process of implementing large initiatives, end-user input is essential throughout the process. Without this input, the change could contain small inefficiencies that offset the initially intended benefits. All the internal communication, planning and brainstorming between users and designers makes a large-scale change a significant investment of time and resources.
Sometimes a change like this is necessary to keep pace with competitors or to correct a fundamental flaw in processes. However, it is worth thinking critically about the significant time investment against the benefit to the company. Is it worth the time?
Don’t miss the changes to the desktop view
The reality of the situation in most innovative organizations is that leaders must simultaneously manage organization-wide change and incremental improvements. When working on a large project, it is essential to focus on small changes.
Leaders and managers must be clear that they are willing to listen Any idea from his employees Any level. No sentence is too long or too small to hear. These ideas may become efficiency innovations or be impossible to implement, but the crucial detail is that they are listen.
As employees become accustomed to sharing ideas and see leaders taking their thoughts seriously, engagement at the individual level will increase and innovation will begin to occur naturally. Sometimes, small ideas can lead to a major change in company processes, and managers may never hear those ideas if employees don’t feel comfortable sharing their struggles.
Don’t build a new culture. Innovate About Current Culture
The bottom line is this: Every company is staffed by employees who have ideas about how the business works. These ideas, from the minds of the people who make the gears turn every day, are a company’s best bet for innovative changes that will really help its business.
Business leaders need to make employees feel comfortable talking honestly about how things work to gain access to these ideas. The current status quo is not the only way operations can be performed successfully. there are probably many ways that leaders can improve the status quo. Always look for improvements and make it known that ideas are encouraged — whether big or small.
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