10 Steps
to a more creative office

Most important: deep down in your corporate heart of hearts, you must truly want to become a creative company. Ask yourself: do you want your shop floor staff pestering you with their notions of how to improve the firm or your secretary demonstrating that she has cleverer ideas than you? Think about it.

Realise that you already have a creative company. You have staff with creative potential and lots of ideas. Indeed, they are probably sharing great ideas with each other at lunch, over coffee and in the toilet. But, unless you actively promote creativity, those ideas are promptly forgotten when staff return to their desks.

Establish trust. No matter how creative your people are, they will not share ideas with management if they do not trust management. There are two reasons for this:

• Sharing a really innovative idea is risky - it may be laughed at by people who don't appreciate its value or scorned by people who don't like change. If your people don't trust you completely, they will not risk sharing the best ideas with you.
• Good ideas often have tremendous value. If your people don't trust you or the organisation, they won't want you to benefit from their idea. Indeed, there's a good chance they'll start their own company with the idea.

Create a means of communicating ideas across the organisation. Everyone should be able to contribute ideas to management and management should take all ideas seriously - no matter who delivered them. This can be done via enterprise idea management systems like Jenni, developing your own ad hoc idea collection system or creating a graffiti wall. A graffiti wall is a wall in a central place where anyone in the company can scribble down their idea.

Create a means for people to collaborate on ideas. A good idea can often be the tip of an iceberg to a great idea. By getting people to work together to develop ideas, you can turn good ideas into great ideas. (A good enterprise idea management system will allow you to do this - as will other tools.)

Ensure that people from all departments can contribute ideas and development of ideas for all departments. If you assume that only marketing people can have ideas relevant to marketing, you are sure to get the usual marketing ideas. You'd be surprised about the ideas your people in accounting, human resources and even the staff canteen will have about marketing.

Reward people who give good ideas to the organisation. Rewards don't have to be money. They can be additional holiday time, gifts, a certificate from the company recognising the idea or - at the very least - acknowledgement from the CEO herself. Of course rewards can also be money or even royalties from the idea (this last option helps ensure people give good ideas to the company rather than set up their own companies).

Do not punish people for bad ideas. Even laughing at an idea can seriously demotivate someone who might have a winning idea tomorrow. Creative people have ideas all the time. Sometimes those ideas stink. Sometimes they are brilliant. But demotivate creative people and you'll soon lose their ideas.

Don't rely overly much on research and analysis. These things have their place - indeed are necessary in the 21st century. But great ideas usually come from inspiration.

Be aware that creativity is a long term investment and it will not bring an immediate return. If your company is not creative now, it will take time for management and staff to adopt new ways of thinking, behaving and producing. Then, once ideas start flowing they must be implemented. This also takes time. But, over the long term, the pay off can be very big indeed. So don't just sit there, go for it! .

Turning your company into a creative company can be a challenging process. Need help? Ask Jeffrey.

If you are serious about office creativity and innovation, read up on our Innovation BattlePlan