Everybody needs a reason to get out of bed each morning and go to work. If we don’t have a reason our whole day feels meaningless, becomes a grind and we inevitably get stuck in a rut.You may enjoy your job but recently hit a road block and feel either un-motivated or are looking to improve yourself and become more creative? Is this you?
If so, carry on reading and learn our 5 extremely useful tips on how to become more innovative at work. Don’t worry our tips can be put into practice by everyone!
1. Change your routine
“Routine kills creative thought” – Scarlett Thomas.
A routine is something uninteresting, predictable and a sequence where you will always know the end result. This is the opposite of being innovative. Change anything you can in your daily routine, from the breakfast you eat each morning, the way you come into work, what you order for lunch or even the colour of your socks!
Being creative starts with small steps, breaking away from your regular pattern will help promote innovation and creativity.
2. Talk to management about your ideas
Do you have any ideas that will increase the efficiency of your work or your team’s output? Having ideas or suggestions and leaving them in your head won’t do anyone any good. Arrange a meeting with your boss and discuss any ideas you may have. Demonstrate clearly why you think they will work better than the present system in place.
If you are too shy or afraid to setup a meeting with your manager, propose to have a suggestion box where employees can use to put forward ideas with full anonymity.
Being innovative requires taking action – will you?
3. If you don’t have any ideas – look within
Innovation can’t simply be activated by the flick of a switch, you need to brainstorm ideas, think about problems you face at work and how they can be improved or changed for the better.
For example, in my last job I would usually be so over whelmed with work that I barely had time to check my emails (I would get over 100 a day). I worked in procurement and the customer service team would regularly send me emails asking for the value of particular products or ETAs of certain stock. Sometimes they needed answers within 30 minutes but as I didn’t have time to check my emails – they never received an answer.
This was a problem I faced in my role and I knew it needed to be fixed.
Solution: I had a polite chat with the customer service manager and told him that if any of the customer service team needed answers within the hour, to come up to my desk and I would get them there and then because I’m usually too busy and fail to check my emails every hour.
This was such a simple solution but increased the company’s level of customer service tenfold. Find a problem you face on a daily basis and figure out a way to tackle it.
4. Have a positive attitude
Research has proven that a positive attitude can help aid creativity and innovation. If you hate work or have any negative feelings towards it, the blame doesn’t lie within the work – but within you. Being positive or negative is just a mindset that is based around how your mind reacts to external situations.
Going to work each day with a positive outlook gives you the ‘can-do’ attitude that can act as the catalyst to help you become more innovative at work. Your perspective within the workplace will widen allowing you to explore different ways to approach tasks.
5. Believe in yourself
One of the biggest roadblocks to you being innovative is not having the ability to trust in your own ideas. So many of us are scared by failure and would rather play it safe than make the leap and become innovators. The CEO of PayPal failed with 14 pervious business ideas before coming up with PayPal. Thomas Edison failed over a thousands times before he managed to invent the light bulb, does anyone view either of these people as failures? Failure is the key to unlocking success and the process starts with being innovative. Even when innovators fail they still succeed because they learn something from it and have the knowledge not to make that mistake again.
Being innovative can be done on a micro and macro scale. Whether that’s shaving 30 minutes off your work day by implementing a new strategy, or saving your company $5 million in costs by figuring out a cheaper way to do things. Take the first step today by becoming more innovative at work, it only takes a small change to get the ball rolling and gain monument. Before you know it you will have more ideas and creative juice than you will know what to do with!
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