Coming up with new ideas and feeling the need to be constantly innovative is stressful. You feel like you’re failing every second that you don’t come up with something groundbreaking. That’s why these examples of ideas and innovation for the workplace will jumpstart your creativity.
Since everyone comes from different backgrounds and every job varies so much, this is not a list of new ideas or a laundry list of examples of innovations.
Instead, it’s 14 tools and strategies to change your mindset, relieve the pressure, and help you get into the creative mode without the stress attached.
1. Get in on those brainstorming sessions
You’re not alone in trying to figure out innovative ideas. It can be a struggle to pit yourself against everyone else. The good news is that there’s no reason to pit yourself against others.
You all bring interesting perspectives that allow you to build off each other in brainstorming sessions. New ideas often come from you shaking up your routine, so talk with other people or do some free-flow word association with yourself.
Change up your approach to creative thinking. The best way to foster workplace innovation is to take off the pressure and shake up your habits. You have the power to challenge your brain to think in new ways by choosing new neural pathways to develop.
So, when you’re trying to get the creative ideas flowing, grab a blank piece of paper, a voice memo, or a whiteboard.
Write down anything or say anything that comes to mind. The goal is to relieve the pressure of coming up with the best ideas while also unintentionally going down the same mental pathways every time you’re trying to think of something new.
2. Strive towards continuous improvement without the pressure
We should all want to improve ourselves. Furthermore, we should want to strive for that improvement every day. Maybe we don’t finish a new self-help book every day, or get eight hours of sleep, or even eat well.
But, we can take tiny steps that get us closer to that improvement. Maybe we set the goal to walk on our treadmill for twenty minutes in the morning. The first day, we might be too tired to get up.
But, we lay awake for a few minutes so that we can get closer to getting out of bed the next day. When we apply this to innovation in the workplace, we can remind ourselves that innovation and improvement are intertwined.
It’s hard for us to “innovate” or come up with new ideas when we don’t feel like the happiest version of ourselves. We reach our happiest selves when we love ourselves and believe we are worthy of the work it takes to become better versions of ourselves.
So, remember that you’re worth the time it takes to make small incremental changes over time rather than shaming yourself with the pressure to improve in one big swoop all at once.
3. Heed the buzzwords “work-life balance”
Work-life balance matters. In the best-case scenario, you love your job and it barely feels like work. In the worst-case scenario, you hate what you do and do it only to pay the bills. Either way, you deserve to live outside of your job.
No matter what your ideal life looks like, you need to find a balance that lets you play, practice your hobbies, and allow yourself to find value in something other than what you can produce. We are repeatedly told that we are worth the most when we can be useful to other people.
But, we need to actively find and contradict this narrative. Our value does not rely on the opinions of others, including the opinions of our boss and coworkers.
Let the first step toward your innovations and new solutions be that you care about the person you are outside of work and nourishing them as a person, not an employee.
4. Surround yourself with interesting, smart people and remember you fit in
Find different people who interest you and teach you. Avoid letting these people be the same ones who are condescending or cruel. It’s important to find people who are smart and interesting, just like you.
These are the people who will see your value, and maybe even understand your experiences as someone whose ideas may not have been valued elsewhere. Keep in mind that intelligence without kindness is pointless.
Define smart in whatever effective way makes the most sense to you while teaching you something.
It could be that you surround yourself with people in your field or completely outside of your field. Whoever you choose, let them be the people who have you walking away from a meaningful conversation full of inspiration and exciting ideas.
5. Focus on incremental innovation over a huge difference
When you start focusing more on the small changes over time than the big differences all at once, your mindset changes. Incremental change also comes with less pressure, which is always a plus.
When someone wants to find the next big change that everyone needs to make right now, it’s easy to get stuck in a “waiting” mindset or “not today” mindset.
.In other words, when you’re focusing on waiting until you come up with an innovation huge enough to make a big difference, you’re waiting. You may never know when you come up with a good idea that will meet your standards.
You will always be left saying that today is not the day for innovation. This mindset leaves you with the pressure to come up with something major sooner rather than later, which is at complete odds with a “waiting” mindset.
Instead, when you focus on small changes, you can empower yourself to find value in your ideas, no matter how big or small, which will ultimately lead to a big change much faster than waiting anyway.
6. Find ways to value intrinsic motivation over public recognition
You’ll probably find a line something like this in a self-help book, “Find your intrinsic motivation!” or “Intrinsic motivation is the secret to success, so make sure you learn to like your job!”
There’s nothing wrong with self-help as a genre because it can be incredibly helpful in introducing fresh ideas to you that you’ve never thought of before.
Someone else has put the hard work into researching and coming up with the best ways to understand yourself and the world. That’s great when that’s the case.
When it’s not the case, the author is usually just writing the information you already know or, worse, speaking from a place of incredible privilege and telling others there’s a simple answer to their problems.
It’s true that intrinsic motivation is important for you to like what you do, but it’s not a given and it’s a privilege to find intrinsic value in what you do. So, keep that in mind as you think about better ways to innovate and possibly take some of that pressure off.
7. When in doubt, look for new approaches to the same questions
It may sound obvious, but it can be hard to develop self-awareness. You have to teach yourself to notice when you’re feeling stuck or stressed out by a problem and to take a step back. Often, the last thing we want to do is take a step back in the middle of a stressful event.
This is especially true when we’re at work and worried about completing a task. We have to remind ourselves that we’re often the most productive and innovative when we take a moment to notice the frustration, stress, fear, or anger we’re feeling.
Once we recognize how that emotion is affecting us, we can pause and take a break. We can recognize that we’re not operating at our best and need a break. This allows us to breathe, come back, and try again from a new approach.
8. Always be on the lookout for best practices
Avoid wasting your time with the slow methods of completing a task that do nothing but slow you down. This doesn’t mean that you try and cut corners when you get the chance.
Instead, you take this opportunity to assess where you can introduce a better practice than you’ve been taught, told, or learned. Let yourself try something new by assessing your current processes.
So much of the time, we get stuck performing tasks the same way over and over, no matter how extraneous some of the steps are, because we’re used to doing it that way.
9. Ask yourself how you play a role in improving customer experience
Customer experience can vary a lot, just like the definition of customer. The use of jargon like “customer” can instantly feel corporate and cold.
Since we, at Knockoff Therapy, are not about that, we want to expand that definition and use it as a way to show you how you can play a role in it no matter what. Regardless of the job you have, you have customers.
We live in a society that requires us to receive payment by providing another person with goods or services. Whether you’re a cashier, teacher, or person in IT, you have a customer. Maybe you rarely work with people or working with people makes up most of your job.
Either way, you can choose to make someone’s day a little better with kindness. Yes, sometimes, you can play an even more influential role in someone’s customer experience. But, if the only role you play is to be kind to someone, that’s a win.
10. Remember that you offer different perspectives
You bring something new and interesting to almost every conversation you enter. Sometimes, you should avoid centering the conversation on yourself if other people are struggling to be heard.
Other times, people will snuff out your voice by ignoring you or insinuating you have nothing to add. Regardless, you always have something to add.
Let those moments, when someone is trying to communicate to you that your ideas are less valuable than other ideas, be the moments when you remind yourself that your different perspective is valuable. In the right situations, you will be valuable as will your contribution.
11. Get unsatisfied with the status quo
The familiar is comfortable. The biggest barrier to change is wanting to stay comfortable with what you know, even if it’s not what makes you happy.
Most of the time, people stay unhappy because the certainty of unhappiness is more comforting than the possibility that they could be happier. The status quo is nothing more than the representation of comfort.
You don’t want to rock the boat, and maybe you don’t have the privilege of even being able to consider it. Still, if you’re interested in innovation, you need to be ready to question everything and risk the status quo for the sake of innovative solutions that challenge it.
12. Think of ways to improve employee engagement
Whether you are a supervisor or not, you can think of interesting ways to encourage your coworkers to engage with new perspectives. You’ll likely learn from every person you work with if given the chance.
So, let them know you value their input and would like to work with them more often. Employee innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, so remember to engage with your peers.
If you are a supervisor, then create an environment that communicates to your employees how much you value them. This means requesting input from others and responding directly to their idea to demonstrate you listened when they spoke.
13. Remember that you’re not responsible for a culture of innovation
The thing about innovation culture is that it either needs to come from the top or have buy-in from lots of people. Therefore, if you struggle to come up with new ideas, it may have nothing to do with you.
Instead, it may have everything to do with company culture and the lack of an overall understanding of the importance of innovation. Maybe your boss or staff members don’t inspire a work environment of learning from failure.
There’s no reason you’d want to try something new. Unless you have some authority in your position, avoid putting pressure on yourself to create an innovative culture within your company.
14. Collaborate with your team members
Enlist help from teammates. Team up with the people you work with. Remember that you are stronger together than you are apart and you should take advantage of the help they can provide.
You each bring interesting, new perspectives that combine together to make for an innovation process unlike what you’re used to.
Avoid falling into the individualistic pitfall of competing with the very people who can help you think of new ideas and get out of your innovative rut. Plus, you help them come up with new ideas and everyone is the better as innovative employees.
