Giving Your Employees Room for Creativity Works Every Time!

I think we’ve all learned an important lesson from watching the recent events and misadventures of our banking system.  Handing out hefty paychecks and private jets doesn’t exactly give a company’s employees incentive to work creatively and build a better business.  What social science has shown us [...]]]>

I think we’ve all learned an important lesson from watching the recent events and misadventures of our banking system.  Handing out hefty paychecks and private jets doesn’t exactly give a company’s employees incentive to work creatively and build a better business.  What social science has shown us is that giving employees room for creativity almost always helps a business grow, keeping workers engaged and happy, even giving them that all-important sense of fulfillment in their jobs.

Google gives us a great example here.  Their workers are given 20% of their total worktime to work on whatever project they want.  They set aside their usual tasks to brainstorm, create, experiment.  What has that resulted in?  GMail, for one thing. Orkut, Google News, and numerous other Google biggies have been birthed through this process as well.  Where would Google be without all that creative freedom given their employees?  I can’t say for certain, but I can only imagine we wouldn’t be talking about them much, if at all.  Instead, Google has become an icon for creativity turned loose in the workplace.

Other companies have tried such experiments as well.  A software company in Australia called Atlassian started giving their engineers “FEDEX Days” a few times a year. During those 24-hour periods, engineers were told to leave their usual tasks aside and work on whatever they wanted to.  They were to brainstorm and come up with something new and inventive.  The following day would result in a big meeting in which everyone presented their ideas.  (Hence the name FEDEX Days:  they must deliver something overnight.)  The resulting ideas and software fixes were so productive that Atlassian eventually shifted over to the Google model of allowing their employees to work on whatever they wanted during 20% of their worktime.

These are just a couple of examples of what might happen when a company encourages creativity.  Of course it goes without saying that fair wages and true signs of appreciation are key, no matter how much freedom and creativity is allowed; but one thing’s certain: You won’t have to write out any million dollar bonuses to have happy, creative employees!  If only our banking system would have thought of that one…