How to Improve Team Creativity

In a fast-paced and competitive business environment, organizations are constantly being called to ensure their employees are largely creative. When organizational employees are found to be creative within teams, new innovative ideas, boosts in task completion and further, a rise of employee happiness levels are likely to be achieved.

Correspondingly managers will constantly aim to attempt to boost employee productivity to attain a variety of workplace benefits associated with increased creativity. In many cases, managers may feel as though they are not progressing when they attempt to improve employee creativity levels. In turn, provided in this blog are effective strategies to improve team creativity within an organization.

Encourage Brainstorming

An extremely effective way that managers may improve team creativity is through encouraging brainstorming. Specifically, brainstorming within teams involves gathering a variety of ideas surrounding a specific topic or task at hand. When engaging in brainstorming activities, managers should assure that every individual in the team feels comfortable and effectively has their say in the brainstorming discussion.

Moreover, positive reinforcement is needed to improve team creativity. To reinforce ensure that no team members are allowed to criticise someone else’s ideas, further it is important that all ideas are to be considered valuable and are seen as good ideas. To inspire creativity managers may encourage teams to ensure that each individual follows one after another sharing their thoughts, opinions and innovative brainstormed ideas within the brainstorming session.

Manage Work Environment

To effectively improve team creativity managers may consider managing the working environments that teams operate in. When trying to be creative the external environment surrounding an employee is extremely critical to achieving creativity growth spikes. Studies have shown that various lightings influence employees’ creativity and productivity levels.

Considering lighting, environments with a well-lit natural light exposure may positively influence employee mood, energy, focus and further fatigue levels. Furthermore, to further manage work environments for teams to improve creativity levels, consider changing the area teamwork together. If a team works at an office bench, consider moving to a different location such as an office board room.

Try Role Rotation

Another critical way in which managers may work to improving team creativity is through encouraging teams to try role rotation. Team roles may be assigned in a variety of ways, one way may be assigning team leaders and assistants, another could be utilising tools such as a Belbin test. Whatever the way roles are assigned, consider swapping roles and rotating between team members.

When roles are rotated it has been found that teams are able to be increasingly creative as new innovative perspectives to existing roles are able to be attained. This in turn gives rise to the successful and strong formulation of unique ideas for team activities. Moreover, employees are likely to further specifically increase their creative skills as they are undertaking tasks in a new point of view. This leads to a change in employee perspectives effectively developing their skills and ensuring that stronger work is being completed.

Role Play

Managers can effectively work to improve team creativity by encouraging teams to partake in role-playing. Specifically, role play involves individual team members putting themselves in another person’s shoes and further in some cases entering an imaginary situation. The role-play situation may vary depending on the organizations’ industry you operate within.

For example, an employee could roleplay a client who has problems that each other individual team member must work to solve. Further in another industry, an employee could play the role of a customer with varying tastes and other team members attempt to engage and sell the product to the role-playing customer. This is an extremely powerful technique to spark improvement to team creativity although it must be monitored and supervised effectively.

Diversify Teams

An extremely important way in which managers may improve team creativity is through diversifying teams. That is, managers should ensure that teams are built up with a variety of individuals with different cultures and backgrounds who all share common objectives and goals. These differing backgrounds will give rise to different perspectives, thoughts and further both creative and innovative ideas.

Although to ensure that these diversified teams get along well managers must ensure that they encourage team building activities often. This will allow for these team members to become more comfortable and adapt to the diversified team and then allow for more improved and efficient work to be completed.

Promote Communication

A final and extremely important way in which managers may effectively improve team creativity is through promoting communication. Specifically, communication is critical in a team environment as it allows employees to feel extremely comfortable to share thoughts, fears, ideas and other valuable information to team members.

Moreover, when employees can communicate effectively and openly with another team member, they will feel valued and appreciated. In turn, communication fosters discussion and gives rise to an increase in the generation of creative solutions through extensive teamwork.