Modern Office

Office Creativity Doesn't Cost a Fortune

The normal business office gets a bad reputation for poor work-life balance, long and strict hours, strict dress codes and a whole host of unappealing traits. The stereotype envisions a drab room with uncomfortable furnishings and a bored-looking workforce hammering away at their keyboards.

Many modern businesses have done away with this stereotype and instead introduced a vibrant and fun atmosphere that involves sleep pods, ball pits, football tables and a juice bar. But not every business has that kind of budget to breathe creativity into the business. And some may even be mistaken into thinking that a large budget is the only way to achieve this.

Office Collaboration

Start at the top

In order to encourage creativity in your employees, you need to get creative yourself. Think outside the box on how you might be able to breathe creativity into the place. It could be something simple like a casual Friday or an initiative that involves the managers and encourages people to bring forward ideas. This is where you’re most likely going to hit budget issues. If you are really hamstrung in the budget area, that doesn’t mean this is impossible, you’ll just have to embrace your own creativity and figure something out.

At the end of the day, if you can’t get your top-level management thinking creatively, what hope is there for everyone else?

Encourage collaboration

Collaboration is one of the easiest ways to encourage creativity and innovation, and one of the cheapest as well. Really, collaboration is simply a word, the act of two or more people coming together to work on something – and this is free.

Mobile Whiteboards for Office Meeting

You may want to enable collaboration by providing your employees with the right tools to do so. Online conversation tools, such as Slack, are great for this.

Alternatively, creating a collaboration space within the office is probably the simplest, but to do this, you’re going to need a magnetic whiteboard or something similar, like a flip chart easel.

Magnetic Whiteboards

Allow space to think

Creating a space for collaboration will naturally lead on to this point, and that’s creating space for your employees to think. Now whilst a physical space is great, not every office can provide one of these and so it may be that you allow space in your employee’s schedules to think, instead.

Office Space magnetic whiteboard on wall

This is a method adopted by Google which allows employees to spend a certain percentage of their time thinking about other projects that aren’t necessarily related to their job. The success of their program has led to some of their most innovative work which shows that it is worth doing.

Some businesses may find this level of trust in their employees difficult, but the creativity will only happen if you trust your employees in the first place.

It may be nice to bring in some paid-for initiatives to help creativity, but unfortunately, it’s not always possible. Here we’ve covered three ways you can encourage creativity in your business which can lead to innovation and great success.

Office Boardroom Whiteboard Wall