7 Things You Should Know About Innovation Lab
Innovation is everywhere today! From manufacturing to sourcing and design to HR, you name the industry or department and it has to have innovation. Similarly, we believe human resources is the one field that requires innovation more than anything.
Now, you would ask why?
Simply because the HR needs to look after people of the company. These people make your business what it is. If your people are not happy, productivity is low and the whole environment becomes dull.
This is the reason the HR department regularly keeps coming up with new innovative methods to streamline activities and improve productivity. Hence, to help you proceed in this direction, we have prepared a list of things necessary for harboring an environment where innovations move to the front line.
1. Be A Learner!
Innovators are people who have a curiosity for everything. Literally everything!
They never stop learning, they keep exploring new things, and you will never find them ideally sitting on their seat. Hence, to harbor an environment like this, you should be able to give your employees an opportunity to learn. Well, not just one but multiple opportunities to learn.
Everyone should be involved in different projects, asked to handle things they have never done before, and involve in the strategy of the project.
For innovation to thrive, you need to additionally adopt collaborative communication so that everyone gets a fair chance to put forth their ideas.
2. Try A Focused Approach
Not everyone is Mark Zuckerberg. He got success, you may not. So, plan it accordingly. You don’t always have to go big and do it all in the first chance. Try a more focused approach instead.
Ask your team to divide the work into sections and learn to accomplish one task fully. For instance, you should know your first section is as perfect as it can get before you move on to the next one. Hopping unnecessarily will yield low outcomes and only luck can save your project then, which we know is highly unlikely.
3. Compete!
Some amount of competition is great. It motivates people to work more and achieve more. If you look at closely, you will realize that people often go the extra mile to become better at things. When they know they have to perform better than another team, everyone will work to make the project better. To succeed, they will explore more ideas and come up with new innovative things.
Many experts even believe that creating a sense of competition often helps millennials to develop problem-solving skills.
4. Execute
While many people come up with dozens of ideas, they don’t always come to the execution. Here, it needs to be understood that within an office culture, you constantly need to push employees to work on their ideas. No matter how hard the execution is, it should be accomplished. You never know you may end up with a very good model, product, or service.
5. Give Time
Everyone has a different background, thinking process, viewpoint, and potential threshold to innovation. Hence, you need to give people time and space to adjust to the different environment and openly collaborate with each other. However, don’t give up because some people find it hard to adjust to the ideas given by teammates. Push employees to attain innovative thinking.
6. Failure Is the Key
Getting better at what you do is a messy job. It is not all good, which means that your employees won’t receive success in every endeavor. They will face failure – too many times. Hence, you should encourage everyone to push through failure and reach a common goal.
However, it should be kept in mind that everything has a limit. You need to decide when it is not worth it to spend any more time on a project. So, use your discretion accordingly to know when to push forward or stop.
Conclusion
You don’t have to create a happily-ever-after vision with everything you work on or every idea you think of. You only need to think of right now and how you can make it happen at present. Of course, future goals are important. But, first, decide how you will proceed to meet that future goal. Stop reminiscing only about the end result because the journey can be a lot harder than we think.
Suggestions and comments welcome
Rakesh Jain