Innovating, Environments, and Gathering

Welcome once again to our newsletter! As always, it's a tip, it's an insight, and it's our favourite new thing. Let's get going!

The Tip - Using Restrictions for Innovation

At BillionMinds , we believe great insights can come from anywhere, and that's why we don't just interview people in the business community. Our tip this week borrows from a common practice used by photographers, artists, and poets, who often consciously place a restriction on their work. This can create very interesting art of course, but it's mainly because it's forcing the brain to do unusual things - to be creative, or innovative.

In this week's video, we look at how you can use a similar technique to drive innovation in your business. You might have noticed the tip has a different style this week - let us know what you think about it!

The Insight - The Importance of Work Environments

In many of our tips and these newsletters, we've discussed how important it is to set up the places you do work in a way that supports great work. Our research has shown that spending just a couple of hours working on where you do your work can pay off in greater productivity almost immediately.

Here are 10 things we've seen to consider when thinking about your working environment:

1) Your work environment obviously includes ergonomics but is much richer than that. The lighting, sounds, temperatures, and even smells around you can make a huge difference in terms of how effective you are in a space.

2) Be prepared to change your environment at different times of day. For example, many of us can actually do great work right after lunch IF we work standing and if we reduce the temperature of our surroundings a bit.

3) Many in-office environments are designed to get the basics right, but the space you thrive in will be personal to you. So if you go to the same in-office environment each day, pay attention to some changes you can make to personalize it for you.

4) As for in-home offices - creating a different look and feel for the home office to the rest of the house can significantly help in creating a good separation between work and the rest of your life. And if this is your OWN space, take the extra effort to personalize it. In this part of the house, you probably don't need to compromise with anyone!

5) If you do work from home, understand what the requirements are from your company, then be creative within those requirements. For example, they may require you to do all customer-facing work from a locked office, but may not have those requirements when you are doing internal administrative functions.

6) Different types of space can be more suited to different types of work. For example, you may do your best thinking on a run, your best writing from a coffee shop, and your best decision-making at your desk. Figure out where those places are, and before you do any type of work, as yourself if you are in the right environment to do it well.

7) The more comfortable a seating area is, the more likely you are to remain seated for hours on end. So balance the obvious need for comfort with steps to help ensure that you don't sit for too long at a time.

8) Environments can actually change the way you think. So if you are going to make an important decision, consider a quick change of environment, and see if the decision still makes sense.

9) Certain sounds or songs can prime us to to get working. So if you are struggling to get going, consider putting on a piece of music on in the background that you normally work to. It might get things moving for you.

10) The needs you have from your environment will change over months and years. This is in part because you change physically and mentally, but also the type of work you do is probably changing too. So just because an environment worked well previously, doesn't mean it will tomorrow.

Our Favourite New Thing

Whether you are a remote first organization, a hybrid one or fully in office, you will still need to gather people together to get things accomplished or just to connect with each other. And in fact, as organizations become more distributed, many of us are physically gathering less, and as a result are getting less good at it.

In The Art of Gathering - Priya Parker takes a serious look at how to ensure that any gathering for any reason can be meaningful, impactful and productive. You will likely find this worthwhile if you want to organize anything from a meeting to a wedding!

About Us

BillionMinds?brings you?this newsletter?each and every week. But that’s not all we do. We also help employees and managers in companies around the world embed key soft skills to thrive in the modern workplace and get certified in those skills. Each of our Learn/Do experiences is less than 10 minutes a day and you can see meaningful change within two weeks.

We work with both companies and individual employees. Certification programs start at $200 and we provide discounts for those seeking work, alongside the option for current users to nominate low/no-income people to access the program for FREE. For more information, visit us?here.