Why Creativity Is the Top Business Skill in the Post-Covid Workplace

Creative companies help transform new and diverse ideas into useful innovation through a supportive and safe corporate environment and culture, which brings increased revenue, happier employees, and more.

?Do We Understand the Difference between Creativity and Innovation?

● Creativity is the generation of novel and useful ideas, often by connecting knowledge or people in different ways.

● Innovation is the realization of those ideas and implementing them as products, services, practices, etc. to create value.

This means that creativity is a predecessor to innovation, and that companies who want to get and stay ahead of their competition should strive for.

What is Research Saying about the Importance of Creativity?

● The top business skill of LinkedIn’s list 50,000 different professional skills?is creativity.

● Creativity was also ranked above management, integrity, and vision in importance for tackling a changing future in an IBM study of 1500 executives.?

● In its most recent “Future of Jobs Report”, the World Economic Forum also ranked creativity highly.?

● A study commissioned by Adobe found that 82% of companies believe creativity can produce positive business results, generating a dividend. Creative companies are 1.5 times more likely to command a greater market share than competitors, and 69% of creative companies reported winning awards or national recognition versus only 27% of less creative firms.

● A study from McKinsey found that the most creative companies performed better financially (67% had above-average organic revenue growth) and scored higher on McKinsey’s Innovation Score.

How Can Leaders Make a Company Creative?

In a new Dale Carnegie survey of more than 6,500 employees across 21 countries worldwide, 82% said there are creative people on their team and nearly 3/4 of the respondents agreed that their colleagues are good at generating useful ideas.

Yet nearly 30% of respondents agree that it is NOT easy to get support for these kinds of ideas from their managers, teams or senior in their organization.?

A truly creative company leverages people’s innate creativity by focusing on supportive and psychologically safe culture; by fostering creativity with a clear organizational purpose, mission, and values; and by helping transform those creative ideas into innovation.

Learn more on how to maintain an environment that encourages critical thinking, risk-taking; is characterized by psychological safety and fosters interpersonal connections for everyone here: Creativity is Social: The Interpersonal Dynamics of Innovation in the Workplace.

What are some Tangible Benefits of Being a Creative Company?

Companies focusing on creativity are seeing real benefits:

● increased revenue and market share?

● better employee engagement & retention?

● creative solutions for some of the toughest challenges facing our world today

Some Well-known and Novel Examples of Creative companies:

One of the most known, obvious cases of business results from creativity comes from Google (Alphabet Inc.). Early in its existence, in an effort to signal its commitment to creativity and innovation, Google famously introduced the 20% Rule which stated that employees could work on any project they wished for up to 20% of their working hours. This has invented some of the most widely used apps in the world, including Gmail, Google Maps, and AdSense. According to some reports, less than 10% of employees at Google really used this time, but its symbolic importance remains.?

Laszlo Bock, a Google HR boss, states in his book Work Rules! that the 20% Rule “operates somewhat outside the lines of formal management oversight, and always will, because the most talented and creative people can't be forced to work." Instead, it is about ensuring people want to contribute their creativity because they know that their ideas will be respected, and their creative efforts will be valued.

Creativity is at the center of the recent partnership between NASA and Proctor & Gamble. In space, astronauts exercise two hours per day to combat the physical effects of zero gravity. And when they work out, they sweat—a lot. Shirts, shorts, and socks become unusable within a week, but since astronauts currently can’t do laundry in space, used clothing is put on a cargo ship to burn up as trash in Earth’s atmosphere. Not anymore. With each astronaut requiring 150 pounds of clothing per year, and with dreams of colonizing Mars, space explorers needed to break the cycle of disposable clothing and find a creative solution. NASA teamed up with Tide, which plans to send a new specialized laundry detergent to space in December 2021. They are also working on a washer/dryer combo that would work with minimal water, which would also be useful in arid regions on Earth. The benefits of this type of innovation for space travel and for the environment are significant.

How Social & Creative Companies Benefits the Workforce

Creativity benefits workers, too. SAS Institute, a highly creative company, regularly ranks among Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For”. Their employees are some of the happiest and engaged around, as evidenced by their perennially low turnover rate, which is typically less than half the average rate for their industry.?

The benefits of becoming a highly creative organization are becoming clear. Given the need to innovate better and faster, it is no wonder more companies are turning their attention to—creativity.

How can we Foster Creativity in our Organization?

To learn more about how your organization can better support the creativity that leads to innovation, download our white paper, Creativity is Social: The Interpersonal Dynamics of Innovation in the Workplace..