This article contains 9 habits and strategies that help in promoting innovation and creativity at the workplace.
These habits help the innovative streak to prosper and develop, letting the creative juices to flow from within.
There are numerous activities which help the process of rejuvenating the mind, body and spirit which all the organisations must promote for a more creative workforce.
Let’s begin.
In this article we have focused on the need to innovate and be creative for personal and professional success. Creativity is a pre-requisite to increasing productivity at work. We would all agree for sure.
There are several industries like the hospitality industry that is extremely labour intensive and the workforce at times has to work long hours. Plus, it can be quite competitive while slogging for hours for the next promotion. Focusing on well being and channelling inner creativity can be the key to sustained competitive advantages.
1. Yoga (For Mind, body and the spirit)
A lot of workplaces have included, in routine, regular sessions of Yoga for even a few minutes to rejuvenate the team members.
This should be followed in every organisation across industries.
This is a no brainer as Yoga has become one of the most talked-about subjects recently.
However, it’s worth a mention again given its benefits for hospitality industry professionals not only for a healthy living but even for success at work.
Lots of career paths would need excellent physical and mental fitness especially early on in your career.
Regular meditation and Yoga freshens up our body and mind. While meditation makes sure oxygen is properly circulated within every part of our body to help it detoxify. Our brain also gets enriched by oxygen and other life forces from within our body.
Physical postures from Yoga help the body to release creative juices from locked energy centres and thereby raising our spiritual level and helps the process of promoting innovation and creativity.
30 minutes of Yoga every day can do wonders to our work-life balance.
For all the professionals complaining for time, start even with 10 minutes daily.
2. Getting up early – Reward morning shifts
This is a strategy that has a 360-degree impact on creativity in the workplace.
Companies can set up an example with some extra benefits to those who do morning shifts or those who always arrive before time.
Know what creativity at the workplace is helps in understanding how to strategise for the same.
Getting up early can help you in all these aspects of intelligence, imagination, empathy and more.
Rewarding the habit of getting up early can benefit professionals and in return would help them come up with innovative ideas.
Getting up early gives our mind, body and spirit the required dose of cosmic energy and fresh oxygen which helps our neurons to stay fresh to let innovation and creativity sprout from within.
Finishing up the reports, preparing for the meeting in the morning, spending some quality time with family or partying with friends; there is a number of reasons to justify our late-night habit.
All of us might have heard of the phrase ‘Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’.
How many times have we heard this?
Still, we find this as the most difficult task.
However, battles are fought and won in the mind before they are actually done in the battlegrounds.
3. Healthy eating habits are a must for increased focus and creativity
There must be some reason on why various sectors of the hospitality industry include food on a work shift. Thus the onus is on hospitality organisations to inculcate healthy eating habits in their team members.
The trend of offering sumptuous meals is part of work culture nowadays across industries.
Eat healthily and think better. This is true but who can give Zinger burger a miss or the cheesy pizza, some pan-fried garlic noodles, a cheesecake, chocolates, or the fiery chicken!
You might question as to why were tasteless food is bestowed with maximum health benefits and if tasty food items are supposed to be hazardous to health in the long run, why on earth do they exist?
Taste addiction has no limits attached to it and we would never be able to find an end to the same.
We frequently get bored of the food items we used to love and get into the vicious circle of alternating between one set of food to another, taking away a lot of our creative energy.
Getting back to basics will help the process of rejuvenation, creativity and nutrition for the effective functioning of body and mind.
4. Promote Reading and Writing at the Workplace
All organisations must have a small library (if not physical even a digital collection would server the purpose) and should have an idea box for handwritten notes.
Reading and writing for the basis of a lot of employee skills that can help create amazing team members who are brimming with creativity and innovation.
We all exercise or at least pretend to do so but what about the work out session for neurons in the brain.
Neural forces are most dominant during childhood and get weaker as we progress on the journey called ‘Life’.
These neurons decrease in number as life progresses and thus it is even more important to make sure they are healthy for the continuous outflow of creative juices.
A regular dose of quality reading has many more benefits to offer than just healthier neurons.
It is always good to maintain a diary or write on a blog.
Writing is a hobby which is both trendy and befitting to today’s workplace.
Inner satisfaction and peace of mind come as free gifts in the package of benefits of writing as a hobby.
Maybe reading a few of the top management books and following top career and learninhg blogs can be a good place to start for hospitality professionals.
5. Organise creative Activities at workplace
This is one of the best strategies to promote creativity in the workplace through teamwork.
A lot of top hospitality companies and multinational companies already use festivals as a mode to promote creative activities at the workplace.
This should become more mainstream.
- Have you ever tried to paint?
- Can you sing?
- Do you dance?
- Were you good at sports when you were a kid but you don’t play anymore? Are you a good swimmer?
- What about mimicry?
- How about mountaineering or skiing?
Making creativity zone in the office is a great strategy to promote creativity at all organisation.
There are many more things which help in revitalising our body and mind.
If time constraint is pulling things back, getting up early should be on top of the agenda for developing healthy habits.
6. Community and Charity work
We are all connected to the community. Letting staff member engage in a charity or community work during work hours cam make jobs more fulfilling.
It is one of the best habits to promote creativity in the workplace for all organisations.
Helping a cause of charity once in a while connects us to the unknown.
It helps in exploring the emotional intelligence within us and in connecting us to the universal forces by helping people who are totally unknown.
At work or in our routine life, we always deal with the unknown and live in uncertainties.
Some charity work helps us befriend uncertainty and frees our brain to innovate and create.
A good night’s sleep is an added bonus to some time spent for a humanitarian cause.
7. Holidays and Travel
Employees across industries make everyone’s life special by creating the most beautiful memories through products and services.
Giving the team members holiday coupons or paid leaves for extra work can add a trigger to a more fulfilling job and life. This will create a better and more engaged workplace.
Forced breaks are necessary to keep us fresh and creative.
Like cars need servicing and refuelling so does our body and mind which need rest and refuelling.
A good holiday with family or friends is the best re-energiser.
But, we need to make sure, we keep ourselves away from phone and laptop.
8. Visualisation sessions
Yes, you must inculcate this habit into your daily routine.
Visualise your goals being fulfilled regularly. This will help calm you down and help you repurpose yourself.
Moreover, this simple act of visualising yourself succeed is extremely motivating and helps you get creative in terms of finding better means to speed up the process to reach the goals you set.
This habit is also extremely rejuvenating helping you become more and more creative and innovative in all spheres of life, let alone work.
9. Self-Talk helps promote creativity
This might sound crazy but we all do a lot of self chatter regularly. At times its quite noisy inside.
Change that chatter to mindful self-talk. It’s always good to ask yourself questions and your mind might come up with creative solutions.
It just takes a few minutes. While at work or at home, simply unwind and relax for a few moments and talk to yourself. It decreases anxiety.
If you are looking to change your career then ask questions to yourself before rebooting career. You must keep asking questions to yourself to be able to move in the right direction.
Self talk helps you come up with creative solutions to your workplace challenges. Try it.
Conclusion:
So, what else do you do for promoting innovation and creativity at the workplace?
All of us love to be creative in distinct ways.
We need food to provide energy to our body and revitalise our brain to enlarge the magnitude of innovation and creativity.
Lots of researchers have linked this to spirituality who believe that the real source of energy rests within and outside bodily realms.
The blending of both physical and metaphysical approaches would interconnect all these facets to help us decode the roots of promoting innovation and creativity at the personal level and in the workplace.
However, despite being a quite interesting topic, metaphysics is an area where Angels fear to tread.
We will, therefore, leave this tough discussion for later posts.
In this post, we concentrated on activities that help us innovate and be creative at the workplace and in life.
