Setting your small organization apart from others, especially from competitors that may have more resources and influence, is critical for making your mark and achieving your ideal vision for the future. Innovation can happen unprompted, but you can also hone and encourage it through your organization’s strategic practices. In fact, over 60% of fast-growing businesses consider innovation critical and fund dedicated initiatives to inspire their team.

As a small organization, you have less to spend on initiatives to improve innovation, but you can still promote it in your everyday activities. In this guide, we’ll review how to reward forward-thinking employees and leverage innovation for your continued financial growth.

1. Embrace a Culture of Curiosity

Workplace environments greatly impact the quality of the work your team achieves. This includes the physical environment you operate in as well as the company values you cultivate. 

Spur everyday acts of innovation by integrating curiosity into your company values and culture. You can start embracing curiosity on a day-to-day basis by taking steps like:

• Integrating innovation into your hiring practices. From the beginning of the hiring process, you can lay the foundation for an innovative team by making curiosity a hiring priority. Ask candidates to describe innovations they’ve made in other positions and how they regularly bring creativity to the workplace. Remember to collect data about responses so you can hone in on the most effective interview questions. 
• Hosting innovation power hours. Schedule a block of time dedicated to brainstorming new changes or innovations. This allows team members to bounce ideas off each other and collect feedback from your leadership team. If possible, schedule power hours for both individual teams and the entire organization for a variety of perspectives.
• Flexibly collecting feedback. Though power hours are a great start, inspiration can strike any time. Empower employees to strike while the iron is hot with a 24/7 feedback form. Then, you can review submissions and respond to employees whenever is convenient for your team—it’s a win-win! 
• Adopting an open floor plan. An innovative team is a communicative one that takes action on ideas swiftly.  Open physical layouts allow your team to easily communicate, collaborate, and learn from each other, helping fresh ideas flourish in the moment instead of waiting until the next staff meeting. 

2. Use Data to Drive Innovation

Innovation doesn’t always mean brainstorming ideas from scratch—you can also plant the seed in your employees’ minds by giving them a place to start. Like any of your small organization’s daily operations, data can be helpful in revealing areas for improvement, which are effective focus areas for innovative employees. Here are some tips for driving innovation with data:

• Centralize and share data. Before analyazing any information, you’ll first have to ensure your employees have accurate data to work with. Keep your databases as up-to-date and centralized as possible—if you prefer to use disparate systems, it’s ideal that they can integrate and share data seamlessly with each other. 
• Determine relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) for organizational goals. For instance, a nonprofit might focus on fundraising ROI, whereas a small business might focus on client churn rate.
• Benchmark competitors. Your own data reveals only a piece of your full growth journey. Look externally at your biggest competitors and comparatively analyze any publicly available information. Your competitors’ data can inspire you to identify new ways to stand out.

3. Recognize Innovation

Just as you incentivize high-performers with opportunities for advancement, you can drive innovation by rewarding creative and passionate employees. Recognizing employee contributions motivates them to continue innovating and can inspire other employees to explore new strategies and take on new initiatives. 

Along with giving verbal or written feedback to innovative employees, create a broader employee acknowledgment strategy to formalize the process. You might include the following ideas in your strategy :

• Provide a reward for innovation. Unwrapit suggests gifting inventive employees with items such as an espresso machine, a monogrammed leather-bound journal, or even a vacation voucher.
• Add an innovation category to your awards ceremony. You might already have an end-of-year awards ceremony to recognize high performers. Consider adding an “Innovator of the Year” category dedicated to team members who have championed cutting-edge developments.
• Offer additional compensation. When conducting performance evaluations, consider each employee’s contributions and how they helped future-proof your organization. Give innovation a larger weight when determining employee salary and benefit changes. 
• Establish a peer-to-peer recognition program. Leadership has a bird’s-eye view of employees, but that can mean they miss important details. Team members, however, have a more direct view of daily activities and can provide relevant feedback. Start a peer-to-peer recognition program where employees can elevate exemplary performance to leadership and other team members. 
• Spread instances of innovation across the organization. Official recognition doesn’t have to occur formally or even annually. For instance, if you have a monthly All Hands meeting, you might include a segment where forward-thinking employees have the floor to explain their ideas.

4. Improve Your Diversity Approach

Discussions of innovation are incomplete without examining diversity’s role. After all, having a wide range of perspectives is essential for piloting ideas and learning from others to improve long-term. In fact, studies show diverse teams are 1.7 times more likely to be innovative than competitors. 

To gauge and improve your approach to diversity, start by analyzing the hiring process. Unconscious bias can cause you to discriminate against qualified candidates, significantly skewing the hiring process. JazzHR recommends using software with bias-blocking tech, which removes any identifying information so you can advance candidates purely based on qualifications. Then, as you roll out any changes, analyze relevant recruiting metrics to understand your progress, such as the percentage of employees at your tech company who come from non-tech industry backgrounds.

In addition, ensure you promote inclusivity throughout daily operations. For instance, invest time and funds into training employees about unconscious bias, cultural competency, advocacy, and allyship. You could also empower employees to create Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), which encourage employees with similar backgrounds to connect with each other. Take ERGs to the next level by allocating a portion of your budget for Affinity Month celebrations, allowing your team to experience different cultures first-hand. 

As you roll out these new program ideas, ensure you listen and respond to employee feedback. After all, programs that aren’t tailored to employee preferences might stifle creativity instead of nurturing it. Collect feedback regularly, asking about how your organization can better support employees—they’ll appreciate being listened to and continue to brainstorm for your organization’s future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephanie Sparks

As Director of Content Marketing & Social at Employ, Stephanie leverages 17 years of marketing and communications experience, and her master’s degree in marketing, communication studies, and advertising, to craft compelling content across the JazzHR, Lever, Jobvite, and NXTThing RPO brands. She is a thought leader for the HR technology and talent acquisition space.