Evolving a Creative Workplace: Step 5

In this ongoing discussion about growing creative teams organically, I’ve shared how to prepare your organization for successful expansion, how to plant the right elements into the mix, how to “water” for sustainable growth, and then how adding fertilizer can take your group’s motivation to the next level.

Tilling and experimenting follow once everything’s been humming along smoothly for a while. Changing things up can breathe fresh air into a culture, as well as offer lessons about what works and what doesn’t.

An example of this is how we’re currently pursuing a significant new product development company based on some particularly clever ideas that members of our team have come up with. Intuitive Company employees will have a chance to participate and take ownership in this opportunity, and everyone’s pumped about the chance to get involved in something a bit different than what we’ve been doing so far. It’s a concrete way to show how much we value our employees’ creativity. They know they’re not submitting “ideas for improvement” into the ether or failing to even voice their opinions because they figure nothing will come of their efforts. We’ve shown them that we’re listening—and acting upon their best ideas.

Our staff is constantly influenced by outside knowledge and that influence benefits both their career growth and our company’s offering. When more and more of the staff were requesting to attend industry and technology conferences, we looked to combine their drive for learning with our drive for knowledge sharing. As a response, we introduced the Intuitive Company Conference Program. In the program, the staff earns points towards conference attendance when they publish content to the outside world or bring knowledge back from the outside world into the office. This popular program helps build writing and presentation skills while at the same time injecting new inspiration and experience back into the office environment.

We also turned compensation over a bit this past year when we moved from the expected yearly hire-date-anniversary salary raises to performance-based bonuses. We still provide yearly cost-of-living salary increases, but we made a shift from the basic, “get-your-job-done” raises to more dynamic, “be-proud-of-your-performance” bonuses. Bonuses and profit sharing are now performance-based and the staff is clear on their and our expectations. This experiment has helped to enforce the idea that we’re in a competitive business, and the best performers make the most difference!

Lastly, while we still prefer to remain as flat and un-hierarchical as possible, even as we approach 40 employees, we realized that some adjustment was required. We introduced a mentoring system where the more experienced and senior staff are directly responsible for helping bring younger, newer staff on-board and up-to-speed with our methods and procedures. This is really just a small twist on some of our hiring practices discussed earlier in this series–incentives for the staff that finds us new employees.

The biggest piece of advice I have for this step is to simply introduce something new into your environment or work process and see how it goes. It may stick, it may not, but the goal is to learn something about your team and the company’s collective strengths.

I’ll be back soon with Step 6: Observing and protecting.

Illustration by Ruslan Khaydarov.