4 proven ways to encourage innovation in the workplace

Innovation should be in the lifeblood of all startups. The huge upside of running a startup is that you can more easily implement innovative changes than larger businesses. Small teams are more flexible, so how you foster innovation now will help set your company up for success as you grow your startup.

In this guide, we’ll explore four strategic ways to encourage innovation in the workplace, why innovation matters to startups, and how to embed business innovation into your company culture.

1. Build psychological safety into your culture

Innovation thrives in workplaces where people feel safe to share their ideas. That means creating an environment where teams can take risks or raise concerns without fear.

Creating this kind of culture requires founders to lead by example. Your team might feel nervous raising concerns about current ways of working, and pointing out flaws can be difficult if a senior leader – especially the founder – introduces the process.

To overcome this and ensure you receive constructive feedback, use a “start, stop, continue” format. Ask what the team thinks the business should start, stop and continue doing. By framing it this way, your team knows you’re receptive to their thoughts and ideas. You can start by initiating discussions with open-ended questions, such as “What process slowed you down this week”?

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Here are three top tips for building psychological safety for an effective business innovation strategy:

• Lead by example – share your own challenges and lessons learned. Encourage your team to suggest what you could have done differently. Then, ask the team to take turns doing a “lessons learned” segment at your all-hands meeting.
• Dedicate some time from team meetings to “magic” ideas. Frame these as things the team would implement immediately if they had a magic wand. This can help you better plan short and long-term objectives.
• Use “servant leadership” techniques by supporting team initiatives and acting on their suggestions to show you listen. If you prove yourself as a leader who listens and takes things on board, people are more likely to continue sharing ideas.

Companies that encourage creativity and innovation often prioritise trust and inclusion over hierarchy and perfection. This allows your team to be flexible, dynamic and ambitious with its aims, all of which contribute to putting innovation at the centre of your company culture.

2. Drive innovation and business growth with your goals

Without goals, innovation can lose focus and impact. So, what directions should you give? Set clear goals aligned to your business objectives and use them to structure brainstorming.

Spark valuable takeaways with the “start, stop, continue” method mentioned above with a goal in mind. Gain a better understanding from your team of what’s working. For example, your goal could be to reduce customer onboarding time by 25%.

This allows your team to pinpoint what’s working in onboarding and what’s not, typically leading to more focused discussions and actionable outcomes.

See below for four more example goals you can give your team to foster innovation:

• Cut customer support tickets by 20% by introducing or improving self-service tools and resources.
• Automate a high-volume manual process to increase team productivity by 10%.
• Reduce time spent on internal approvals by streamlining workflows or introducing no-code tools.
• Shorten delivery cycles for product updates by 15% through better cross-team collaboration.

Linking these goals to your business strategy ensures your innovation strategy remains purposeful, measurable and impactful.

3. Embrace cross-functional collaboration

Great ideas rarely emerge in silos. Companies that encourage creativity and innovation in the workplace connect teams from different departments to solve shared problems. Each of your team members will likely have varying priorities depending on their role. Use these multiple perspectives to further your team’s learning and understanding of the business.

For example, a sales team will be more focused on generating revenue, whereas a tech team could be working to improve your product. The sales team can give valuable insight to the product team from what they’re hearing from customers for how to improve.

Quick wins – like adding list filters to improve accessibility – can come from this sales-product collaboration. Equally, the product team could find innovations using automation that makes it easier for sales to keep track of their leads. Unless you create incentives for teams to talk to each other, you could miss out on some great ideas that could drive business growth.

Scott Belsky, co-founder of Behance, noted in his book Making Ideas Happen (2010):

Most ideas are born and lost in isolation.

In this short video, Harvard Business Review explains how flexible startups leverage disruptive innovation to challenge the status quo set by bigger companies.

To foster cross-functional collaboration, apply these four strategies:

• Create shared innovation KPIs across departments. Ask for any ideas to be collaborative ones between teams, and for a minimum number of ideas to be created by the end of each brainstorming session. Why not give bonus points to teams with standout or multiple ideas?
• Use collaborative tools like Trello to share ideas visually and encourage accountability and transparency across departments.
• Take advantage of cross-functional team building exercises to strengthen colleague relationships and foster a more productive work environment.
• Assemble diverse project teams that use various skillsets. For instance, bring together your marketing and legal teams to ensure compliance-friendly messaging across your marketing channels, if applicable.

Encouraging departments to learn from one another drives better ideas, builds empathy, and strengthens communication across your organisation. Over time, this creates a more agile culture that can adapt to change and seize opportunities.

4. Reward creative contributions, not just results

Give shoutouts to your team’s creative contributions. They need freedom to test ideas – even if they don’t immediately work. If something doesn’t work, frame it as a learning experience of what not to do, which is still valuable.

For example, a team member suggests adding a chatbot to your website to improve customer support. After testing it, you find that most users still prefer email or phone support, and the chatbot hasn’t reduced ticket volume as expected.

Use what you’ve learnt about customer preferences to refocus your support strategy. Encourage your team to brainstorm new ways to deliver a more human experience, then test and implement the strongest, most viable ideas. This is an example of shaping workplace innovation while ensuring your efforts stay aligned with core KPIs.

Co-founder and former CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, once said:

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It’s best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations.

See our three tips below for encouraging creativity:

• Rotate Creative Leads. Let different team members take turns leading brainstorming sessions. Giving people the mic (even those who are usually quiet) can surface fresh ideas and build confidence in creative thinking.
• Share and celebrate creative efforts in an all-hands meeting. This improves visibility among teams and showcases different approaches to solving problems. For example, highlight how reducing customer onboarding times using automation tools led to the team coming up with further solutions.
• When was the last time you took your colleagues out for a meal? Team lunches are an example of how you can encourage building relationships. Remember to reward bold ideas and keep morale high to maintain momentum.

Celebrate the creative process, as well as outcomes, to reinforce a growth mindset and foster continuous innovation. A truly innovative workplace doesn’t rely on one-off initiatives. You want to create the conditions where experimentation, curiosity and collaboration are part of your company’s culture.

Drive innovation and grow your business

To inspire innovation in the workplace, you don’t need unlimited resources; you simply need to embrace fresh ideas and cultivate a culture that nurtures them.

Ready to transform your ideas into meaningful change? Explore our company formation packages and learn how setting up your business with the right foundations can support your journey towards growth and innovation.