Companies are constantly vying for any competitive edge they can get in today’s day and age. There has been an oversaturation of the market, where people are likely to find multiple businesses selling nearly identical products. If you’re trying to help your business succeed, you need to be able to make choices that others do not. This does not mean you’re necessarily opting into high-risk, high-reward scenarios, but that you’re adapting to the benefits technology and better leadership practices can bring to your business. With the help of this guide, you will have a better understanding of how to bring modern innovation into your business and help it thrive. “Companies are constantly vying for any competitive edge they can get in today’s day and age, especially in the field of paint estimating services.”
Define what innovation is for you
Talking about innovation in general terms is counterintuitive, as you need every team member to understand their goal points and the methods needed to achieve them. What can be qualified as innovative for your company is highly contextual, which is why you need to be able to measure and define success within the business. In order to do so, you would need key performance indexes and a framework that can take that information and compile it into a concise, useful document.
While businesses in the past needed to hire multiple employees and spend months going over performance reviews and sale metrics to gain this insight, technological advancements in data science make these tasks much easier. As long as you have the capital needed to afford a system analyst salary and an enterprise resource planning software license, you will be able to build a digital framework that can measure your KPIs. The analyst will ensure the software is calibrated to your company’s IT needs, and enterprise network monitoring will be able to transform the data into reports understandable by you and your board of directors.
Focus on soft skills while hiring
Various large companies like Levi’s conduct group interviews while bringing on new hires to the team. This has the benefit of interviewing multiple, similarly qualified people for different comparable positions. In terms of innovation, it allows you to focus on hiring differently. Not every candidate will be imaginative and inventive, and you cannot judge their ability to come up with ideas, adapt to unexpected situations, or communicate effectively through a resume.
The group interview format would allow you to watch these candidates interact with their potential co-workers and give you an insight into their character. You could measure soft skills like communication, collaboration, adaptability, etc. You would also be able to tell which candidates are ambitious, clever, strong-willed, or opinionated and decide who would best fit into your business’s work culture.
During this process, you don’t need to safe-hire. You might find someone who fits the job on paper and has the relevant work experience. Still, if candidates have already done this job a hundred times, they’re unlikely to bring new ideas to the table. While this method can require both group and secondary one-on-one interviews, they can be well worth the effort. Moreover, innovation should ideally start from the top. Instead of leaving HR to their own devices, use this method to help them onboard the best possible hires for the company.
Make comfortable spaces for them
Some companies think having common spaces or recreational rooms for employees to relax are incentives that convince viable workers to join them. Au contraire, some believe rooms like this are a waste of time and would decrease productivity. Both of these companies are incorrect.
Parker C. McKenna, a member of the Society for Human Resource Management, stated creating a space to allow employees to roam freely breeds more innovative thinking. It moves them out of a cold and clinical work environment and can spark inventive ideas. McKenna adds that workspaces with couches, tables, and smartboards where employees can gather in groups help people depict their ideas. If you doubt it, remember that Google is one of the most successful companies globally, and they have so many slides in their office that Business Insider decided to rank them.
Train the right type of leaders
If you’ve been in the business for a while, you know that the people who help your company the most generally have ambitions to become leaders. If you manage to hire these people at the start of their careers, you have the unique opportunity to shape them into the type of leaders you need. After all, you can’t stay on top of every facet of the business, so you will be dividing the departments into teams and appointing internal leaders and managers.
These are the people who will be making the day-to-day decisions and value judgments. As they grow into their position, you should encourage them to grow not only into the work culture you currently have, but the one you hope to create at the company.
One of the best ways to do this is by giving them the space to take risks. If employees feel like they can attempt something new and different without fear of being fired, they are more likely to develop unexpected solutions. It also makes them feel more invested in the company and would build loyalty towards you. Companies like better up offer their employees the chance to learn research, design their own business experiments, and understand risk tolerance. This work environment helps create leaders that can take reasonable yet useful risks for the benefit of the business.
Conclusion
Innovation can help define your company’s future and give you the edge you need to stay ahead of your competitors. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a small mom-and-pop shop or about to celebrate your 10th business anniversary, you should regularly be seeking ways to come up with creative and original ideas. This could be as simple as hiring the right people or as nuanced as using specialized software to measure the performance of your company’s various departments. As long as you have a concrete, contextual idea of what innovation looks like for your business and provide your works with the space, training, and technology needed to bring out their best ideas, you will thrive.
