Creating an innovative environment in a hybrid or remote workplace doesn’t just happen, it takes support and bravery from every member of the team. Adapavist’s CTO Jon Mort shares three ways to create the conditions for innovation to flourish.
In an IT organisation, your ability to innovate is your biggest asset. It’s also one of the hardest to maintain, dependent as it is on your engineers and developers having the headspace to be creative, the ability to share ideas and the mindset to learn from failure as much as success. It’s reliant on the alchemy of teamwork, the magic that happens when people collaborate. Fostering that in today’s hybrid and remote business environment takes strategy.
Over the past three years, more and more companies have adopted remote and hybrid work as the norm (for many in IT, it already was), yet some are still struggling to adapt to the digital processes they now rely on to bring new products to the market. One major challenge has been finding the right software tools to extract innovation from their organisation’s knowledge workers. Another is creating an innovation culture among colleagues with different IP and physical addresses.
A recent McKinsey & Company report looked at this human side of innovation and found that the employee experience of innovation correlates highly with an organisation’s overall success at innovating. Creating this virtuous circle relies–among other things–on finding processes and platforms that give employees this positive experience.
How do you do that? Here are three strategies that have helped us.
1. Use a platform to that fosters innovation agility
Ensuring productivity in remote and hybrid settings requires structure. For development teams looking to bring innovative new ideas to market, the best way to create structure is to provide a platform.
Leading-edge IT and engineering teams increasingly rely on platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions to structure their asynchronous work setups. This approach ensures developers can focus on providing real customer value rather than building and configuring infrastructure. As a result, business agility increases through rapid development with faster and more frequent delivery of functionality. PaaS also offers access to tools, templates, and code libraries that can reduce development time and simplify processes.
2. Create a safe environment for innovation with hackathons
Digital organisations must continue to foster the idea that ‘If you can think it, you can do it’ to boost innovation. However, without in-person connections that can be difficult, especially when companies onboard employees virtually and employees are asked to share outside-the-box ideas with colleagues they’ve never met.
I encourage teams to use hackathons. Hackathons enable programmers to engage in collaborative projects in a safe environment with no wrong answers or dumb ideas. Colleagues can step away from their day-to-day roles to contribute to open-sourced ideas and collaborate on new concepts or enhancements to existing products.
The innovative feedback these scenarios provide is far better than what you get in a typical work environment because the team is less inhibited with both the original ideas and the responses to thoughts.
3. Engage and empathise more with your teammates
One radically simple way to find out what your team needs to help them be more innovative is to ask. Let them tell you what the barriers are. For example, you might think that digital communication is working well, but my organisation’s Reinventing Work Report found that sixty percent of people say they ‘regularly,’ ‘occasionally,’ or ‘always’ feel invisible to their colleagues on digital platforms despite their interactions and posts. Communication fatigue and sensory overload are real and inhibit creativity.
When asked what improvements they would recommend to management, the top answer was that leaders need to show more empathy for employees. Another common answer was wanting to be asked for employee feedback. Put your workers in a position to succeed by letting them know that their opinion is valued and that their work has meaning.
Making your company more innovative can sound like a nebulous task. However, there are practical ways to create the right conditions for innovation in a hybrid context. As Einstein said, “innovation is not the product of logical thought, although the result is tied to logical structure.” Get the soil right and the seeds will grow.
