This is a question that many entrepreneurs ask themselves, hesitant to grant independence to their employees. However, employees are often in the best position to bring innovative ideas that could increase the performance of their company. Granting autonomy to employees allows them to devote more time to their creative hobbies or research. But is it a good idea?
The importance of a climate of trust
Two professors from the University of Rochester (United States) emphasize the importance of a climate of trust. According to their research, everyone naturally seeks more autonomy and self-determination to develop their potential. This freedom promotes engagement and improves professional performance. Therefore, the company also benefits from it.
In addition, autonomy strengthens employees’ feelings of security and facilitates more open collaboration. Each employee gains freedom, expresses their authenticity more and feels useful to the company. Thus, his involvement increases. Finally, a climate of trust naturally stimulates creativity. It is therefore up to leaders to strengthen this environment to make it a real lever for development.
In what way?
There are several ways to encourage creativity:
- Promote conviviality: by organizing festive events, for the end of year celebrations or any other memorable date. These moments of pleasure allow your staff members to build relationships with each other and develop their creative spirit together.
- Encourage boldness: thanks to the climate of trust, you can establish another dimension in relation to failure or error in the event that one of your collaborators agrees to take risks within the framework of an innovative project. He will thus feel freer to try something new and will fully commit to it.
- Simplify procedures: trust and autonomy already exist? Very good! You must now take measures to promote the responsiveness and capacity for innovation of your employees. Make procedures more flexible, avoid meetings that last too long and no longer require tedious reports which represent so many obstacles to creativity.
- Give free rein to ambition: do not hesitate to share with your teams the objectives that you set for yourself and that you wish to achieve through their collaboration. Provide a clear vision of your projects, what you plan to undertake, transform and the reasons that push you to do so. The fact that you make them aware of all these details will give them confidence and inspire them to contribute to the realization of your projects.
Two convincing examples
The concept of participatory innovation which advocates the independence of workers in order to encourage their creativity has borne fruit and is at the origin of the growth of many companies. Here are two examples:
- A biscuit factory which employs more than 700 employees has set up an incubator to allow workers and managers to develop a project, during working hours.
- An Internet search engine has implemented a mechanism that divides the organization of the working time of its developers and engineers into two parts: 80% for the official mission and 20% for personal research.
Certain associations like Innov’Acteurs bring together best practices if you one day wish to develop this practice within your company. It’s up to you! Would you like to one day develop this practice within your company? Up to you !
