WORKPLACE INNOVATION DDI
Singapore - Improving the innovation capability of the workforce for continuing business performance has become the biggest challenge for senior leaders to overcome as the economy picks up.
According to a McKinsey Global Survey on Leadership through the crisis and after in September, 46% of senior leaders polled deemed innovation as the most important organisational capability needed to maintain their company's growth after the financial crisis. Simply put, innovation is required in order to overcome the top two business challenges of acquiring and developing the right talent and improving customer relationships after the crisis. This is a huge increase from 33% of leaders who felt that innovation was vital during the downturn in the previous survey.
"Most companies during the crisis obviously were focused on survival," explains Ian Till, general manager of Development Dimensions International (DDI) Asia Pacific. "But as we move out of the crisis, there is a need to drive innovation, an innovative culture in the organisation."
The same sentiments were reflected in the quick poll taken at this morning's breakfast meeting organised by DDI, with around 50 HR practitioners agreeing that creating an innovative work culture was vital. Yet they believe that no one in their organisation truly understands how the company defines innovation even though 58% said their "top management has a clear commitment to innovation".
But it could be a matter of "actions versus words" because senior leaders are still not allocating sufficient resources to support innovation despite saying otherwise. In Till's opinion, many business leaders are still practicing caution which means most of them are not in the right frame of mind for innovation yet. "They haven't made that mental switch from cost control, productivity, efficiency to growth and innovation," says Till. "As a result, while employees have all these ideas, the management are not necessarily going to put in place time, effort and resources to support that culture."
This is again reflected by 85% of the event's HR participants who revealed that their organisations do not have an easy-to-use system to capture and share innovative ideas. To create the right work processes for innovation, Till says there is a need to promote a culture that is open to bottom-up feedback and encourages innovative ideas at all levels in the organisation. Thankfully, an overwhelming 92% said their senior leaders do encourage peers to come up with new ideas.
Sharing ideas can be systematised through focus group discussions or tea sessions to increase the amount of input or it can be even done informally. What's most important, says Till, is not the type of process HR implement but the support from the top management. "If you really want to drive the culture, it cannot be an HR initiative. It has to be driven from the senior levels of the organisation."
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