Creating a culture of creativity

There tends to be the misconception that employees are only productive when they are quietly sitting at their desks. However, not all activities are best completed in this typical, static, way.

Activity-based working is extremely popular, demonstrating that people can effectively use different settings for different tasks. But what happens between these work settings? Is your movement between the settings a waste of time and devoid of value as you are not in a designated area?

We know that physical movement and moving away from screens is an important part of personal wellbeing but our recent LinkedIn poll also revealed some interesting findings. We found that nearly three-quarters of people find they are at their most creative when they are moving between work settings. This creativity and movement-based inspiration is something that should be encouraged.

Creativity is important in all roles in an organisation. It is not just artistic creativity, it can be approaches to problems, a way to look at the data and much more. Creativity needs to be encouraged in the workplace but to facilitate this, organisations need to make sure their culture allows it to flourish.

If they want to encourage this, workplaces need to create a culture in which it is acceptable to see colleagues walking around the workspace and enabling creative thinking. They may wander to the kitchen deep in thought or go on a lap of the building when ideating with a colleague. Employers should be clear that this is acceptable and encouraged behaviour, that they don’t think it is a waste of time or just an in-between stage between productivity. They need to show that they see the value in the movement for increasing productivity and model this behaviour for employees.

Hybrid working has shown that the traditional way is not always the best. Our in-office practices need to reflect the diversity of the employees and the way they work. An open and accepting office culture can help people to work in a way that benefits them and, ultimately, the organisation.