You don't have to be Google to nurture a workplace culture that fosters high levels of creativity and innovation.ORLANDO, Fla.—Google is often showcased as the poster child for workplace creativity and innovation, in no small part because early on—in their pre-IPO statement of intention, no less—the company declared that, "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one."
Yet most conventional companies will never be a Google. Few have the deep pockets to subsidize perks like free gourmet meals, on-site dry cleaning and haircuts. But not all parts of an innovative work culture are a result of staggering fiscal returns; the larger themes can be adopted by any organization looking to boost employee innovation and morale.
Takeaways from Google's model that could be applied to any enterprise include a culture of trust, creativity in the recruitment process and a regard for the creative process so strong that every employee is expected to allocate 30 percent of their time to innovation.
However, analysts said that before organizations try to Google-ify their workplaces, they must first understand their own enterprise behaviors and their implications.
"Every organization, irrespective of enterprise personality, has some number of people that stifle and/or kill creativity. Leaders need to recognize where these inhibitors operate, and create an environment to mitigate the impact of negative behavior, and stimulate a creative and positive climate," said Susan Landry, analyst and vice president with Gartner Research, to an audience Oct. 9 at Gartner's 2007 IT Symposium, here, during a session called "The Creative Workforce and Culture: Build It and Innovation Will Come."
Landry said that innovation suppressors, which are factors that inhibit ideas from surfacing in a workplace, include: work force isolation, such as a geographically dispersed company, or one with many remote or mobile workers; high drama workplaces, in which employees are constantly putting out fires, or work around the clock; risk-averse individuals in visible roles, such as chief financial officer or chief security officer; and what Landry called "routinization" of workplace activities.
Even worse than the innovation suppressors are what Gartner analysts call innovation "killers": items which stamp out any ideas that surface. Such "killers" include: excessive cost-benefit analysis, including pro formas and return on investment; compliance cops; a glut of governance and outsourcing, which has a dulling impact on the residual work force; and what Gartner analysts called industry provincialism, such as "what's good for Google isn't relevant to our industry."
"The worst thing you can do to someone's job is to take away their ability to improve it," said Landry.
Tension was considered an essential workplace ingredient in combating equilibrium and ennui.
"Tension is obvious when an organization is in crisis, but it is also evident at the peak of success, because there is visibility and pressure to sustain the advantage," said Landry.
Organizations could artificially create tension through forced diversity, such as mixing employees with different backgrounds, skills, knowledge and attitudes toward work. Blurring boundaries, by creating destabilizing assignments which force collaboration and creativity amidst uncertainty, is also seen as a means to increase tension.
The analysts also argued that process maturity and creativity could coexist in a workplace. In IT, CMMI (The Software Institute's Capability Maturity Model Integrated) and ITIL were used as examples of standardized IT processes that IT leaders feared would stifle creativity, when research found that global standards often enabled workplace confidence through predictable, reliable processes.
