Getting the team involved
The best ideas come from collaboration, no one person or organisation has all the good ideas. If the whole team is encouraged to contribute creatively and have an equal share of voice in creative discussions, staff will feel their ideas are being heard and you’ll create a culture that will feed off a creative spirit. We hold daily creative sessions and share ideas in our weekly meetings, encouraging and welcoming feedback throughout.
Couple this with a fun environment and you’ll reap the rewards. We celebrate our creative successes; we hold weekly yoga sessions and our last away day even included axe throwing! If it’s your birthday you get the day off and there’s always beer in the fridge. This fun aspect of the work will be repaid many times over by dedicated and motivated, like-minded team members.
Making the space work
It is key to create a physical environment that stimulates creativity and inspires the team and clients to want to work for you, or in our case, to commission us. Breakout spaces, comfy seating, consideration for interior design, encouragement to use the space and understanding how it’s used are all important factors. We’ve just successfully convinced our landlord to allow us to build a roof-top deck for meetings and creative sessions, which is used daily. Keeping the environment fresh is also important – move things around and change the perspective regularly. Finally, having the tools to do the job with the latest software/hardware and facilities will only ensure the team know you’re serious about inspiring creativity within the work place.
Defining the creative process
Having a balance between creative freedom and a sense of creative direction is important to ensure that creativity has focus. Offering plenty of scope and encouragement to explore creative options and a culture where learning from failure is not frowned upon. Too many rules will only hinder the process. For creative businesses like ours, all of this will ensure the brief is answered, the work is completed in a timely fashion and the client is happy.
Ensure you allow enough time
If you want to encourage creativity in your organisation, you certainly need to allow time to do so. It’s not just a quick 10 minutes at lunchtime but proper sessions, with pre-planned, well-defined briefs, the right people in the room and a creative leader to drive the session. Encouraging all team members to engage and participate in the creative session, ensuring all ideas are heard and considered is crucial. If the team feel they are contributing they will only want to continue.
Harvest the talent
Strong creativity and original thinking is essential to our business and therefore employing the best possible creative minds is vital to our success. We are always looking for the next team member through our network, our website and monitoring our competition. We do not just wait for a vacancy to arise. We also have a graduate internship programme, taking the best talent from the most appropriate courses on a three to four-month trial. Several current full-time members of the team were recruited via this method. The reputation of the business and its focus on creativity acts as an attractor to the best creative minds and encourages those already in the business to stay inspired.
Darren Henderson is managing director of Jason Bruges Studio
