How to inspire creativity and reward good employees (like you and me) (page 3 of 3)

And when space is tight, she suggests building in as much privacy as possible. "Not everyone can have their own office but supervisors can, in a cubicle space, arrange to have visible barriers set up, like six-foot-high partitions between desks. It's the number of boundaries that counts in terms of reducing distractions and giving employees their own space. Both the sense of privacy and of being valued by one's supervisor can contribute positively to an employee's creative thinking."

Meanwhile, Cummings has cautionary words about reward systems that are based on seniority: the photo album for 10 years of service; the pin for 15 years; the watch for 25 years, etc. "Companies should ask themselves if they are rewarding seniority, quantity or quality," she says. "If you are rewarding seniority without rewarding quality, you can't expect employees to be appreciative. And a lot of systems will reward quantity because it's easier to measure than quality. But again, employees know the difference. What you want is high-quality, creative people thinking out of the box. Those are the people who should get rewarded. It sounds like common sense but you would be surprised how few firms do it well...It doesn't take long in my experience for employees to figure out that certain rewards are a sham."

Idea Generation
Part of Cummings' work looks at the relationship of idea generation to networks. "How do networks of coworkers, and the way in which workers fit into those networks, affect the kinds of ideas that are generated? What I have found so far is that frame-breaking ideas come from people who are boundary spanners.

A boundary spanner is a person who receives information, support, advice from other people who aren't themselves connected to each other. So a person might get technical data from three people who are in three different unrelated departments. If you do a network analysis - looking at who is talking to whom about what inside the firm - you find that the most innovative ideas come from employees who spend their time talking to unrelated others. These employees are essentially efficient and creative in how they spend the time interacting with co-workers. They don't talk to multiple people in the same department or group. Rather they spend the same amount of time talking to one person in each of a variety of different departments or groups. This has managerial implications in terms of setting people up in jobs where they are expected to talk to people in other groups rather than getting information from co-workers in the same department."

Cummings also notes the importance of giving employees feedback. "We know that one of the worst things a manager can do is ask people what they think and then never respond to the ideas they are given. A manager would have been better off not asking for input in the first place. Encouraging employees to offer their input into a decision, for example, increases the employees' commitment to the decision outcome, but only when managers either use that input, or give clear and detailed feedback about why they didn't. By asking for that input, and responding to it, managers are encouraging employees to think more creatively about what they do.



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