Positive teams are those who thrive in a creative workplace environment. Maintaining the creative energies alive, especially when you are the boss and have multitude of activities to manage, cannot be an easy one. Staying creative all through the way to infuse creative ideas into the minds of your employees is another challenge, facing most employers, HR managers and business leaders.

Being creative at work can be beneficial to businesses, as it helps foresee some positive changes such as effective problem-solving approaches, more innovative marketing strategies, productive workforce, higher self development prospects and more capable leaders.

At the same time, a boss could benefit from the creativity atmosphere at work to retain the best talents, increase performance output and thus overall profits of the company.

However, some traditional leaders do not realize that an idea cannot be successfully implemented right away. It takes time to fullproof a creative idea that would work well for a business to succeed in the longer run.

Edison didn’t create a light bulb over a night and Bell didn’t invent the telephone within few hours. Creative ideas can only be implemented after trials and errors, mistakes and solutions are later derived to achieve the desired results.

Fortunately, leaders’ perspectives towards creativity has evolved significantly through time. According to Fast Company, 60 percent of global CEOs polled said they felt creativity was the most important leadership skill, higher than both integrity and global thinking.

See: How to Encourage Employee Creativity at Work without Promoting Dishonesty?

As a boss, it is important to keep your employees’ creativity alive. Through brainstorming sessions with the team at work and discussions with senior business leaders, here are some tried and tested formulas for bosses to keep creative energies pulsating at work:

Building a creative culture

The Millennial Survey indicates that 76% of millennials whose work culture is creative and inclusive say they have high levels of productivity.

It is joyful and fun to work in a creative workplace as people are encouraged to buzz around, accomplish the tasks without feeling pressured, discuss about new ideas with colleagues, and hold a project based on their original ideas.

People are happy when they are allowed to infuse creative channelisation of thoughts into their daily workings. This leads to higher attainment, self satisfaction and better levels of employee engagement at work.

Ownership of tasks and responsibilities

Ownership of the tasks and responsibilities is essential to boost employees’ productivity. As a boss, do not give much directions to your team, instead allow them to experience freedom and use their own form of creative expression in their workings to get the job executed on time.

Employees with a sense of ownership towards their job role are more committed towards work. Irrespective of the size of the project, the signature touch that talented professionals add to the final execution of tasks, makes them experience sense of pride and accomplishment.

Flexible timings

Creativity has a close relationship with good work-life balance. As a boss, ensuring employees have a good life-balance is vital. Instead of adhering to a strict 8 to 5 schedule of working five days a week,  some alternatives can be provided to employees to work at flexible working hours.

Employees might need extra time to reflect on their schedules before commencing work on a project, sometimes they might need days off for a vacation or some time away from work. As a boss, you can offer employees with work-from-home or flexitime arrangements, and part-time work schedules. Allow employees to decide what works best for them.

Flexi-time work arrangement is a kind of support system offered by bosses for better work-life balance, this brings in more creativity at work.

Being a boss is not easy to empower humans to put their best foot forward everyday, for they are not programmed robots. Humans are born with their own characteristics and creativity. It is better for the boss, HR managers and senior leaders to create a creative workplace that motivates the employees to come, work and give their best at work everyday of their lives.

Read also: Crowdsourcing in HR helps channelize creativity and boost productivity