Every employer dreams of having the perfect working environment. One that will retain the best talent, hire the best recruits and make them stand out in their industry.
Having a positive work environment means that you're more productive, be more creative, deliver a higher standard of work and, crucially, have more fun.
After all, what's the point of working if it can't be exciting, intriguing and helping you grow as a person?
This is of course the scourge of most large companies, as you grow you lose that chemical reaction that helped you to be the leader in your field.
Having a startup mentality is key to this.
Become the innovator
Do not be satisfied by homogeneity.
What do you do in your workplace to do things differently to your colleagues or the established ways of your company?
Be fearless
Don't be afraid to fail.
It's a cliché of course, but it remains true. If you are restricted in what you do by your own conventions, you will fall in to the same patterns of delivering work and, as a result, work that does not make you or your clients stand out.
Challenge everything
Do not accept what is given is correct.
Approach each task like a child - ask 'why' to everything you encounter. Just because something has been done the same way for years, doesn't mean it is the right way now. Even if you do the same task regularly and get the same results, always ask 'why' - interrogating data might lead to a new unexpected insight.
Be Social
Human interactions inspire us to be more creative.
I love the example of Pixar as a company that tries to make sure their employees are as social as possible.
In Jonah Lehrer's book Imagine: How Creativity Works he tells of how Steve Jobs laid out the new Pixar working space to ensure that people would mix and spark creativity:
"[Jobs] insisted there be only two bathrooms in the entire Pixar studios, and that these would be in the central space. And of course this is very inconvenient. No one wants to have to walk 15 minutes to go to the bathroom. And yet Steve insisted that this is the one place everyone has to go every day. And now you can talk to people at Pixar and they all have their 'bathroom story.' They all talk about the great conversation they had while washing their hands.
" ... He wanted there to be mixing. He knew that the human friction makes the sparks, and that when you're talking about a creative endeavor that requires people from different cultures to come together, you have to force them to mix; that our natural tendency is to stay isolated, to talk to people who are just like us, who speak our private languages, who understand our problems. But that's a big mistake. And so his design was to force people to come together even if it was just going to be in the bathroom."
So, what do you do?
Now, you may not be able to shift the location of the bathrooms in your workplace to change your working environment, but how about changing the decor?
Artsicle is a great service that allows you to rent art and regularly change it to keep your workplace fresh.
It's a simple start.
What do you do to innovate your work environment?