How to Engage Innovators in Your Dream Team?

In the quest for originality, companies may lose sight of one important aspect – in order to be innovative, you have to recruit innovators. Among the top management, this topic becomes a hot button, along with personnel employment and future human resource development. Every year, enterprises lock horns with each other in pursuit of the lucid minds.

Enhancement of goodwill and employee incentive programs are an uphill fight for lots of companies, especially for startups. By and large, the latter sometimes don’t have enough money even for product development and its marketing. So, how can you kindle potential employees’ interest? Which tools to use in order to do this? Keep reading and you will get the answers.

Human beings are relational

First things first, let’s look through the history of management. Since 1930, when the foundations for the first human relations school was laid in Hawthorne, an importance of social relations, motivation, and employee satisfaction for business productivity became known worldwide. The results of the Hawthorne effect set the world of management on fire.

This experiment proved that social factors affect the productivity of labor, which turned out to be a surprise at that time, believe it or not. The main idea of the school – focus on good working environment, not only on mechanical actions and task completion. The experiment showed that when social factors are taken into account, people work in the most effective way and go to work with great relish.

Three pillars of motivation

As an employer, you have to understand that except a competitive salary you are to offer your workers something else. Work process goes more effectively if you apply passion and enthusiasm. What are the sources of these emotions? The sources hide in the answer to the question ”Why am I doing this?” Here are the most common answers:

• Money.
• Development. It could be studying, professional advancement, or sharing experience with interesting people.
• Professional recognition. This is achieved when your staff feels satisfied, when you do justice to them, and when they lack nothing while doing their work.
  

Of course, these pillars will work best in conjunction. This brings us to the conclusion that arguably the most effective tool for motivating staff is by creating an organizational culture.

Follow the leaders

Let’s take a look at examples of organizational culture from such market leaders as Apple, Netflix, Blizzard etc. The thing they have in common is that all of them are unique and tempting for applicants. For instance, let’s run through the organizational culture of Netflix, a company that specializes in providing online streaming media and video-on-demand. The culture of Netflix amazes with its out of the box thinking: they are the embodiment of perfectionism, self-discipline, and, herewith, high efficiency.

On the one hand, as they mention on their website, they focus on managers’ judgment through the “keeper test” for each of their workers. The managers should imagine the situation where a particular member of the team is thinking of quitting for another company. The manager should then ask himself a question: “Will I try hard to keep him from leaving?” If the answer is No, this inferior is paid a fair wage so the company can find another member for their dream team. A bit harsh, don’t you think?

On the other hand, Netflix is strict, but fair. If a worker has a perfect history in the company and now he is going through a rough patch, Netflix gives him another chance. Therefore, if the company is caught in a similar situation, the team will follow suit and stick with it longer.

Another example is Blizzard Entertainment, an American video game developer and publisher. Its employees are allowed to play games right in the office, they celebrate the anniversary of the company in Las-Vegas, and have access to many more goodies. What is more, Blizzard established a practice of the Service Award ceremonies. For the 2nd, 5th, 10th, 15th, and 20th anniversaries of working in the company the staff member receives steins, swords, shields, rings, and helms as a gift. What do you think about such merchandise? As you may notice, the main idea is to differentiate from other companies in the segment that are also in search of innovators.

How to create your perfect organizational culture?

You have to establish a culture which is a sum of values and goals of your company. Moreover, it should be supported by particular actions and different combinations of rewards. Alas, eventually this system can become quite unmanageable. That’s why it is so important to have a top-notch planning tool like Roadmap Planner.

Easy-to-use and convenient, our Gantt Chart View and Flexible Timeline features will help you to visualize the needed balance of events and goodies for your team. The Task Dependency Compliance feature will show you logical connections between company values and correspondent events. As a result, you will have a visual presentation of the actions directed at improving the job climate of your company.

Engaging innovators to your team, you have to give them back in turn. Download Roadmap Planner and create a perfect workplace for your dream team.