No matter where you are or what you do, innovation is usually the best key to success. It not only gives you the right edge to beat the competition, but it also paves the way for your employees to express their individuality through the corporate lens. To help you understand this process better, here are five key reasons for how performance indicators can empower your employees’ innovation.
Guidelines to Improvement
In all the world’s history, innovation and the creation of new ideas always come from a powerful driving force to push through a difficult problem. Therefore, the easiest way to empower innovation among your employees is to give them difficult problems that they can solve independently.
Unfortunately, much of the corporate world is divided into clear-cut, well-divided tasks. The least we want to happen is for our employees to waste precious corporate time thinking about how they should deal with a simple problem. So, how can we solve this?
Performance indicators give your employees the best of both worlds. While they need to do their mundane tasks to keep the company running, feedback can give them a sort of problem that they could work with. In this way, innovative skills will develop in even the weakest member of your team by guiding them toward the right path to success.
Finding the Problem
Furthermore, performance indicators can show you exactly where your company might be having problems. With this information, you can direct your employees to find solutions on their own, lending their thoughts and experiences into the way you run your company. This gives them the confidence to speak about solutions that they might have thought of instead of keeping quiet while thinking that they are not good enough.
Morale Boost
While on the topic of confidence, performance indicators can give a morale boost, which can empower innovation among your employees by letting them know that they are good enough. As with most people, your employees will want to be sure that they really can give good advice if they know that they are just as good as you say they are. Sometimes, constant praise may not be enough. And while the Dunning-Kruger effect may affect some members of your team, the more experienced members can give better solutions, throwing away the bad ideas and letting you focus only on those with the best outcomes.
On the other hand, performance indicators may also decrease morale, as is the case with those who consequently get bad performance every season. Fret not, though — as a leader to those in your care; your empathy will empower innovation and confidence in these employees, helping them improve over time.
Common Problems
Another way that performance indicators can help empower innovation lies in its utility as a common ground finder. Performance indicators can help you find problems that can be solved by various departments’ task forces, bringing various experts together to share their knowledge. This helps you make innovative solutions that you may never find without these people joining forces to reach a common goal.
Teamwork is crucial in solving any problem, regardless of how important or insignificant it may be. And with every previous problem solved together, each team member will remember it and bring their knowledge back to their teams. When you bring people from various departments to work together, these people will learn, remember, and apply what they know to their departments’ problems.
Starting Ground for New Hires
Lastly, performance indicators are important milestones for those who are new to the company. Being inexperienced in your company’s ways, performance goals will give them a good view over the kind of standards to which your company adheres. This is similar to how many people tend to learn best when they do something instead of reading or listening about it. And with these employees getting a better understanding of your company, they will be better able to adapt to your corporate culture and gain the confidence to give their input to their respective teams.
With your proper guidance, you can empower innovation in your teams by combining their strengths and experiences. After all, you are a company, a collection of people who work together to solve a common goal. While having a single, smart leader can be good, having a collective of smart people solving problems together is a far better and more efficient alternative.