Innovation must be core to company culture

Innovation is what makes companies stand out from the crowd. It helps them to attract new customers and create leading products, as well as enables them to retain and attract top-notch talent.

Amid the ‘Great Resignation’, and particularly the highly competitive war for digital skills, retention has never been more important.

However, a survey of 1,000 chief innovation officers (CIOs) in 2021 by Logicalis found that companies are missing a trick around innovation and digital transformation.

Only 27% said innovation was part of the company culture, and 34% said innovation was confined to large-scale projects controlled by dedicated teams.

Prioritize tech and wellbeing

Instead of allowing innovation to be siloed to specific teams or departments, companies must ensure innovation is baked into their culture.

To do this, an employer must create the right environment for creativity and collaboration. This is where HR tech communication tools come in, particularly for hybrid distributed teams that most companies are grappling with.

According to Logicalis, “an updated approach to innovation and company-wide collaboration will enable businesses to improve productivity and gain a competitive edge.”

In addition to focusing on tech, Logicalis notes that CIOs know they need to dial-up employee experience at work. To retain talent, employees need to feel part of something bigger than their day-to-day workload.

50% of CIOs told Logicalise that they had to learn to focus more on wellbeing during the pandemic, while 80% plan to prioritize employee experience in the next five years to benefit productivity and engagement.

Talking about the findings, Logicalis CTO Toby Alcock noted: “Businesses don’t have to approach innovation with an ‘all-in’ strategy. It can start with optimizing operational processes such as empowering employees to build their own workflows or automating a process that was previously manual.

“The key to success is building an innovative culture where employees can surface and test new ideas quickly and providing the time, tools and processes for them to do so.

“By doing this, employees will produce ground-breaking ideas and solutions and in turn, will feel satisfied within their roles and employee turnover will decrease.

“Without taking these measures, businesses risk losing top talent to competitors that are more advanced.”