How to Encourage the Flow of Ideas in an Office

Nothing is more important for modern businesses than idea generation. That is, perhaps nothing will encourage the growth and continued success of your business more than incorporating an improved flow of ideas into your human resources training. With the decline of the heavy industrial base of America's twentieth-century economy, a service economy has grown up to replace it. Those services, in banking, consulting, and technology, all depend on human resources training that encourages new ideas to arise and become the innovations of tomorrow. Any company with human resources training that emphasizes the intellectual capital of its workforce will have a competitive edge.

The first trick to encouraging idea generation at your company is to establish an atmosphere of trust and teamwork. This goes beyond merely installing an anonymous suggestion box. Your human resources training has prepared you to act as a go-between for workers and senior management, and it's in this capacity that you'll act as the conduit for new ideas as they bubble to the surface. It is essential that the employees who are actively running the company feel safe bringing even their most pointed criticism to your department.

This isn't as easy as it seems at first. In many companies, material criticism is not only unwelcome, but can actually be punished in a hundred hard-to-spot ways that foster a rigid bunker mentality for employees and management alike. One of the great tasks of comprehensive human resources training is to consciously resist that mindset before it sinks in. Employees who feel they can't talk, and managers who feel they don't have to listen, might as well be arranging deck chairs on the Titanic for all the good they're doing their company.

Good human resources training goes beyond fostering a general air of tolerance and inclusion. There are concrete measures that can be taken to improve the flow of new ideas. One of the most productive measures was pioneered by the management of the Manhattan Project: regular cross-department meetings. In this model, the physicists working out the underlying science of the first atomic bombs would hold regular meetings with the engineers charged with translating their theory into a practical device. Members of these teams would also meet with military experts, security personnel, and others who might stimulate new ideas for the teams.

Regular meetings of this sort—between, say, customer service reps and the IT department, or between accounting and the people conducting the human resources training—will not only improve the flow of ideas across the company's internal divisions, but will actually help to break down those divisions and create the sense of teamwork you need to ensure the continued generation of new ideas in the first place.

Whether you're heading up the HR department for a small tech company on the coast, managing a large bank in the Midwest, or running in-house human resources training classes at a large government agency, improving the flow of ideas across your office will be the key to your success. Taking a few active measures to improve the flow of ideas will also have the benefit of making your office a better place for everybody.

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