INNOVATION
Ideas without implementation Separately, my colleagues and I researched the culture, structure, systems and impacts on employee wellbeing and innovation in our aforementioned surveys of an emergency services call centre and a mid-sized city’s police department in Canada. On the whole, our results support the patterns found in the government’s national survey. Among 128 respondents to the emergency call centre survey, 61 per cent agreed that innovation was important to the high‑paced, high-risk and stressful work they undertook, but only 36 per cent said it occurred. Furthermore, while 90 per cent agreed it was important to be “willing to quickly admit to errors and correct mistakes”, only 38 per cent indicated that their organisation did this. Meanwhile, 83 per cent agreed that change management as a culture-based action was an important thing to do, but only 40 per cent cited evidence of this occurring. This piece of research also found that innovation was strongly linked to employees feeling that they would be supported for presenting a new idea, the extent of collaboration among team members, having some involvement in decision-making and the presence of effective internal communication. However, all those measures came in at under 60 per cent agreement with the relevant statements. The conclusion is that this particular call centre does not have a culture of innovation, likely reflecting the “Successful leadership should blend the transformational, directive, situational and transactional”
ongoing negative publicity in relation to failures in service delivery. Consequences of failing to innovate Police services are another high-profile and necessary community service tasked with responding constantly to ongoing changes in crime, population growth, social and economic issues and public expectations. As such, our survey focused on the need for innovation in the face of rapid changes. Among 125 responses from both civilian and sworn police officers, we found that many of the vital ingredients for successful workplace innovation were missing within this department. These factors include employee engagement, leadership that is open to change and effective communication and collaboration, as well as a culture that values and respects employees – the absence of which results in a reduced level of public confidence in policing. For example, only around half of employees (51 per cent) felt that their department was open to change. In addition, just 34 per cent agreed that the department was innovative, while 47 per cent thought that employees’ knowledge and skills were recognised. The failure of innovation in this workplace can be explained by the failures of cultural and leadership factors that have shown a strong correlation to successful workplace innovation among other employers. Based on our analysis, these include being open to change and transformation, encouraging constructive criticism and being willing to admit to errors and correct mistakes. It also extends to nurturing a culture that emphasises employees’ emotional wellness, ensuring they feel valued and respected, rewarding good performance and delivering useful internal communication. The links to successful innovation outlined earlier in this article reflect a healthy workplace culture and are now associated with exemplary leadership. Yet they were also rated poorly to average by the employees surveyed. Taken together, the insights gleaned from these wide‑ranging investigations into workplaces in Canada offer several conclusions about what successful innovation requires in our current climate of fast‑moving external environments. While the results confirm many key factors that are presented as core competencies needed by today’s business leaders, the reality is that gaps in both acceptance and performance persist in many organisations.
Eli Sopow is an associate professor in the MBA programme at University Canada West in Vancouver, Canada. Sopow has conducted more than 500 research studies of employee workplaces in Canada over the course of his career, investigating linkages between culture, structure, systems and the workplace climate. Previously, Sopow served as the director of research for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police national change management project
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Business Impact • ISSUE 2 • 2024
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