Have you ever had the feeling that your workday was taken up by small, repetitive tasks whilst your best ideas had to be put aside? You’re not alone.
In many companies, employee creativity drowns in manual processes and administrative routines. It’s a shame, because creativity is precisely what drives both innovation and company growth.
What if you instead had a daily routine where the most trivial tasks ran on autopilot. A daily routine where you had time to focus on the challenges and tasks that make a real difference – and which are actually motivating to solve.
Does this sound like something from a dream or a distant future? It doesn’t have to be.
By streamlining your work processes and automating some of the boring, repetitive tasks, you and your colleagues will get much more time on your hands for letting your creativity unfold and creating true value for the company.
Once the heavy burden of ‘pointless’ tasks is lifted from your shoulders, you’ll have the capacity to innovate and take the company to the next level. Let’s take a look at how you can unlock your creativity by simplifying your daily workflows.
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Key takeaways:
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The vision of a workplace without friction
What exactly is a workplace without friction?
On an average workday, each and every one of the 150 million employees in Europe alone makes about 17,500 decisions. That’s a whopping 2-3 billion work-related decisions – every single day.
Each of these decisions has the potential to either create value or destroy it.
But how many of these decisions are spent on administrative tasks that could’ve been automated?
Imagine if we could have workdays where every decision was about creating value – about strategic choices, creative solutions and human relations.
No more manual document management and hours of reporting that doesn’t move anything.
This doesn’t just free up time – it frees up mental energy, too. When you don’t have to use your brainpower on tedious admin, you’re instead free to invite deeper focus and creative thinking inside.
But remember: just because we want to do away with the friction, it doesn’t mean we want to do away with human contact. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
When we get rid of the administrative burden, we create more room for meaningful human interaction. The spontaneous coffee breaks that spark great ideas; the focused project meetings where everyone can contribute fully because their heads aren’t filled with practical concerns.
It’s about using technology to strengthen – not to replace – human relations.
If we’re to get closer to the goal of a frictionless workplace, it’s about understanding the ‘decision hierarchy’ – about understanding which of the daily 17,500 decisions create real value through human involvement, and which we could benefit from leaving to intelligent and automated systems.
In other words, you must find the right balance. Automation should feel like a helping hand – not a cold shoulder.
Watch Mette Hindborg Gade, Chief Product Officer here at Pleo, talk more about the frictionless workplace. [Timestamp: 13.10-14.27]
3 concrete tips for unlocking creativity in the workplace
Talking about the importance of creativity isn’t enough to light the creative spark in the workplace: you also need to remove the practical obstacles barring the way.
1. Automate the repetitive tasks
Most workdays are filled with small, manual processes that take up more time than they create value – reporting, invoicing and travel expenses, among others. By using AI and automation tools, you can cut down on these routine tasks and free up employee energy for more meaningful activities.
In fact, The Finance and Business Synergy Report – our report featuring insights from more than 2,800 financial decision makers across Europe – shows that 76% of respondents believe expense management tools create more value than internal communication platforms. A brilliant example of how much value your company stands to gain from looking into how you can automate your processes.
What you can do: Map all recurring tasks and determine what can be automated. Consider investing in software to effectively manage your invoicing and approval processes so your employees can instead focus on developing new products, improving the customer experience and solving complex problems.
2. Clean up your meeting culture
Many companies have poor meeting culture. They either have too many meetings that could’ve been an email, or their meetings are unnecessarily long because they’re poorly structured and/or prepared. These meetings are draining and take up time that could’ve been spent on focused work.
What you can do: Implement guidelines for determining which meetings are necessary and who should participate. You could also introduce meeting-free days or set focus time during the week where no meetings are scheduled and everyone is free to focus on their individual tasks. When you do have meetings, make sure they’re focused and have a clear purpose so all participants leave the meeting knowing exactly what the next steps are.
3. Build a culture around innovation
Creativity is often limited due to fear of failure or doing something ‘wrong’. If you want engaged employees who solve problems in new ways, you need to give them space to explore new ideas and experiment.
What you can do: Make sure to establish clear frameworks that allow for testing out concepts without fear of the consequences of making small mistakes. Hold innovation days, hackathons or workshops where teams work together on ideation for everything from new products to improvements to processes, workflows and collaboration.
