Building a business which constantly innovates and evolves takes time and dedication. It isn’t a one-time effort, it’s something you need to hard wire into your culture and everything you do as a business.

It starts with injecting a sense of curiosity and continuous improvement in the DNA of the people within the organisation. You need to encourage behaviours where people are constantly looking for ways to improve things for the customer or change processes to make things easier for employees. Foster a culture where your people are truly accountable for making a difference to how the business operates and feel empowered to act.

But there are many businesses that don’t have the foundations in place yet to make a culture of innovation and continuous improvement the norm.

Here are some tips to get you started:

• Make sure that your values and behaviours include innovation and continuous improvement at their core. Without this place it’s hard to reinforce the idea that taking accountability and responsibility is down to every individual. Basic Fit recently launched a new behavioural framework for their leaders that sets the expectation on how they want them to lead the charge when it comes to innovation. An organisation that isn’t afraid to disrupt their sector or blaze a trail. But it’s their intentional focus on making sure their leaders understand the innovative behaviours that need to be lived that will ensure they’ll continue to do this in the future.

• Design into your employee experience opportunities that encourage people to come up with new ideas to drive business growth. Bacardi Limited ran an incredibly successful NEXTGEN programme to challenge their people to grow their business. TWISTAILS was one of the innovations that made it to market - so the programme wasn’t only empowering and fun, it has driven commercial value. This agility and problem-solving mentality that’s in the DNA of their culture also enabled them to continue to grow during the peak of COVID.

• Tell compelling stories about what your business is doing to innovate and challenge the competition. How are you entering new markets and changing up the game? But remember to share the things that have worked and those that didn’t. Being transparent about failures helps build psychological safety, which gives people the confidence to try something new or speak up about a game changing idea.

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We’ve only scratched the surface here but if you’re looking to build a culture of innovation and want to know where to start, get in touch with us at hello@unitedcultureco.com.