Innovation is one key to cultivating a thriving municipality. Continually finding new ways to increase efficiency and effectiveness while overcoming hurdles keeps operations running smoothly. Local residents maintain peace of mind knowing that government services will remain in effect and continue to make their lives easier.

Here are six ways to promote innovation in your municipal workplace.

Hire for Culture

Bring on team members who blend with your municipality’s culture. They must embrace your municipality’s vision and goals and collaborate on reaching objectives. Teammates should also seek out different perspectives for solving problems and increasing efficiency to keep your municipality moving forward.

Bring Aboard Passionate People

Hire employees who are passionate about what they do. When they care about their work, they’re excited to come in each day and help your municipality smoothly function. Finding ways to improve operations will keep them engaged in their work and leading by example.

Encourage Diversity

Create a team full of diversity. Employees with different backgrounds, interests and capabilities are faster at solving problems and finding new ways to accomplish work in less time than teams with similar thoughts and ideas. Celebrating individuality results in out of the box ideas and approaches to move operations to a new level.

Promote Vacations

Innovation happens when people are rested and refreshed, so remind teammates to use all their vacation days. Our brains need to disengage for a healthy work-life balance. Your team cannot come up with brilliant ideas when they’re exhausted.

Provide Brainstorming Sessions

Encourage everyone to come with ideas on a certain topic. Support all ideas, regardless of personal opinions. Promote development of each idea until it’s either not feasible or there’s enough detail to begin developing a plan for implementation. Make the idea reality as quickly as possible so teammates continue to think of new ways to improve operations.

Support Experimentation

Allow team members to try new things and learn from their mistakes. Encourage them to find out what went wrong and how to correct it to achieve desired results. Continue working on the issue until it’s resolved.

Find an Innovation-Focused Municipal Job

Find an innovation-focused municipal job through MuniTemps. Use your creativity and forward thinking to help your local government continue to improve the lives of fellow community members. Contact us today!