What do you do if your team is lacking motivation and inspiration in the workplace?

1 Identify the root cause

Before you can solve any problem, you need to understand what is causing it. Sometimes, the lack of motivation and inspiration in your team is not due to the task itself, but to other factors such as unclear goals, conflicting expectations, poor communication, or insufficient feedback. To identify the root cause of your team's dissatisfaction, you can use tools such as the 5 Whys, the Fishbone Diagram, or the Problem Statement. These tools help you ask the right questions, analyze the situation from different perspectives, and define the problem clearly and concisely.

2 Generate diverse and divergent ideas

Once you have a clear problem statement, you can start generating possible solutions. However, instead of jumping to the first or most obvious idea, you should encourage your team to think outside the box and explore a wide range of options. This is where creative problem solving techniques such as Brainstorming, Brainwriting, SCAMPER, or Mind Mapping can help. These techniques stimulate your team's imagination, creativity, and lateral thinking by breaking mental barriers, challenging assumptions, and combining different elements.

3 Evaluate and select the best ideas

After generating a large number of ideas, you need to narrow them down and select the ones that are most feasible, desirable, and impactful. To do this, you can use creative problem solving techniques such as the Six Thinking Hats, the PMI Method, or the NUF Test. These techniques help you evaluate the ideas from different angles, assess their pros and cons, and prioritize them according to their novelty, usefulness, and feasibility.

4 Implement and test the solutions

Finally, you need to turn the selected ideas into reality and test them in the real world. This is where creative problem solving techniques such as Prototyping, Experimenting, or Piloting can help. These techniques help you create tangible representations of your solutions, test them with your customers or stakeholders, and gather feedback and data. This way, you can validate your assumptions, learn from your failures, and improve your solutions.

By using these creative problem solving techniques, you can boost your team's motivation and inspiration in the workplace. You can also foster a culture of collaboration, learning, and innovation that will help your team overcome any challenge.