Experimentation brings innovation: Create an experimental workplace

In an increasingly noisy digital age, you need your product or service to stand out so people choose you over other companies. 

To find solutions that get your target audience’s attention, you can foster a culture of experimentation in your workforce. Allowing employees to try — and fail — is how you’ll find innovative ideas that change the game.

What’s experimentation in the workplace? 

Experimentation in the workplace involves asking employees to question the status quo, try out ideas even if they fear failure, and embrace change. Leaders also encourage cross-departmental brainstorming to break down silos, which increases the chance teams land on innovative ideas brought about through collaboration. 

Encouraging experimentation also involves bringing together unique perspectives across professional hierarchies. Managers encourage upward communication from entry-level employees about what to try and procedures to change. Leaders might ask staff at every level to present their ideas, trials, and failures to team members. 

An experimental workforce also prioritizes research on industry trends and innovations to pivot quickly when new technologies arise. They try to be one of the first companies to embrace these advancements.

Why you should foster a culture of experimentation

Pinning innovation into the fabric of your business requires drive, conviction, and constantly returning to the drawing board. But it pays off. Here are a few benefits of encouraging experimentation in your workforce:

• Saves you money: Trying out ideas helps you decide if a solution is worth investing in. Rather than diving into the market headfirst with all your resources, experimentation separates good ideas from bad ones.
• Increases everyone’s knowledge: Open brainstorming and testing expand your business’s cognitive diversity. The more comfortable people feel sharing, the wider the pool of experiences and perspectives all employees can learn from. 
• Provides a way to implement systematic changes: Experiments allow you to systematically break down changes into smaller pieces. Rather than launching a complex new service, you can progressively build, test, modify, and release interventions.
• Drives growth: According to a study by McKinsey, crisis-fueled experimentation was the main driver of organic growth for companies during the pandemic. Companies that refocused quickly, invested more resources, and experimented with new technologies accelerated faster than others.
• Everyone enjoys greater success: The quicker you fail, the faster you'll reach success if you’re resilient. So leaders who make their staff feel comfortable rather than afraid of the occasional disappointment increase their chance of success. 
• Increases employee retention: Employees want to feel valued at work. And you can showcase this value by listening to and trying out their ideas. 
• Boosts employee morale: A/B testing allows employees to clearly see their accomplishments because of the quantified results. They can also more easily share this information — in a spreadsheet, during a presentation — than qualitative accomplishments like “My yearly review went very well.” 
• Encourages curiosity: Inquisitive employees are more likely to ask deeper questions and avoid “status quo” solutions. This curiosity can lead them to unique ideas or problem-solving outcomes compared to staff who are encouraged to think inside the box.

How to build a culture of experimentation: 8 ways

Unironically, creating a culture of experimentation involves running experiments to figure out what works best for your business. Here are eight methods for encouraging innovation at work:

1. Practice humility

Humility in leadership means accepting your knowledge gaps and mistakes. And when you’re vulnerable with your staff and admit you don’t have all the answers, you gain their trust and make them feel comfortable trying out ideas. 

A fundamental step in creating a culture of experimentation is opening the floor to everybody in the organization. Rather than taking charge of brainstorming or being responsible for coming up with every solution, step aside and listen to help workers fine-tune their ideas. 

2. Make failure your friend

In a culture of experimentation, everything won’t go as planned. But that’s the point. Experimentation shows you the right path to innovation by illuminating the roads that lead to nowhere. 

When you accept failure as part of the process and not a roadblock to success, you also build important soft skills. This includes being cognitively flexible, resilient to challenges, and motivated to tackle tasks and achieve goals. 

3. Drive with data

You can’t test ideas if you don’t know where you currently stand in your market. You won’t know who you’re targeting and how to measure success. So conduct market research and assess customer data to understand where your solution fits.

If your marketing department doesn’t have a dedicated team of research analysts, consider hiring a consultant. They’ll help run controlled experiments, build case studies, and outline risks and benefits. This allows you to unify subjective ideas with data-driven insights to launch effective and creative solutions.

4. Don’t reinvent the wheel

Your team doesn’t need to invent an entirely new solution to your target audience’s problem. Experimentation also involves improving current products and services. You’ll try out several tweaks to a current offering to see whether it satisfies your clients even more. 

Workplace experimentation could even be internally focused. You might rearrange in-office seating to see how it affects productivity or experiment with a new conferencing system during hybrid meetings. Encourage experimentation in your workforce by constantly trying new things to find the most effective option.

5. Encourage initiative

Clarify for everyone in the company that you’ll reward those who show initiative — no matter the experiment results. This public encouragement builds their confidence to follow through on instincts, share ideas, and develop skills without fear. 

For example, encourage your sales team to experiment with new methodologies, client acquisition techniques, or workflow platforms to streamline processes. Then, allow all employees to offer feedback on the changes so their voices feel heard and valued and your sales team can gain fresh perspectives. 

6. Don’t hate, collaborate

Regular brainstorming sessions effectively generate a wide pool of ideas. They also establish a teamwork-focused company culture and encourage diverse perspectives.

No matter the brainstorming technique you choose, discuss the session’s focus and agenda beforehand so everyone feels prepared and well-informed. The right balance of freedom to pursue curiosities and structure to fine-tune ideas will help keep experiments firmly planted on the ground. 

7. Learn with A/B testing

You’ll likely identify multiple solutions to the same problem, so use A/B testing to narrow down the best choice. Test every iteration of an idea on the same users to choose the best solution to improve and launch.

Before conducting these tests, identify key metrics so everyone on your team understands what success looks like for each solution. When testing ideas for improving an app’s interface, a metric might be the number of call-to-action buttons clicked. 

8. Resist the temptation to micromanage

If you tend to micromanage, you might need to adopt a new leadership model. Micromanagement can make employees feel their ideas and contributions aren’t valuable, so they’ll stop sharing. Experimentation might feel like a waste of time since you'll likely re-work methods or results to suit your style. 

Instead, show you trust your employees’ creativity and competence by giving them the freedom to try new methods. When they bring a viable idea to the table, offer them resources to try it out, even if there’s a chance it fails.

Confronting the challenges of innovation 

Changing your business’s culture is a holistic process that touches every aspect of the organization, like leadership style, resource allotment, and keeping up morale in the face of failures. Here are a few challenges to encouraging experimentation:

• Resistance to change: Whether you’re a large-scale organization or startup, the leadership team might not want to change “business as usual,” so prepare to show them the benefits of experimentation with data and testimony. 
• To launch or not to launch: It won’t always be easy to decide whether the test results are enough to launch a new strategy that implicates the whole company. Your research might not be meticulous enough, and the test market could skew results. Or maybe the new strategy unexpectedly takes precious resources from other initiatives. 
• Pulling the plug: Humans often make decisions based on emotions. You may find it hard to pull the plug on experiments that teams are excited about, even when data-driven research suggests something won’t succeed in the market.
• Drained resources: Experimentation requires time and resources, as does helping your team learn from failures. Building cross-functional teams, recording tests on open-access documents, and setting time aside to analyze mistakes can help keep time and resources in check.

Success through failure

Embracing experimentation in the workplace is all about becoming comfortable with discomfort. It’s scary conducting new experiments to test solutions that might not work.

But nobody makes it on the first try — you can only reach success through a series of failures. So, really, they’re not failures since they gave you the confidence and insights necessary to move forward.

To encourage your team to be more experimental, start by assessing your current company culture. Note areas where you tend to go with the most obvious solutions or where you’re in a bit of a rut. You might find you’re micromanaging every project, so employees feel they lack the freedom to try new things.

Or perhaps you haven’t found a streamlined A/B testing process yet. Once you’ve pinpointed your weak areas, work with the entire team to fix them one by one until you’ve successfully created an experimentation culture.