Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom How to Revamp a Boring Culture

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom How to Revamp a Boring Culture In an earlier article, I discussed how tobuild a culture of innovation. Some of the tips includedavoiding micromanagement, keeping stress level to a minimum, and encouraging your people to take risks. These methods can definitely re-energize a stale culture, but there are other avenues you might try as well. The end of the year is the perfect time to put some of these ideas into effect for a fresh start in January. Get Your Games On When most people think about gamification, they picture sophisticated software programs featuring elaborate plots and characters. But gamification is simply taking the essence of gamesâ€"fun, play, transparency, design and challengeâ€"and applying it to real-world objectives rather than pure entertainment. In herrecent article forInc., Ekaterina Walter featured social solutions companySprinklr. In the “Sprinklr Assassins” game, everyone in the office gets assigned another employee as a target and the goal is to be the last person standing. The competition is fun, of course, but it also helps the business by promoting cohesiveness and relationship building. Institutionalize Intrapreneurship Intrapreneurshipis the practice of entrepreneurship within the context of an established organization, by leveraging the resources of that organization. Intrapreneurship sounds great on paper, but if you leave it to chance, it will lose out to everyday business fires every time. If your culture is getting stale, consider building intrapreneurial projects into employee performance objectives and setting aside time each week for employees to pursue innovative personal projects that will take your business to the next level. Decide on the projects that will receive significant organizational resources by establishing a formal innovation committee to vet ideas. For the rest of my ideas, take a look at the full post at the AMEX Open Forum.