4 pieces of advice to managers and employees to help foster intrapreneurship
The innovation race has now reached all activity sectors, bringing a whole range of projects in its wake, designed to boost our companies’ performance and competitiveness – sometimes in unexpected places.
Very different from the dusty old image of gloomy, listless workspaces, outsourced customer relationship centres are also following the trend and have become true innovation ecosystems and great creators of in-house initiatives. Supplementing in-house incubators, a managerial context open to intrapreneurship enables employees to develop their own projects in fully organic fashion.
As it fosters talent development, employee cohesion and organic improvement of performance, intrapreneurship is a major component of company dynamism that needs to be promoted more forcefully. My four pieces of advice to companies and employees to work collectively to ensure its success.
1- Open up the managerial context to innovation: managers, listen to your talents!
Intrapreneurial projects can only be developed in a context that encourages such practices and recognises how important they are at overall company level.
Transversal management must enable such flexibility, even if it involves going beyond job descriptions and taking time over daily activities.
It’s a matter of setting up a system based on trust, autonomy and acknowledgement of the fact that each and every employee can do their bit, above and beyond whatever they were hired to do.
A group of employees at Armatis were given the chance to take a break from their daily round and put their talents to work at the service of a common project: creation of a collaborative digital platform. Called SODA, the tool is now used by over 2,000 employees every day. An atmosphere of trust and acknowledgement of employees’ capacities led to a good idea being turned into an overall functional solution.
The success of intrapreneurial projects depends on the engagement and flexibility of a company’s entire ecosystem, as well as on managerial support of course. And finally, it empowers employees by making them actors in their own and the company’s success.
2- Involve everybody: project promoters, listen to your colleagues!
If a project is to benefit the whole company and serve cohesion and performance, it’s absolutely essential to include all employees.
Listening is of key importance: concrete problems arising in a company, whether it’s a matter of collaboration, socialisation, commitment or performance, can only be solved to everyone’s satisfaction if the employee experience is taken into account. That’s exactly what makes it a human adventure.
The most effective projects are the ones that have been thought up and designed by employees for employees.
If innovative ideas are to get the whole company on board and committed, it’s essential to make sure that they correspond to concrete expectations and needs. Tests, briefs, surveys and requests for feedback must become reflexes.
Trying something new also requires you to put the original project constantly in perspective and confront it with the company’s changing priorities and employees’ expectations.
In addition to legitimising the position of teams managing intrapreneurial projects, ensuring that everyone is given a voice at every stage along the way helps develop a sense of belonging and involvement among employees, which they may not necessarily have felt otherwise – so contributing to creation of a more inclusive and cohesive work environment.
3- Pave the way to related reflections
Intrapreneurship gives companies an operational second wind.
As well as giving the employees involved greater control of their activities and career paths, it can instil a fresh dynamic of thought and action across the company – a dynamic that must absolutely be taken full advantage of.
This snowball effect enables expansion of an ecosystem conducive to entrepreneurship in other departments, other sites and other branches, so as to undertake related projects and foster the emergence of new ideas. Giving employees access to the resources surrounding their activity sector (barometers, analyses, in-house studies, etc.) helps stimulate new thought and initiate new projects.
4- Commit to a dynamic of transmission and education
Intrapreneurial projects mustn’t stay “confidential”.
Their future will partly depend on their resonance and impact outside the company.
Where possible, joining the academic networks in the company’s areas of location must be a priority. Educational partnerships, from secondary schools to higher education, are a goldmine as regards application and diversification of projects.
They enable teams to escape a purely in-house context and present the way they do things to young people training in academic subjects, compare various approaches and test out solutions with completely different sectors of the public.
It’s a win-win approach, as it also enables pupils and students to work on concrete cases that demystify the company’s world.
Committing to this logic of transmission alongside local actors is also an effective way of anchoring the company in its region and increasing its legitimacy as an actor in innovation – a significant argument when it comes to attracting new talents and developing new markets!
Intrapreneurship is above all a human adventure serving employees and the company alike. A genuine HR strategy, the system has the dual advantage of being a career accelerator for employees and a driver of innovation, essential to the survival of a (large) group.
Article published by Entreprendre, on May 5, 2022.