Cover Story
Creative relations
Smart Business Chicago | January 2009
Page 2 of 3
Nancy Ruscheinski president and COO, Edelman U.S.; chairman, Edelman Digital
Bring creativity into your office
Like you, Ruscheinski has spent the time
vetting candidates and hiring creative people
in her company, so that should be enough to
move the Edelman engine, right? Well, even
in the most creative industries, many of your
people are saying the same thing.
“I try to be creative every day, but I’m so
busy, and I’ve got these tasks to accomplish, and we’re all going so fast, we don’t
pause to celebrate creativity and really
think about it,” Ruscheinski says.
So at Edelman she really began to think
about how to get employees to be more
creative. The first step was giving them the
time and power to think about what would
help them — remember, telling them what
will make them more creative won’t make
them more creative.
“Half the secret is just realizing that some
of the best ideas aren’t your own,” she says.
“We encourage people to innovate here
and come up with new ideas and what can
we do to make this a better place, not just
to come up with new ideas on behalf of
their clients but for Edelman.”
Part of that was the time. Sure, it costs
money, but employees sometimes need to
be away from the daily monotony —
phones, computers, cubicles — to free up
their minds. So Edelman closes down for
creativity days a few times a year, taking
employees on field trips to places of their
choosing, like The Art Institute of Chicago.
That doesn’t take much effort, really. You
can ask employees for a list of places they’d
like to visit and then vet which ones are realistic from a time and budget standpoint.
And, before you start adding up the costs
of a field trip and a closed office, consider
that the main idea is to stretch people’s
thinking to create new ideas and keep
them fresh. At Edelman, Ruscheinski
helped push the company to be the first to
embrace the Web as a medium, and in 2007,
she helped spearhead Edelman Studios, a
virtual film studio that connects brands
with emerging filmmakers. She’ll be the
first to say that those ideas didn’t come from meetings in boardrooms.
If you don’t want to shut down operations
to let people get creative, you can go with the
old standby: a little competition and cash.
Edelman has given out small money grants to
the person with the best idea for redesigning
his or her cube. The firm also recently created a cash award for creative excellence that
is given for the company’s most creative idea
that’s used — whether it’s something that
runs in a campaign or an internal idea.
“We put a big spotlight on them and celebrate those, so things like that help keep
the concept of creative very fresh and
dynamic here,” Ruscheinski says.
Those little freedoms — a cube wall that
someone turns into a Hawaiian theme or
an award given in front of the company for
creativity — can be more than enough to
start people’s innovation machine and
keep them happy with their job.
Edelman also did a contest where people
could submit ideas for redesigning office
space to become a creative space. The
reward was given based on the top design
that mixed both a sharp, relaxing setting and
a meeting room where work could be done.
By letting employees enter the contest, creativity and energy instantly began brewing.
And while those spaces are relaxing, they
are also functional: They are filled with white-boards, markers and other tools to start a
brainstorming session. The idea is if you’re
not comfortable giving people entire free
days for creativity, then find ways to put a
hint of the office into things that help people
feel relaxed and in touch with the world.
“People spend a good chunk of their lives
here in the office, it’s not a 9-to-5 environment at all, so we’ve brought the outside
world in,” she says. “We’ve done wine tastings with a little education thrown in —
teaching people how to be knowledgeable
about wine when they take clients out to
dinner. We’ve done panel discussions on
politics and the elections, trying to stimulate intellectual curiosity to get people to
stretch their thinking. They are little, easy
things, but it makes a world of difference.”
