Everyone is creative, but not all the time. How can you boost your creativity to optimise your time spent at the office?

Contemporary research shows how mindfulness and regularly disconnecting from daily work tasks improve concentration, efficiency, and your creativity. At Yu Centrik, we wanted to embrace this, but the question remained: how?

The fast pace of work makes it hard to allow ourselves breaks during office hours. I’m not talking about the casual chit-chat at your colleague’s office — I mean a real disconnect while at work.

We not only wanted to boost our creativity and wellbeing at work, we wanted to do it as a team. The thing is, our team is as diverse as a box of Smarties. Therefore, finding the right fit was a design challenge in itself.

We followed the “4 D” method of UX design

Step 1: Discover through User Research

First things first, don’t take your colleagues for granted: ask them what they want. We are designing for people, so everyone has an opinion and preferences. Do they have a desire to take breaks during their work day? How much time do they have? What benefits are they after? What are the drawbacks or deal breakers?

Step 2: Define

Once you have conducted interviews, it’s time to design a solution. Analyse the results by finding common denominators. Afterwards: iterate, iterate, iterate! Our goal is to surprise them with a creative solution that answers more than their needs. In our case, we discovered meditation was our common denominator. We wanted to retreat individually while sharing the experience as a group.

Step 3: Develop

Try out your ideas and collect feedback on their experience: Too much of this? Not enough of that? Schedule the next activity. You’d be surprised how many activities you can readily try out.

Step 4: Deploy

Once your team has found its activity, make it a habit and stick to it: keep the rhythm and enthusiasm high, so retention and interest stay strong. Don’t forget to improve and refine every now and then, so be aware of your team’s satisfaction level and relay that information to the person teaching.

At Yu Centrik, our activity was Tai Chi!

We are now happily discovering the art of Tai Chi. Not only did we find the right fit for our team, our instructor comes to our office for one hour every week!

Leading design

Whether you are designing team activities, products, services, or mobile applications, in UX you can follow the 4 steps described above. Project managers can learn these tricks of the trade to reinforce your team’s spirit and efficiency, and (most importantly) your products through our three levels of UX certification.
What have you designed for your team?