Episode 21: Boosting Workplace Creativity

In this episode, we dive into the challenges and opportunities of growing a creative team, sharing practical insights for navigating transitions, fostering a positive culture, and planning for success. Whether you're expanding your business, mentoring new talent, or just looking to keep your creative spark alive, this episode is packed with takeaways you can put to work today.

🎯 Key Takeaways:

Onboarding with Intention:

• Thoughtful onboarding sets the stage for success. We discuss strategies to make new hires feel valued and aligned with company goals from day one.

Scaling the Team While Keeping Creativity Alive:

• Growth is exciting, but how do you ensure the team stays innovative? Tune in for actionable steps to balance expansion and creative energy.

Building a Resilient and Collaborative Culture:

• A strong culture isn’t built overnight. Learn how to foster trust, collaboration, and adaptability as your team evolves.

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Hello and welcome to this episode of our podcast, Creative Fuel for Underdogs. A quick update of where we are and what's going on in my world. We hired a new employee this morning. Today's her first day onboarding and it is the first time we've brought a new employee into our world. So before, I've always had this vision of this type of agency where we have this extreme creative culture.

We're the best. We're the best at these services we offer, which is, you know, creative advertising and also creative SEO. We're the best in the industry. But I also had this vision that we were the best place to work too. We had the best benefits, we had the best culture, we had the best pathways for growth. We have unlimited

opportunities and that everybody that comes in has a really positive experience. And it's about nurturing and unlocking their greatness, just like everything we talk about in this podcast. Podcast. So today is the first day I can officially say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes to all of those things. And it's just really exciting to hold this vision and then to have this vision come to fruition and then be able to say yes, we are doing all of those things. We offer the best benefits we offer.

There's just nobody like us. And what we're trying to do within the workplace is a completely, completely different model. And everything's about what we've termed creative flips, where we take everything that is an issue, everything that weighs on somebody, everything that's an obstacle, and we come up with this amazing solution and we brainstorm on it. Brainstorming is such a core part of our culture and we brainstorm it, we come up with ideas and we're constantly innovating and we're constantly innovating our products and our services, and everybody is engaged and excited and it's just, it feels great to come to work. And so we're going to do two episodes and it's all about that feeling of it's great to come to work because so many people don't experience that. And so that's what

this podcast first is about. You know, what I'm trying to do here is take this idea of applying creativity, applying brainstorming, applying this, getting out of your head and being in this non judgment zone, which I call the clear thinking channel, and applying that to all aspects of your life and then setting up experiments and testing some of the solutions that you come up with. And one of the. So in this podcast, we're going to be dealing with Every single topic that we face that is a negative, and then how can we flip that to a positive? How can we do a creative flip on that? So these two episodes are about work, and the first one is reversing the Monday Effect. And then the second one podcast is going to be the Joy of Work. So

there's so many areas of our lives where we just live in this state of mental stress and strain and pain, and nothing quite triggers that like our work environment, whether it be our coworkers. If you're a business owner, it's going to be employees or, you know, lack of customers or too many customers. There's never a balance. And that's something we are doing a completely unique approach to as far as balancing our work life. But especially post Covid, one thing that people tell me, and I hear this frequently, is they just get so much anxiety on Sundays thinking about going back to work.

Like, there's just so much anxiety. And post Covid, like, Covid put us in our head. There's no doubt about it. Everything is putting us in our head. And we're kind of living in this drama, trauma. And for a lot of people, and

even some people start on Friday evening, they can't enjoy the entire weekend because they're thinking about going back to work Monday. And then there's vacation, where the first half of vacation is letting go, enjoying it. And then the second half of vacation is this. It's going to be ending. I'm going to have to go back to work. And so this episode is, how

do we reverse Mondays? Why are Mondays so bad and how do we reverse them? So let's say you work in the ideal work environment. You still have this regret and loss of freedom of the weekend, going back to work and getting back to structure and organization. And it still has this, like, mental weight on you. But if you're in our experiment ideation world that we live in, my team and my business and my family, then what you do is you start to, okay, how can I apply brainstorming to that? How can I apply? How can I change this experience? How can I get to the point where I actually love going into work on Monday mornings? So you start to break down all those things that become a challenge. So for me, in my work, Mondays are usually the worst day because we support hundreds of WordPress sites. And what happens

is there'll be a security update and somebody will have updated their WordPress site themselves and WordPress updated, but the plugins didn't update and it broke their site. And Some are on automatic updates and that broke the site. So you'll walk in Monday and there'll be a couple, a couple of sites that are down. And so immediately whatever plans you had for Monday morning are going to be disrupted by that. And then I, from my perspective, where we measure energy, if everybody's coming in, you know, I don't want to go back to work. I don't, you know, they're

grumpy. It's a grumpy Monday. Everybody's bringing in this negative energy about coming into work. There's the balance of negative to positive. Especially if you've had this anxiety about going back to work. There's this

whole wave of negative energy in the morning. When things start to go wrong Monday morning, it becomes this whole wave of grumpy upset. And so one, we're trying to resolve that where there's no WordPress updates on the weekends and if you did do it yourself, then shame on you. Don't be doing that type of work on weekends for our clients. Two, we try to turn every negative into a positive experience.

And so, and I really believe if you're just coming in as this positive energy, if you're coming in, you know, just, you know, I want to change the world. I want to, you know, I want to have an impact. This is my stepping stone to get there. If you're coming in with this positive impact and then you're using. So let's say you have a grumpy client come at you, you're going to give positive energy back.

So the grumpy client's coming at you, they're upset because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're living in the gap. They're all they can see is a negative. They've got to answer to their boss why their website is down. There's a million reasons. And so if

for some reason that negativity that's been thrown at you has just slipped you out of your positive, go immediately into brainstorming. Just do a quick two minutes of brainstorming of how you can reply with a humorous light hearted answer, but not, but not in a way fuel the fire, but defuse the fire. So, and we are trying to. Everybody you deal with that's grumpy is just have them. You're trying to connect with that greatness inside of them. You're trying to

connect with their creativity, you're trying to connect with the fun side of themselves to help them realize the human experience they're having on a very low. Monday morning is not the real experience. And so giving a little humor back, like the reply might be, oh my gosh, your website's down. Oh my gosh, let's take care of it right away. This is unusual. And again, don't live in the gap like, my website's always

down. You've had 180 days of great website, positive experience. This is unusual. Let's take care of it right away. And you can add some more fun into it. Like, I love 404 errors, where you jump on a page that's

not there and there's something fun like, oops, it hasn't been found. In our world, we use dogs for all our marketing. But whenever you land on a page that can't be found, you get a grumpy cat on our website. So, and it's like, you know, grumpy cat, you know, you found a page that doesn't exist. Sorry about that. But a way to respond to people in

a positive, fun, engaging, humorous light. When you, when you respond to negativity with negativity, you just go into a deeper, deeper negativity. But having a little humor, having a look, making it lighten it up, having it can help to reverse that. And I believe if we all just start to, you know, on our Sundays, if we're in anxiety, you know, just start to do a quick brainstorming. Because anytime you can get out of your head, anytime you can disconnect and remap to opportunity, get out of, you know, just let go, let go of those emotions, those feelings, because those feelings are just your brain triggering chemicals throughout your body.

You're letting go of that, you're getting into the two minute brainstorm. You can list out 50 ideas of what I could do to change my Monday morning experience. List out the problems, list out solutions. Just being in that brainstorming mode, in that troubleshooting, that ideation, and then just kind of devise different experiments of how can I approach this differently, how can I turn this grumpy into something positive? And how can I start to live in this world of greatness and see this world of greatness in everybody else and just kind of shift out of this human experience? And it's really rewarding when things start to come together. It just, your brain starts to rewire. It does.

And every time you start to have these feelings or anxiety or it just, you're like, oh, you become curious about it. You're like a little kid because that's your true nature. You're like, what's going on? And then you Start to ideate. You're just constantly in this ideas and experiments and things you want to try. And you just live in this world of adventure and fixing, but not fixing, because really, at the end of the day, there's nothing wrong. The people are just having this

human experience, and your goal is to help them to see that's not who they really are. So when you start to address this in people, it just is amazing. And when you bring it into the workplace, you can help to then, like, quiet down that weekend anxiety. So you're coming in as this positive energy. This, you know, we can take on the world no matter what. We're gonna hit Monday morning. We're

gonna tackle it with fun and laughter and lightheartedness. And our responses are not gonna be defensive. Our responses are gonna be, oh, my gosh, this never happens. Even though it just happened to five people in a row. They don't know that. And you're acknowledging their feelings. You're

acknowledging that they're having a bad experience. But that client's your top priority. You're going to take care of it right away. And you, positive, positive, positive. So you've made your list of all the things that can possibly improve your Monday experience and diffuse that anxiety. And ruining your weekend, ruining your

family's weekend, ruining your partner's weekend, your friends, everybody around you because you're in this grumpy, I just don't want to go back to work tomorrow. And it's starting to look at work as, should I be there if this job is not the right fit for you? One thing we're doing with my EO forum is we're doing a book club. And the book club book right now is called Necessary Endings. And it talks about, there's a cycle for life. Everything ends. Everything. You know, we all end

up dying. It's a reality. We all face it. A lot of people don't look at life from that perspective of when they're going to die, but I do. I'm always looking at, hey, did I do everything I want to do? Did I accomplish what I wanted to do? Do my kids know what they need to know? You know, does my husband, is he set? Is everybody set around me? But I look at life that way. But necessary

endings are. There is a time and place for everything. And if you're in this career or job that just doesn't feel right, then maybe give it the chance. Bring creativity into it. Bring your greatness, Unleash your potential in this job. But if it's still not working, it is

okay to move on. So this is a note from our sponsor, Advent Creative, and our featured client this week is ourselves. Contact us for unique high visibility campaigns. And that starts with the top spots on Google with amazing SEO and then amazing creative ads and messaging that really get attention. Reach out to us@advancreative.com and it is, it's just

part of life. And it's okay to figure out that this isn't for you. Maybe this isn't the path for you, this isn't the career for you, or maybe this just isn't the company for you, but it's okay. And I think nobody gives us permission to do what we need to do. So this is, this is a place where you know, your goal is to live up to the level you're supposed to live in this lifetime. You're supposed to

be living up to whatever your life purpose is, whatever, whatever you would put on this planet for this journey, you're supposed to be living up to it. And it's okay to say this isn't working. I need to go in another direction. It's okay to say I need to explore something else. And that will come out of, you know, if you just start the brainstorming, you start the experiments, you start everything. If you want to start your own business, you know, that could be an

evening weekend gig to get it going where you can financially support yourself. There could be all kinds of different things that you could do to get to where you feel that pull, you feel where you need to be going and what you should be doing. But it's okay to explore that and not stay in something that's really creating that's not the right fit, that is creating mental stress and just carrying over to your weekend. And so in the next episode, what we're talking about is the joy of work. And it's just really understanding how companies that have a really great employee experience, how do they do it and then how do you find alignment with that and how do you find your fit in this world with the right company that's giving you that experience? So join me for the next episode.

Thank you.