How creative are you expected to be at work?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My entire job pretty much consists of me being creative on demand. For example, on Friday my boss gave me a rough pitch for a new videogame. By the end of the day today I have to generate a couple of pages of brand new ideas for how to make the pitch incredibly fun and compelling. (I’m putting off getting started on this task by writing this OP.)

I’ve working a long time to get into a position like this. But at the same time it sometimes gets daunting. Every single day contains the possibility of choking and failing. Sometimes I daydream about having a job where my daily tasks would be much more cut and dried – do these specific things before 5pm and you’re done!

How creative are you expected to be on a daily basis? Would you rather have more creativity in your job, or less?

2

My day job is a non-creative hole! Most of my creativity throughout the day is spent on coming up with different things to look up on the internet.

Luckily I work as a Floral Designer on the side so it saves my sanity a bit.

Anyhow… thank your lucky stars HAMSTER KING… Like you said, its been a long haul to get this job… i’m sure the pressure can be immense, but the payoff after completetion must make it completely rewarding!

3

Very, but that’s the nature of research.

4

Yeah, me too.

5

A good balance. I definitely have to use my brain throughout the day and creative solutions are appreciated; but there are conventions to follow as well.

6

Not creative at all, and I like it that way. I prefer putting my creative side to work making things I want, rather than what someone else wants. I have little interest in being creative on demand, making someone else’s dreams. It’s why I never went into architecture or animation, like I’d considered when I was younger.

7

I create training materials, so fairly creative on a daily basis. I enjoy that aspect.

8

Fairly creative, but in a problem-solving way, not an artistic way. As a behavior therapist, I am always trying to think of new strategies to tackle a behavior when the basic strategies have failed. Technically, creating the client’s program is my supervisors job, but luckily she doesn’t mind when I come up with programming suggestions.

9

Not at all. I work for a brokerage firm and my department is beyond rigid and conservative. My only creativity is deciding which bathroom I want to use at the office.

10

That’s pretty much me, too. Working for a small company in technical support, if there’s no known solution to a problem… well, I pretty much have to figure one out (albeit with some support from the devs). There’s no next tier to pass stuff along to. Plus, being a small company, we can’t always replicate the hardware that people are using, so a lot of times we have to come up with some creative ideas for resolving issues.

It can be frustrating, but it’s also really satisfying when you figure something out. For example, one particularly persnickety issue couldn’t be replicated in any of our tests, for years even… until I went through all of the things that people in the field reported and every single way I could think of to break the software in that way, tried every one (this failed), and then started trying combinations and variations until finally finding something that DID create the problem. While it wasn’t what people were doing in the field (it required a lot of artificial meddling with the software), it did show a vulnerability in how the software worked, and when we fixed that vulnerability, the field reports went down to nearly nil. Flex!

Sad, but true - a lot of upper level technical support is just making educated guesses, and narrowing things down. This requires technical expertise in the area, sure, but you also have to be willing to try things, experiment, fiddle, and make intuitive leaps.

I also do a fair amount of writing, both communicative and instructional. It’s not exactly like writing a novel but it does give me some room to create.

11

I work maintenance at a factory, and we don’t often get all the money we ask for. Much fabrication of custom stuff, figuring out how to fix things with not the right stuff, etc.

Plus all the troubleshooting, which exercises the brain a bit.

Theres plenty of rote, repetitive stuff too, but the plant manager really appreciates creative solutions. But not too creative. :wink:

12

Very creative.

Each day, I have to come up with three daily lunch specials and a soup to serve, and each week I need to have 3 dinner specials, which will run for the entire week.

Dinner specials are fun. I have a lot of time to think about what to make and think about how to make it unique. I can toss my ideas at my assistant for some feedback, and occasionally he will give me ideas to use. Once we have a basic plan, we still have to develop and execute the recipes, and figure out the best way to “pick up” the orders. We also have to figure out how to store the additional ingredients in the already-over-stocked kitchen. And finally, we must decide on how to arrange the special on the plate for presentation. Its a great blend of artistic and problem-solving creativity, with satisfaction in the form of raving comment cards.

Lunch specials, however, are a drag. There are only a limited number of combinations of sandwich ingredients and salad fixings. I can repeat ideas occasionally, but that usually results in an “again?” look from my boss. Plus, the menu is large and diverse already, so a lot of good ideas are just too similar to an existing item to use. Running out of specials is VERY BAD, so I have to make enough to last through the lunch rush, but then I have leftovers, and I have to figure out what to do with them. Sometimes I come up with a new idea, or something fun that we haven’t done before, but usually, it is just a chore.

Soup pisses me off. I don’t understand the infatuation some people have with soup. The most boring crap will get rave reviews, but anything I put a lot of effort into doesn’t sell. I throw away GALLONS of soup every week because it won’t sell, but if I make less, we run out by 6. If the weather is cold, I make something thick and hearty, and only sell 25% of it. If I try and run a soup a second day, the wait staff complains about not having a different soup every day. Soup sales are so sporadic and I can’t come up with any solution to the various problems. I hate soup.

We just started desert specials this past week, which was supposed to be pre-made stuff (means not so much added work for me). It turned out to be crap, so we are going to make it in-house like our other deserts (which means MORE work for me).

We tried happy hour shared plate specials, but for whatever reason, management decided they should be “verbal” (told to the guests by the server, as opposed to typed out on a special menu like everything else). The servers either didn’t tell people about the specials, or people wouldn’t find out about them until after they decided what they wanted. Every shared plate special I made went into the trash because it didn’t sell. I stopped making them.

I also have a lot of problem solving related to the size of the kitchen. Our restaurant was a unpopular fine dinning place that turned into a packed-every-night family dinning place. The kitchen is far too small to store and prep the crazy amount of food we go through. I don’t have a walk-in freezer, so putting away frozen food in the two upright freezers is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The cooler has to be organized in just the right way every day, or else things won’t fit. God help me if the produce packers change the sizes of their boxes every week (I’m looking at you, cucumber farms! And why do the limes come in boxes with cut out handles, but the lemons and oranges don’t?). My dry goods storage is spread across 4 separate areas of the kitchen, just because I don’t have an actual dry storage area big enough to hold everything. I also don’t have a receiving area, so when the deliveries arrive, there is $3000 worth of food blocking everyone’s path and slowing us all down. I have to get it all put away before we all go nuts… but wait… I’ve got to get the lunch specials done… PULLS HAIR OUT…

Ok, so that was more of a rant then I intended it, but to be clear, My job is soaked in creativity. I too wish I could have a mundane, task-list, itemized work day, sometimes. But I love the challenge.

13

Zero. Not at all.

Joe

14

Very and constantly. I’m a freelance graphic designer of many years experience and have become pigeonholed as a ‘concepts’ person (not all design is about concepts, mostly it’s about implementing an idea, be it yours or someone else’s). In my last 3 month contract, I barely touched a computer - I literally had to sit there, day after day, brief after brief, with a sketch pad, leaking ideas for others to implement. I was a withered rag after that and pined for someone to just give me some text amends.

So, there are many times I wish I didn’t have to be so creative. It makes life very pressurised. Today I’m staring at a blank piece of paper (again) and need to pull some ideas out of the bag by the end of the day.

15

I’m in post-production, but in an administrative, non-artistic role. My job is all about following protocols and precedents and maintaining consistency. I have to problem-solve, communicate well, and be efficient.

I’m able to create protocol documentation as I see fit, and I’m able to direct my team’s operating guidelines. That’s pretty much it.

16

Between the bank auditors and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, I don’t think I can even be that creative at work.

17

We very occasionally have a problem to solve that needs a bit of thinking around a corner, but that’s about it. There’s really only so many ways to get blood or poop out and the medication in, or to explain what’s going on to an owner.

18

I am not expected to be creative. However, the fact that I am creative in my job makes me much, much better at it, and a more valued employee, than the drones I work with who robotically follow their training.

19

It’s not a specific requirement of the job (children’s librarian) but the rest of the staff is a bunch of super fun creative people so creative work is appreciated and rewarded. I do children’s story times and programs and sing and play original songs on ukulele and dream up crafts and activities. It’s a fun fun job.

20

That. I work implementing SAP, and I specialize on “keeping the programmers bored”; I’m good at finding ways of doing whatever the client needs done without coming up with a patch.

In this particular project we’re not supposed to be writing courses/manuals. But I LIKE writing training materials, damnit! And what I write is good! It’s clear, it’s useful both during and after training… Most SAP courses suck like a Hoover :frowning: Actually, most corporate courses are Hoover-like. Since I’m in a sort of supervisory position to the guy who’ll write the first courses, I’ve mentioned a couple of my usual tactics over coffee and he’s going to try them.