5 Essential Steps To Encourage Intrapreneurship

According to MIT SLOAN, Intrapreneurship is acting like an entrepreneur within an established company, creating a new business or venture within the organization. It is important to note that this initiative does not focus on creating a new company. Still, it aims to contribute to the business in which the employee is already inserted, driving innovation, a great sense of belonging, and collaboration- which may help in performance and better results. 

Encouraging intrapreneurship also impacts talent retention and maintains the company's competitiveness- not to mention an increasing employer branding. All that being said, find below essential steps to help you develop and encourage intrapreneurship within your company to promote a sense of belonging and collaboration. 

• Make employees feel like they own the business
• Give people more autonomy and freedom
• Horizontalize the hierarchy
• Motivate and reward employees
• Invest in innovation processes and service design

Make employees feel like they own the business

Many companies engage their employees in several different ways, including profit-sharing programs. However, this does not always motivate individuals to innovate within the business. The demands remain the same: delivering projects on time, keeping customers, and meeting deadlines.

For employees to feel like company owners and stimulated to undertake, it is necessary to be transparent: if the company's employees feel that the leaders discuss certain issues behind closed doors not sharing the situations, changes are that sense of belonging ceases to exist. 

It is common that, notably in large companies, there is this culture of discussing major problems among leaders so that employees focus only on the positive side. However, it does not foster intrapreneurship and makes employees oblivious to the issues they could help solve. 

Give people more autonomy and freedom

Autonomy is one of the essential elements of promoting engagement and intrapreneurship in companies. It is interesting to define this concept, starting from what it is not: "autonomy is not working in isolation, without supervision, doing whatever you want, without a support network."  To provide autonomy in a company, one must:

• Know that mistakes are part of the game: a leader that only makes destructive criticism when mistakes occur may be killing good initiatives. People who work in fear do not develop their potential.
• Build trust: autonomy cannot be achieved without trust. Employees who feel the company trusts them receive the message that they command their own time, effort, and reward. 
• Provide tangible goals: it is necessary to establish challenging plans that are very clear to the employees and that are possible to achieve. Creating non-tangible goals destroys the concept of autonomy. 
• Delegate decisions: Perhaps leaders' most difficult issue is empowering decision-making employees. This attitude comes with the building of trust mentioned above. It gradually evolves until a superior's approval is no longer necessary for the employee to take on some decision-making processes.

Horizontalize the hierarchy

Everyone within the company needs to be both a process executor and a decision-maker, from the CEO to the frontline service employee. It allows everyone to own their actions and projects within the company- a practice that encourages the skill development  needed when thinking as the company owner.

Thus, it is necessary to delegate problems, not tasks only. This action helps individuals transform problems into opportunities on their own so that they may learn intrapreneurship  in practice (the concept of learning by doing).

In other words, you need to create a structure that does not consider management and execution separate actions. As the employees grow within the organization, their way of working will not change; they tend to continue performing and making decisions; the difference will be the scope of these activities. 

Motivate and reward employees

 It is crucial to motivate and recognize people, highlighting their efforts to foster intrapreneurship. In this case, some actions are effective:

• Taking employees' suggestions seriously: there is no point in having a feedback tool and listening to employees if nothing of what is suggested will be implemented. Otherwise, the company may be losing valuable information besides people feeling that this action is just a formality and becoming unmotivated to propose changes. 
• Making the Recognition public: recognizing successful projects on the company's intranet, through a letter from the president, or even a speech in a press release is simple but very effective action. Everyone likes to receive praise, especially for something worth a lot of effort.
• Create financial incentive programs: who doesn't like recognition in "cash"? Even though workers have shifted their priorities recently, the old and good profit-sharing program can continue to exist with other supporting actions. Setting goals and offering extra financial benefits to those who achieve them is still a great stimulus to intrapreneurship in companies. 

Invest in innovation processes and service design

Service design has innovation as its main focus, going hand in hand with promoting intrapreneurship in companies. The Service Design may use tools based on this approach to rethink and design more desirable services for employees and customers. Investing in innovation and service design is essential.