Slashdot Mirror
Independent Developer Projects in the Workplace?
An anonymous reader asks: "My company wants to increase creativity and innovation, we our thinking of implementing a Google like policy of 20% of your time for independent projects but I can't find any details on how Google actually implements this. I am curious how they divvy up their time (1 day a week or 1 week a month)? How do you keep your real project from impacting it? At what point are the projects reviewed? Has anybody experienced other successful ways to stimulate creativity at their workplace?"
That is a great idea and I think you will get a lot of brownie points from your employees that care about such things. But make sure you enforce what they can work on. Some people might use it as an oppurtunity to start another business that competes with your own, which might not be what you had in mind.
I think that if a lot of businesses had this kind of open mind it would surely help open source software.
I worked at a company in Quebec awhile back that had a similar policy. Each Friday, you were allowed to work on your own projects. About once each month, we had a small group presentation where we told other people in our group what we'd been working on, and how it's progressing. When the group decided that the idea was mature enough to tell others about, we gave a small presentation to the managers. They talked it over for a bit, and decided if it would be pursued further, or if we should find something else to work on. I found it quite nice to be able to work on my own things. I never made anything great, but a number of people had small teams put under them to help them work on their idea :)
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
They probably figured: "We can let our employees slack off 20% of the time, or pretend like we're 'encouraging' their independent works while at the same time eliminating that slack time."
So you've made your employees happier which makes them more productive, and you've taken something wasted (slack time) and turned into something useful (creative/moral boosting time).
What?
Umm, not all bosses have pointy hair. I've certainly heard of small companies with similar, if slightly less radical incentives to employees to do creative, entrepreneurial kinds of things. Basically, the issue is the more freedom you give your employees, the better they need to be. If you tell a slacking idjit that he can spend 20% of his time pursuing his "own interests" you can forget about that 20% of his time doing anything useful for the company.
Major corporations don't usually have the calibre of employees across the board to make this sort of system work. They have evolved large bureaucracies as a way of extracting valuable workproduct from extremely mediocre talent.
So I'd agree with a PHB at a major corporation, this probably would be a bad idea for his company.
Give people, and their bosses, rewards/reconition based on these "extra" activites.
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!
The idea being it was time devoted to thinking outside the box, such as trying new ways to do old things. Billable projects still came first, so this wasn't a hard and fast rule, and for the most part I just used it to account for my time spent on /. :)
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
Our company framed this concept a little differently so that it was more palatable to management. Each of us was to spend 20% of our time in "Process Improvement" initiatives. (Sounds very dry and corporate)
In reality it was a nice juicy chance to make great changes that would help the company in operations. We measured the time by hours per day. One hour per eight hour day was to be used independently. At our weekly meetings, ideas were discussed and progress was measured.
The nice thing about this was that it was voluntary. As there was no fincial incentive or reward for creativity, the time itself became the incentive. You could do whatever you wanted for that hour be it surf slashdot or play everquest.
Every employeer I've worked for since 1995 has asked me to sign paperwork that effectively claims anything I think up as their own. Under such conditions where is really no such thing as "your own project." (Not moral and only arguably legal. People do need to work to eat, etc.)
The irony is that instead of protecting their business investments that kind of garbage just shuts the smart people in tech departments down. The smart folks know they should bite their lip sometimes rather than share all their creative energy.
Now if Google does not make sure claims on what their employees think up and work up, then bravo! Let them set an example that bean counters elsewhere might discover.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Instead, try something like a brainstorming session a couple of times a month.
People have different ways of doing this, but here is an example of how we did it at my work. The person holding the meeting had each of us just blurt out some ideas for our business. Not putting much thought into it. Just whatever came to mind. After that was done we would weed through intresting ideas and discuss them. It doesn't have to be anything real complicated. Just take some time to get the gears turning.
It's the battle of the minds, and everyone's unarmed.
..until the company shut off the bulk of the outbound network ports so now I can't do much more than browse /. to get my mind on other things to relax about the work I am doing.
This is one of the reasons that Google allows its employees to do the 20% on your own projects. It stimulates the mind subcociously to seek answers to the problems you are working on the other 80% of the time. I used to do this at work, primary by working on projects (My web site, new software ideas, etc) on my home system while I was at work if I got stuck or fustrated. They have pretty much deneied my ability to do this shutting off most outboand and inbound ports below 1024 (according to a friend in security there ar only 5 below 1024 now), and all ports above 1024.
Result huge drop in net productivity, and work quality. No one has really noticed yet since I am sort of a workaholic overachiver anyway. The net drop still puts me way above the average around here (Ie. I actually still turn in projects at least on time if not a bit early, though nowhere near as early as I used too(Bugs the hell out of me) There are people here that have not delivered a project in as far as I can remember, the project usually gets killed before they finish it because it has been languishing for so long. Comparitively if I ever turn a project in I look pretty good.
The reason I never get that release of switching to something else to take my mind of the problem.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
A place I worked tried this.
The rule was that you got 4 hours a week (10%) to work on any project you wanted, provided A) that the project benefitted the community in a non-profit fashion, B) did not negatively impact the company's image, and C) no more than two people could be using their time allotment at once. In other words, help the community, and don't let the company look like an ass or bring the company to a halt in the process.
The developers also had to pick the same time each week for their allotment...their choice, morning or afternoon.
We called it "geek hours". Management bought into it. The theory was nice, but in practice, the developers couldn't or wouldn't decide what to do, they spent the time dinking around. The account management staff didn't respect the developers' time and frequently stepped on the "geek hours" by citing client/project demands.
If you can get it to work in your workplace, let us know how you did it.
I work within an "Advanced Projects" group at my company, an aerospace firm. My department allows people to spend up to 10% of their time per week working on projects not related to their assigned work. These are generically termed "research" and there are two constraints:
1. The research must be related somehow to work. Since our department works primarily in software development and on a variety of operating systems, this allows for a wide variety of projects. Also, our department head allows a very broad and fuzzy definition of "related". In practical terms you can justify pretty much anything except surfing pr0n sites or running an ebay business.
2. One must periodically (a couple of times a year) report one's work to the department in the form of a brief talk/discussion. This is intended to spread information around and to keep the projects from becoming too frivolous. We have a weekly meeting at which one of the department members makes a presentation. The presentations can be informal. It's a small price to pay for a fairly generous benefit.
What was surprising to me and to my boss was that very few people in our department choose to take advantage of this 10% of freedom. We're not sure why. One theory is that four hours a week is not really enough to entice people. The other theory is that the idea of having to make presentations to the group turns people off. (However, we draft people into making presentations anyway, even if they're not taking advantage of the research program, so I don't really buy this theory.)
None of my employers have granted time to work on personal projects or discretionary time. This is one of the reasons many of them went belly up.
This idea has many advantages besides just helping to attract better people. It can allow people to be more productive and innovative. At least for creative people like engineers, programmers, and scientists. Making it work for non-creative people is more difficult, though they can still benifit from things like learning how to use a spreadsheet or database or even how to program.
One implementation is simply to allow people 20% discretionary time that is exempt from management control. With people who aren't goof offs, this has considerable benifit. The projects might not necessarily be unrelated to work. The time could be used to solve problems that interfere with your productivity without having to justify it to micromanaging managers. Creating a database of parts in the company stock room that is actually useful to engineering. Instead of "RESISTOR", you have "RESISTER VALUE=10ohms WATTAGE=1/4W PRECISION=1% PACKAGE=0805". Management thought this was a waste of time but the real waste of time was not having the database; Less than 1 man month of time is needed to build the database but not having it was wasting multiple man months every year. Another example was creating a program to handle purchase orders instead of writing them out by hand (this was adopted company wide). These projects aren't intellectually stimulating but they reduce aggravation and boost productivity.
Discretionary time would be easier to sell to management than purely personal projects. Discretinary time would be work related but exempt from management control.
For over 20 years I have worked on a high tech haunted house. I take vacation time to do it although one of the participants did manage to get some annual paid sabbatical leave. The primary participants all worked in major R&D labs. But ironically, the management in the R&D labs was afraid to try anything new. The halloween show, termed "frivolous activity" by one boss, actually had considerable benifits to our employers. All of our employers have benifitted from technology developed while working on the show. One of the big benifits of doing halloween projects is that you can risk failure. If you try something new and it doesn't work, it is no big deal; in reality, the projects did work though some had to wait until the next year. Software waveform synthesizer techniques used for halloween laser shows were later used on industrial motor controls. A "frivolous" color organ using flourescent lights (traditionally considered undimmable) instead of incandescent lights led to office lighting controllers that saved energy. Halloween robotic projects led to bomb diffusing robots. And the junior people working on the show learned things like prototyping techniques and how to program microcontrollers.
In engineering, the shortest distance between two points (i.e. finishing a project) is rarely a straight line. This is a concept that most managers do not understand; sanctioned discretionary time is a way of letting engineers manage their time more effectively.
The choice of personal projects is often influenced by the problems faced in the workplace. Problems prototyping equipment leads to work on CNC machine tools. Problems cramming circuitry onto PC Boards leads to work with FPGAs. Utility programs are written to fill in the gaps in existing software.
The maximum benifit to the employer is likely to come from projects that are tangentially related to the companies products.
The employer should have a shop right in personal projects done on company time but it is a good policy to release the projects under a business friendly open source license (i.e. BSD style over GPL).
Paid sabbatical leave is institutionalized at many universities. For example, a professor may get one semester at full pay or two semesters at half pay every seven years.
Many companies give eductational benifits to employees. But for people with technical skills, working on personal projects can be much more effective than stuffing them in a classroom.
Well, what do you mean by "always busy"? If you mean that you have work to do from the minute you step into the office in the morning, and it continues until you leave (at a reasonable time), minus a lunch break, I fail to see what the problem is. If you're not getting things done in the time that your boss thinks it should be, that's only a problem if he's unreasonably pressuring you. If he gives you un-meetable deadlines solely to keep you working on 100% of the company's time, good for him. After all, they *are* paying you for a solid 8 hours of work each day (or whatever).
Now, if the work you're getting is causing you to stay at work later and later, work through lunch, etc., etc., and if your boss is constantly on your back about not getting the work done that he's given you, then sure, you have a problem. But this may all be alleviated simply by going to your boss, giving him a list of the tasks he has you doing, with time estimates. Ask him to prioritise the work, and shift some of your workload to someone else if he absolutely must have some of it done before you're able to complete it. If he's not willing to be reasonable about this, it's time to brush up the ol' resume and look for a new job.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
We have a so-called "non-directional" day where I work. It's pretty nice; every Wednesday you're supposed to work on some sort of side project. There's a few around you can join, or start your own. The caveat, of course, is that the company owns any outcome from this, but that's fair since it's their time. Of course, if you contribute to a GPL licensed product, then the company is the proud owner of the copyright to a GPL'ed patch, so you can do that if you want. It's also possible to get approval to start a new GPLed project, and people do have independant (non-GPL) projects that they work on in their "real" spare time that the company doesn't have any sort of claim to.
You do have to get the project approved, but that's only to prevent you from starting a "let's blow up the company" type of project. The only one that was ever been turned down was one that would directly compete with us.
The main problem has actually been getting people motivated to start a project, and then keeping them working on it (especially in the face of real deadlines). A few have turned out to be surprisingly interesting, but we haven't had any notable successes like Google has, at least not just yet. There have been a few sizable improvements to internal projects that came from this though. A key factor was moving the day from Friday to Wednesday; when it was on Friday there was just about no motivation to get started on these things.
If you can convince your management to approve this, it's nice and rewarding.
You know what I hate? Wait, what do you like? I hate that!
I used to work for a company that, no joke, had a masseuese (sp?) who came in once a week to give everyone a rub-down... she was pretty hot too. I have no idea how much she was paid, but the company went belly-up and took a bending-over in a last-distch acquisisition deal pretty quickly. we spent more money on perqs like massage bunnies and free popcorn and cool high-def monitors than even a fraction of what were bringing in proffit-wise...
so, with appologies for all the two-part vocab, we can only dream of massage bunnies, because it's time to update the resume when they show up (maybe that's 'murphey's law' of massage bunnies?)
ah 2000.... that was fun....
At my company, we provide the research time between projects. This allows people to focus on the new activity and to not affect deliverables. Typically people get a one to two weeks of open time between projects.
The vast majority of people can't handle undirected activities, so we enforce some controls over junior people. We require them to learn foundation skills that they don't already know that will benefit both them and the company. For employees who are anywhere from an intern to a software engineer, there is a stock list of topics you can choose from, including langauges, techniques, coding standards, testing, new tools, etc. Unusual topics can be studied with approval. At the end, these employees have a discussion with a technical lead about what was learned (note: not a grilling, but a "fill in the gaps" kind of discussion.) This last bit also forces them to practice their communication and organizational skills.
More senior people, who have demonstrated innate initiative and curiousity, can choose their own research topics, but they have to present their findings to the rest of the senior staff. Therefore there's some peer pressure to pick relevant topics.
A very important additional benefit is that everyone has their own book budget, the size of which is dependent on experience. You can spend the money on any technical book you want without having to get prior approval.
If you think about it though, most companies readily admit that for say a 9 hour day they really only expect to get MAYBE 5 hours of productive work. And by productive this means not playing Doom or that windows pinball game (no one plays solitare anymore).
Thus though there may be 19, give or take, business days in the month, you only get about 100 hours per employee. I've even seen companies that will budget less than five productive hours per day.
This sig has been removed pending an investigation.
Well, I worked for NASA Ames. We were always complaining that we were becoming technologically stale, because the contractors did the "fun" work and all we did was push contracts.
Management claimed at the time that we were allowed to allocate 10% of our time to independant research. Unfortunately, the never ending paper-pushing workload insured that we never really could take advantage of that opportunity.
That is why I no longer work at Ames. For me, being a government researcher meant being a contract monitor. Not an ideal work assignment.
Granted, this was ten years ago, but I suspect not much has changed.
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.