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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?"
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.