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?"

Comments

Heh

[Neil Blender]

Who doesn't spend at least 20% of their workday doing things other than work?

Re:Heh

[Peyna]

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).

Re:Heh

[Cheesy Fool]

Probably more than that. To quote Office Space:

~ Well, generally I come in at least twenty minutes late, I sneak in through the backdoor so Lumberg won't see me, then for the next hour I just kinda space out.
~ Space out?
~ Yeah, I just kinda stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working... I'd say in a given week I do about, oh, 15 minutes of real, actual work.

Re:Heh

[joabj]

Google has a bit of a specialized workforce--people who are creative and smart. I'm not sure how well it would work elsewhere, with people who are just punching the clock and holding no interest in work-related projects.

I just start doing it

[Botunda]

And then when they see the results they usually are quite happy.

Fridays are your day!

[chris09876]

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 :)

Your company has deeper problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me get this straight... Your company wants to increase creativity and innovation yet can't even decide for itself how to "implement" independent thinking time?

And you go as far as asking slashdot how to copy google's infrastructure... how original and creative!

Re:Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start

[eln]

Of course, if they're starting their own business on company time with company equipment, even if the activity is nominally "independent," they'll soon find out that their new side business is actually their employer's new side business.

Re:Google is pretty unique.

[Fnkmaster]

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.

Re:Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start

[tverbeek]

Mod parent up.

If you do this, you need to make it crystal clear ahead of time who will own the results of their time spent noodling. Ordinarily, what you do with company resources on company time while an employee belongs to the company. The situation of a company formally giving employees "permission" to do whatever they want might muddy the waters legally, but it certainly muddies them in people's minds. Put the policy in writing and make people sign off on it.

Likewise, you need guidelines for what kinds of projects they can spend that 20% on; i.e. obvious dead-ends with no value to the company?, surfing the web?, etc.

20% Time at Google.

[chrisd]

20% time works pretty simply, you identify a project you want to work on, write up a design doc and have that be your 20% time. You can also put your work into an existing project at Google. You can also bunch up 20% time and take it all at once or in larger chunks than 1 day a week or whatever. Of course, Google engineers are expected to make sure that thier 80% projects are in a good place, but we trust each other to make those kinds of decisions. The trust is what makes 20% time work for everyone.

There are some caveats, but that's the broad strokes. News.google.com, Orkut and a bunch of stuff on labs came from 20% time.

Chris