20% Time
There's a policy at Google that insists that their engineers spend one day per week, on company time, working on a personal project. If you look at this from the perspective of a bean counter, that means 20% of their engineering budget is allocated to letting their engineers hack on technology, whether or not Google stands to benefit from it directly.
The reason they do this, as any person who appreciates the creative process already knows, is that they're chasing serendipity. Creativity is non-linear. Getting good ideas from your employees is more likely to happen if you disband some of the structure of your organization instead of re-structuring it.
So far, it's worked pretty well. Google News and Gmail were both started as small projects conceived of and developed during 20% time. Both of them have worked out well for Google.
A lot of companies are inclined to scoff at this. "Why should we pay to give people time and space to learn new things or improve themselves?" They regard this sort of thing as something that should be done off the clock, but the employees on their own personal time. Especially given the very real fear that the employee will eventually leave and go work for someone else?
To that question, I'd pose another: is it worse to incur the expense of letting someone grow and then losing them as an employee, or to avoid the expense of self-improvement altogether and keep them around?
The reason they do this, as any person who appreciates the creative process already knows, is that they're chasing serendipity. Creativity is non-linear. Getting good ideas from your employees is more likely to happen if you disband some of the structure of your organization instead of re-structuring it.
So far, it's worked pretty well. Google News and Gmail were both started as small projects conceived of and developed during 20% time. Both of them have worked out well for Google.
A lot of companies are inclined to scoff at this. "Why should we pay to give people time and space to learn new things or improve themselves?" They regard this sort of thing as something that should be done off the clock, but the employees on their own personal time. Especially given the very real fear that the employee will eventually leave and go work for someone else?
To that question, I'd pose another: is it worse to incur the expense of letting someone grow and then losing them as an employee, or to avoid the expense of self-improvement altogether and keep them around?