The Google Way
The NYTimes recently had a short article about “The Google Way” in their Jobs section of the online magazine. Related by a Google employee (”A Googler”), the article starts: “GOOGLE engineers are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to work on something company-related that interests them personally.” Is this something that could work here at UVa?
This “Google 20 Percent Time” may or may not be something new to you, but recently it has been coming up frequently in blogs and articles on the net. This is just a small part of the Google ogling (”Oogling”?) lore: the sometimes-amorous fascination with what makes Google tick. The concept is fairly simple: An employee is given 20 percent of his or her time–that’s one day a week, or about an hour and a half a day, or 10 or so weeks a year–to work on something self-directed: Something that interests her; something that he thinks needs attention; a pet tech project that will be the next Google Maps or Gmail.
The article discusses one manifestation of 20 Percent Time: the “grouplet”—self-organized efforts surrounding technical interests ranging from fixing technical problems that they deem important to changing cultural norms at Google. One example in the article is advocating and developing Agile methodologies at Google, because they believe it will improve the company’s products and service, as well as the improving the developers’ day-to-day experience.
If you are at ITC currently and have taken part in the intensives run by “The Sherpas”, Allan and Michael, the Google grouplet idea probably sounds to you a lot like the “Community” model that the consultants espouse. And I think in the ideal the two models converge to a very similar-looking organization where space is made for employee self-organization and self-determination, where employees are allowed to pursue their interests instead of just their duties, and both the employees and the organization benefit. However at Google, the “space” is explicit: You have 20 percent of your time.
So… What about at ITC? What about at UVa in general? What about at your job? The one that puts you in your chair right now? Could you take one day a week to pursue something that you think will make ITC or UVa (or wherever you work) better even in a small way? If not, shouldn’t you have that opportunity?
That’s already been instituted in the Scholarly Resources unit in the Library — Fridays are no meeting days, and we are all encouraged/required to work on topics that are of personal interest and innovative. I’m newly moved into that area and haven’t settled into the practice yet. So far I’ve spent time catching up on relevant reading.
It’s a pity more organizations don’t work personal project time into their culture. In reality, most employees are already “wasting” a similar percentage of their work time anyhow. So why not channel that energy into something that benefits the employee and the organization?
Unfortunately, it looks as though this freedom-to-pursue-interests culture has to be formed in the organization’s early incubation years. 3M instituted a similar 15 percent solution almost 90 years ago after “an employee disobeyed an order to abandon a project to ease automobile painting and ended up creating Scotch masking tape”. 3M was still a relative startup at the time and its management team quickly applied the lessons of the experience. Since then, the personal innovation time has been a cornerstone corporate tradition. Post-It Notes are the most widely-known product success story to come out of such project time.
Can UVa pull off such a turnaround in culture? Too early to tell. Though James, Mike, and the Sherpas are making impressive headway. beTech has led the way as well. Is reading or commenting to this blog, attending a beTech presentation, or taking part in a beTech project part of your EWP? Probably not. But you’re still making a positive difference for yourself and this institution for “wasting time” in this community.
By the way, isn’t it interesting to note that both Google and 3M are on this past year’s Top 20 Most Admired Companies. Perhaps they’re on to something.
One of the first things we did as an organization was to start our BHAG program. BHAG stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goals, and we stole it from Jim Colins’ book From Good to Great (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0066620996/bookstorenow57-20). Every employee gets up to three months a year to work on projects that further the “thought leadership” of OpenSource Connections.
We did this because as a small consultancy, we don’t have the size to support a dedicated R&D group, and because you never know where the great ideas will come from. By building in time to work on projects that aren’t directly “line of business”, we can invest in peoples training, participate in community groups, attend conferences, and prototype ideas to see if they’ll work. Which means that we become better rounded, more valuable people.
This of course requires you to really “trust” your people. It’s not an invitation to slack off for a long period of time. In fact, we often find ourselves burning the midnight oil on our BHAG projects! We set measurable goals for each BHAG project, with a committee of advisors, weekly demonstrations, and frequent feedback on how someone’s BHAG is going.
Our current BHAG projects include a social networking project, a code metrics aggregation tool, a Ruby to Python language interpreter, and a .NET web widgets validation library.
The BHAG is part of what keeps me excited about being a software developer, and one of our favorite interview questions is “What would you do with 3 months?”
Leslie -
I am excited to hear that 20 Percent Time is making its way into the UVa technoculture. It would be interesting to see how it is manifesting itself in Scholarly Resources. Do they set out goals and metrics like it sounds Eric’s company does? Or is it more free form than that?
It sounds like Scholarly Resources is headed in the right direction, but for UVa to see a real benefit, this type of situation has to occur in more than just isolated pockets. As Eric points out, you don’t really know where the next great idea is coming from. You need to make sure the environment doesn’t let that idea go undernourished and neglected. 20 Percent Time is a concept that gives the ideas the time to grow and the gardeners (people like you and me) time to nourish them.
P.S. What is “Scholarly Resources”? I can’t seem to find any information about it.
I think of that google way just as a motivational trick. Doesn’t every employee pause at least 20% of her work time? And on the other hand - google is making money from displaying ads on webpages. I am not sure if they really need all their employees currently.