“[W]hen you give engineers the chance to apply their passion to their company, they can do amazing things.”
That quote comes to us from Google software engineer Bharat Mediratta (in a 2007 interview with Julie Bick of The New York Times), and Google has certainly proved the statement accurate. Google’s 20% time policy encourages employees to spend 20% of their time working on projects that they’re passionate about but which don’t necessarily fit into their job descriptions. And the projects that have resulted from this (to one extent or another) include big name products such as Gmail, Google News, and Google Reader.
This is nothing new, of course. As Scott Berkun points out in this 2008 article, 3M’s 15% time rule in the 1950s helped usher into existence both masking tape and Post-It notes.
As you can imagine, this is a much-beloved perk of working for Google (big enough that it appears on Google’s Jobs page). And companies big and small could benefit from some version of it. Lifehacker has some tips, as does Google developer Joe Beda.
Ever produced anything awesome in your spare time at work? Are you encouraging your employees to follow their passions on the job (within reason, of course)? Leave a note in the comments below, and let us know.
Then get out there and have yourself a fantastic Fun Stuff Friday!
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[...] addition to our daily practice, we use our Google-time for various unsolicited projects, such as Failed Architecture and VURB, and for our ongoing [...]