User talk:Knocte
Innovation time off (ITO) is a motivation technique employed by certain companies that consists of encouraging employees to spend their work time in projects that interest them.
Over the years, this technique has been used by many companies but the one which has popularized the most has been Google, Inc., because they highly publicitize the fact that many of their services and products were born thanks to this policy (such as GMail).
Another way of calling the kind of products that can be created within this initiative is Side Projects[1]. In the same way time spent in training by your employees does not contribute directly to the company's bottom line, side projects may (or may not, ever) just contribute in an indirect way. And that's the point, as one of the requirements of Innovation is to make mistakes, create and implements lots of ideas, and later throw away most of them, kind of like brainstorming.
This idea has served to other companies as a foundational concept to base their entire managerial structure: flat hierarchies, bottom-up idea flow. Some examples are Valve Corporation which in their employee handbook explain a company structure with no bosses, or Github which doesn't have managers and openly lets people work on what they want to work on[2]. In these cases, Innovation Time Off may not really be the appropiate term to refer to them, because it applies to 100% of the time, thus it may be better to apply the Flat Company adjective to these, like Jason Fried refers to his small company 37signals[3].
Author Daniel H. Pink also cites this technique in speeches [4] while talking about his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, as an example of the first of the three principles explained: autonomy, mastery and purpose. The second principle, mastery, could be also related to this technique in the cases in which it also allows autodidacticism as training.
Following is a relation of companies that follow this technique and the percentage of working hours of allotted time targetted to it.
Company | Percentage | Limits/Remarks |
---|---|---|
20% | No limits | |
Valve Corporation | 100% | Emphasizes to base the policy on team collaboration |
Atlassian | 20% | |
Novell | 10% | Company encouraged individuals to reserve their ITO for hackathon-like company-wide events called HackWeeks. This policy does not seem to be present anymore since the acquisition by Attachmate. |
7digital | 10% | No limits. |
GitHub | 100% | |
100% | ||
Linden Lab | 100% | No longer a valid policy since December 2008[5] |
Opposing point of views
[edit]This technique or policy has not convinced everybody an the best proof of it is the small amount of companies that apply it.
There have been even companies that applied it in the past but stopped doing it at some point. The best example here is LindenLab, which changed their "Tao" (company culture values) on December 2008 to remove the section "Your Choice is Your Responsibility", which explained:
There's a dual meaning here. Most companies tell you what to do. Then they make you accountable to the person who told you what to do, not to yourself. We don't think this gets the best long-term results with a truly ambitious project like Second Life. At Linden Lab, you are expected to choose your own work, you have to decide how you can best move the company forward. This isn't always easy, but it can be very rewarding for you and it is a huge win for the company. This doesn't mean that you can't ask someone else what to do - it means that you are responsible for choosing who to listen to! You are responsible for listening well and broadly enough to choose wisely. And once you have chosen, you are responsible for executing well to making your choices work. You must understand that other people now rely on you for single-minded execution, and it is time to shut out the noise and work without distraction. Sometimes you will fail, and in those cases it is very important to fail fast and fail publicly - that is how we learn and iterate and ultimately win.
In LindenLab's case, this technique was placed as a core value of their culture (like Valve Corporation) so it alloted for 100% of the time.
See also
[edit]Flexible Time Off Paid Time Off
Xdg-app
[edit]Please do not "copy/paste move" an article. See wp:moving a page on how to do it. Copy/paste moves lose the wp:page history. Thank you Jim1138 (talk) 02:43, 25 May 2016 (UTC)
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The article Maverick.NET has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:
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Hello, Knocte, and welcome to Wikipedia. I edit here too, under the username Yeeno, and I thank you for your contributions.
I wanted to let you know, however, that I've started a discussion about whether an article that you created, ReVanced, should be deleted, as I am not sure that it is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia in its current form. Your comments are welcome at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/ReVanced.
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Yeeno (talk) 03:29, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
- ^ http://zachholman.com/posts/why-github-hacks-on-side-projects/.
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(help) - ^ http://zachholman.com/posts/scaling-github-employees/.
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(help) - ^ http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110401/jason-fried-why-i-run-a-flat-company.html.
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(help) - ^ http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/dan_pink_on_motivation.html.
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(help) - ^ http://wiki.secondlife.com/w/index.php?title=Tao_of_Linden&diff=173553&oldid=25217.
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