Part 3: Consider Giving Your Employees Time for Personal Projects

Part 1 (Flexible Work Schedules Will Attract More Gen Y Employees To Your Company) and Part 2 (Measure Employee Results Instead of Monitoring Clock Time) of this series on Flexible Work Schedules discuss allowing employees to have more flexibility in when, where and how often they work. Part 3, however, brings to the table an idea that is not totally new, but that hasn’t been widely implemented—Offering employees a “Pet Projects” Program. 

A Pet—or Personal—Projects Program would consist of allowing employees to spend up to 20 percent of their time at work on personal projects. This could be anything from creating a new product to updating an old process to any other innovative idea. 

While not really a “flexible work schedule,” the Program will allow employees to spend some of their time at the office working on a personal project that they are really passionate about. 

A few companies that have a program like this implemented at their organization are Genentech, 3M and, of course, Google. 

In fact, Google actually requires their engineers to spend 20 percent of their time working on projects unrelated to their primary job duties. On the Google employment Web site about life as an engineer, it says, “Google engineers all have ‘20 percent time’ in which they’re free to pursue projects they’re passionate about.” 

Stacy Sullivan, Google’s head of human resources, said in the Workforce Management article, “On the Clock But Off on Their Own: Pet-project Programs Set To Gain Wider Acceptance,” that “The policy emerged a few years ago and has its roots in the company’s desire to foster innovation.” And it applies to all employees. 

Gen Yers like to be creative. They want to do something meaningful. They want to nurture a project from tadpole to adult. They want to find new ways to perform old tasks. They want to take on a project and be able to complete it in their own way. 

Interested in fostering innovation at your company? Here’s my 3-step program for giving it a go. In its developing stages, you will probably want to use a test group to see if this is a program that you can implement throughout your company. A test group can include any number of employees but is usually easiest with 10 or less. 

Get the Conversation Started

Invite your employees to a brainstorm session and ask them these two questions:

1. What are some ideas you’ve come up with for projects you’d like to undertake?
2. If you were given time during your work week to pursue this project, would you want to?

Then see the responses you get. You may find that your employees are bursting at the seams with ideas. Have a conversation about each idea and ask how the employee would execute it. By discussing these ideas you can find out if this type of program would work at your company (and if there are any good ideas at all, they are probably worth at least exploring them). 

If your employees don’t have any ideas on the spot (which is unlikely) ask them to take a couple days to marinate, and then reconvene. By getting the conversation started your people will now have this program in the back of their minds as they go about their week and ideas will start popping up here and there. 

Manage the Program

This program will work best if you assign each employee a manager to report to. This     could be their daily manager or it could be one specific person who will manage the entire program. 

The manager and the employee should draw up a loose outline of the project and its estimated timeframe.

After their project is planned, the manager would check in with them on a regular basis to see how they’re progressing. 

Joyce Giola, a consultant and author of Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People, said in the article, “On the Clock,” that accountability is critical for a program like this otherwise it could deteriorate into a big waste of time. 

Set the Ball in Motion

Send your employees off to work on their projects, making sure to set check-in dates. 

As you start seeing this test group completing projects, you will have a better grasp on whether or not this type of program would work at your company. 

I’ve also found that when my day-to-day life is getting stagnant, by working on some of my own projects—creative writing, making jewelry, decorating my house—I become reenergized for my daily routine in a way that not even a Red Bull could fix. 

So I suggest trying to implement a program like this at your company—even for a couple months—to see the kind of response you get from it. You may be completely surprised (and have some great new company projects to brag about!). 

And if you think this type of program is a waste of productivity, then let me introduce you to something I like to call reality. The truth—though often very difficult for employers to swallow—is that employees already complete personal tasks on company time, approved or not. A recent survey from Salary.com found that the average worker frets away about two hours per day, not including lunch. 

So since it’s happening anyhow, your company might as well benefit from it.