Letting Employees Solve Company Problems

May 2, 2012

Interview with Ryan Tate, author of the book The 20% Doctrine: How Tinkering, Goofing Off, and Breaking the Rules at Work Drive Success in Business

________________

Mike Carruthers:
More and more companies are allowing their employees to work on side projects that could benefit the company even if it has nothing to do with the employees’ job description.

Ryan Tate:
From the companies stand point they have these employees that like late in the day on a Friday are not at their most productive. And the companies that use this approach seem to do it in order to encourage those employees to use those hours for something that might hypothetically benefit the company and they seem to use it as a low cost research and development lab.
 

Ryan Tate, author of the book The 20% Doctrine, says Google is well known for letting their employees work on these kind of side projects and it has paid off well for Google.

A guy who wasn’t even a programmer said, “Hey what if we instead of just selling ads based on who bids the most, right why don’t we figure out how many people are actually clicking on them and adjust our formula and show the ads that are actually going to make us the most money.” And it was a very, very simple tweak to Google’s system that ended up making them 100’s of millions of dollars.

Of course employers have to put some limits on this for example…

People can only pursue these sort of side projects for a limited amount of time, they can’t go crazy and spend company resources on sort of a wild goose chase. But even if the products didn’t add directly to the bottom line which in some cases they didn’t’ it always seemed to be the case that the employees were happier, they felt more engaged with the company and by all accounts employees really seemed to appreciate having that room to at least try to make their case.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.