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Why paying your staff to goof off is a good idea
By Wang Yong |
December 22, 2012, Saturday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
IF you want your company to be innovative, try to let your employees goof off now and then. He who is absent is not always in the wrong.
So says senior business journalist Ryan Tate as he explains the unexpected benefit of allowing employees to spend 20 percent of their paid time on personal projects.
"In a company setting, the lack of structure is the whole point," he says. "The very crises that have undermined the priesthood of American business are now empowering what was once the underclass: the rebellious, the off kilter, the young and the marginalized."
That's the message of his 2012 book, "The 20% Doctrine: How Tinkering, Goofing Off, and Breaking the Rules at Work Drive Success in Business."
20% phenomenon
As a veteran business journalist and the technology gossip blogger for Gawker's website, Ryan Tate gives a narrative arc from Google to Flickr to Yahoo, and finally to the ever-popular 20-percent phenomenon in every aspect of business and life in America.
If the 20 percent doctrine is new to Corporate America, it's even newer to Corporate China, or for that matter Corporate Asia, which has long been patently patriarchal.
In Corporate China or Corporate Asia, the more hours you spend hanging around the office, the better you're likely to appear to your bosses. This is often the case even if the long hours are not productive and your spirit drifts someplace else.
Google's approach is to let employees devote 20 percent of their paid time on personal projects they care about - even projects that may not bring immediate benefits to the company. The concept is revolutionary in corporate governance because, to a certain extent, it frees employees from patriarchal orders - the very antithesis of innovation.
In essence, Google's 20 percent-doctrine amounts to real "thinking out of the box." Tate observes: "A great side project walks the line between the host company's core competencies and outside technologies and ways of thinking that the company hasn't embraced."
Birth of Gmail
He tells may stories, such as the birth of Gmail.
Google did not deliberately invent Gmail; it all began with Google engineer Paul Buchheit trying to improve Google's rudimentary internal e-mail system - it was his personal fun.
In 2001, he created Gmail and released it to his fellow workers for peer review. He decided to convert at least 100 happy internal users before Gmail was announced publicly. He did it. Now, Gmail's user base has expanded from the initial 100 internal users to more than 200 million people worldwide.
One detail in the Gmail story merits special attention. As Tate tells us, Buchheit quickly attracted the support of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as he tinkered with the company's old and immature internal email system.
If you're a boss, this detail may get you thinking about your employees' personal interests and support your employees in developing their personal projects, which just might become money-makers.
In Corporate China, goofing off is often greeted with managerial suspicion. How can an employee be paid to do anything personal during working hours?
If you hate goofing off, read this book. The author goes from Google's 20 percent doctrine to Flickr's pivot strategy to Yahoo's Hack Day, and the common thread is this: forget your corporate rules and pay your employees to work on something they are passionate about.
Gourmet's role
For example, if you're the boss of a lifestyle magazine facing declining revenues, you may organize a hack day or two and ask your employees what to do.
Or you may apply the 20 percent doctrine and give your employees one day a week, four days a month, or two and a half months a year to do whatever inspires them. In that process, keep an eye on what could bode well for your magazine.
Say you have an employee who is a gourmet and who often goofs off to restaurants during working hours. You dislike her.
But now your magazine is not selling so well and she tells you she has been hoping to publish a series of booklets or shoot a TV series on eating across China or America. Don't dismiss her. Try to see if her personal interest can help bring added revenues to your magazine.
And if you're the principal of an English-language school in Shanghai, don't dismiss your employee if he or she does Chinese calligraphy during working hours. As more and more Chinese parents would like to see their children educated in both Western and Chinese culture, your "off-kilter" staff may well be your tour-de-force in the fiercely competitive education market.
Working long hours under patriarchal orders can be fine, but goofing off is not all bad.
When innovation is key to corporate and economic growth in many countries, thinking out of the box is good, and working out of the box may be better.
So says senior business journalist Ryan Tate as he explains the unexpected benefit of allowing employees to spend 20 percent of their paid time on personal projects.
"In a company setting, the lack of structure is the whole point," he says. "The very crises that have undermined the priesthood of American business are now empowering what was once the underclass: the rebellious, the off kilter, the young and the marginalized."
That's the message of his 2012 book, "The 20% Doctrine: How Tinkering, Goofing Off, and Breaking the Rules at Work Drive Success in Business."
20% phenomenon
As a veteran business journalist and the technology gossip blogger for Gawker's website, Ryan Tate gives a narrative arc from Google to Flickr to Yahoo, and finally to the ever-popular 20-percent phenomenon in every aspect of business and life in America.
If the 20 percent doctrine is new to Corporate America, it's even newer to Corporate China, or for that matter Corporate Asia, which has long been patently patriarchal.
In Corporate China or Corporate Asia, the more hours you spend hanging around the office, the better you're likely to appear to your bosses. This is often the case even if the long hours are not productive and your spirit drifts someplace else.
Google's approach is to let employees devote 20 percent of their paid time on personal projects they care about - even projects that may not bring immediate benefits to the company. The concept is revolutionary in corporate governance because, to a certain extent, it frees employees from patriarchal orders - the very antithesis of innovation.
In essence, Google's 20 percent-doctrine amounts to real "thinking out of the box." Tate observes: "A great side project walks the line between the host company's core competencies and outside technologies and ways of thinking that the company hasn't embraced."
Birth of Gmail
He tells may stories, such as the birth of Gmail.
Google did not deliberately invent Gmail; it all began with Google engineer Paul Buchheit trying to improve Google's rudimentary internal e-mail system - it was his personal fun.
In 2001, he created Gmail and released it to his fellow workers for peer review. He decided to convert at least 100 happy internal users before Gmail was announced publicly. He did it. Now, Gmail's user base has expanded from the initial 100 internal users to more than 200 million people worldwide.
One detail in the Gmail story merits special attention. As Tate tells us, Buchheit quickly attracted the support of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as he tinkered with the company's old and immature internal email system.
If you're a boss, this detail may get you thinking about your employees' personal interests and support your employees in developing their personal projects, which just might become money-makers.
In Corporate China, goofing off is often greeted with managerial suspicion. How can an employee be paid to do anything personal during working hours?
If you hate goofing off, read this book. The author goes from Google's 20 percent doctrine to Flickr's pivot strategy to Yahoo's Hack Day, and the common thread is this: forget your corporate rules and pay your employees to work on something they are passionate about.
Gourmet's role
For example, if you're the boss of a lifestyle magazine facing declining revenues, you may organize a hack day or two and ask your employees what to do.
Or you may apply the 20 percent doctrine and give your employees one day a week, four days a month, or two and a half months a year to do whatever inspires them. In that process, keep an eye on what could bode well for your magazine.
Say you have an employee who is a gourmet and who often goofs off to restaurants during working hours. You dislike her.
But now your magazine is not selling so well and she tells you she has been hoping to publish a series of booklets or shoot a TV series on eating across China or America. Don't dismiss her. Try to see if her personal interest can help bring added revenues to your magazine.
And if you're the principal of an English-language school in Shanghai, don't dismiss your employee if he or she does Chinese calligraphy during working hours. As more and more Chinese parents would like to see their children educated in both Western and Chinese culture, your "off-kilter" staff may well be your tour-de-force in the fiercely competitive education market.
Working long hours under patriarchal orders can be fine, but goofing off is not all bad.
When innovation is key to corporate and economic growth in many countries, thinking out of the box is good, and working out of the box may be better.
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