Advantages of "Innovation time off"

Google deploy a technique called “Innovation time off”, to encourage its employee to spend 20% working(one day of their week) on the work they like. Products like Gmail, Google News, Orkut, AdSense etc are the results of this technique. They claim, about half of their new products are result of this 20% free time. Isn’t sound interesting, getting 50% of return for an investment of 20%.

Today, most of the organizations are providing good facilities and good environment, to get best from their employees. But instead of providing facilities isn’t good idea to provide the one project of employee’s interest, to get best from them. Also this technique will help to utilize the bench period of the employees, as in the free time each employee will be busy with a project. The project which is result of his thought process.

In a regular project, contribution of a junior level resource, in designing phase is very minimal as designing is normally performed by senior members of the team. During 20% time, employee will work on the projects ignited by his own idea, therefore he gets a good chance to design his won idea/project. This will help to increase the creativity of the employees.

In software industries, work satisfaction, is one of the major factor of Attrition. Most of employees, I found, are not happy with the project they are doing. “Innovation time off” ensure that at every time, each resource is engage, at least in one of the project of his interest. Thus it must be very effect to retain the best talent in the organization.

Besides all above mentioned advantages, there are some challenges in front of organization, in implementing the “Innovation time off” technique. One of the major problem is the ‘schedule tightness’, but at least organization can start with providing one afternoon (10%) of free time, to their employee, to work on projects of their choice.