Ask HN: How to implement innovation time policy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to implement innovation time policy?

3 pointsa_imho6 comments

I'm gauging the feasibility of implementing innovation time (20%) policy. What should be the main guidelines so that it could be inclusive and mutually beneficial to all parties? E.g it is neither treated as overtime nor slack time and something valuable eventually comes out of it. Any tips or pointers to successful/failed attempts are appreciated.

Also, what could be the right angle to approach management to fully get on board with it?

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Revolve your budgeting around the 20% being treated as gone.

If you cannot do it, don't do it and don't put up gimmicks for it; While hackathons have been really helpful in creativity, the sore impression they drive in an otherwise stressful workplace is: great, more work to do or I need to now get back grinding that old thing again.

What it really means is: You cannot have innovation unless your culture favors it, period.

Personal opinion but I find conferences and trainings more of a waste of time, and obviously they are more expensive as well. I see innovation time as a complementary practice to hackathons. I very much agree with the cultural aspects, but hopefully innovation time could have a positive effect on it as well?

I've tried doing something like that in my very small company (two employees) and I think I wouldn't do it again.

- There's always too little time to get things done in time. If people do something else 20% of the time, you are even less likely to finish things quickly.

- I did not make any rules, so people just tend to work on their hobby projects that aren't necessarily "innovative", and I'm not sure how much they learn in comparison with other activities (eg. going to conferences)

- if people have a good idea, I think it is better to let them work on it on "regular" time rather than "innovation" time.

- if employees have enough freedom what to work on, special "innovation time" might not be needed.

For more detail, this is a very big company with room to experiment.

I did not make any rules

Do you think that it could make a difference? Some of the guidelines I'm thinking about:

There should be a clear goal probably with time bounds as well. Budget should be estimated. No individual teams, there should be a minimum number of people involved for each project.

Yes, a clear goal sounds like it would help. There should be something to work towards.

I would also plan for some way of presenting the result of the project (eg. a presentation to the team).

Personally I prefer allowing devs to submit proposals for projects, basically innovation time but they say upfront what they're going to be doing and if approved it becomes a project that is managed the same way as ordinary work but the client is the company itself. In my experience devs have proposed (and eventually built/ongoing) a new data API, a mobile app, a huge refactoring, framework upversioning, a massive dependency reduction, a geographic dashboard for our datasets, an optimisation engine and a prediction engine. Probably added more value than any other scheme I've seen.

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