The Google Innovation Model - A Festivus For the Rest of Us...

Couple of questions today on Employee Engagement here at The Capitalist:

1.  Do you think you can engage employees in your company who are not currently engaged?  Or do you feel like I felt a while back, and believe that the best way to ensure employees are engaged is to hire engaged people?

2.  If you don't know who the engaged people are in your department, do you think you can figure it out by making them an offer they can't refuse? (if they are the type who are or can be engaged)

3.   Do you think the best way to engage employees is to offer creative time to all employees, whether they have shown a wisp of engagement or not?

What's got me thinking about engagement in this way? I was catching up on Jon Ingham's blog (UK), and he reminded me of a practice to stimulate innovation at Google by offering up 20% of the workweek to technical projects of the employee's own choosing.  From the Harvard Business Review via Jon Ingham:

"One clear reason for Google’s success at innovation is that the company does what many others do not: budgets for it in employee time. New ideas at Google are often generated by employees, from the bottom up, in a prescribed system of time allocation. Technical employees are required to spend 80% of their time on the core search and advertising businesses, and 20% on technical projects of their own choosing."

If you are like me, you've read about that practice before.  Pretty cool, but not exactly transferable, mainly due to one factor...

I'm not Google... Neither are you.... Our mix of jobs is different.... and so's the talent in many ways...You don't, for the most part, hire PhD's who are expected to create and innovate on a daily basis.  You'd like innovation, would settle for engagement, and want to avoid folks working against you.

Seriously - if you put this practice in place today, what percentage of your employees would come to you to inquire about what the heck they were supposed to spend the flex time on?  30%?  50%? 70%?

Fortunately, there's a festivus for the rest of us - Coffee's for closers, so if you are looking to see who's really ready to innovate, tell the individuals on your team that if they can find a way to get their current workload complete in less time, you would support the use of 4 hours per week at work to pursue any work-related, professional development project that interests them.

Then see who's proactive about pursuing it.  Those are your engaged employees.  Do whatever it takes to retain them.

The good news?  You don't have to brainstorm with Billy in records management about what he should do during innovation time...

Comments

[Andres]

I agree, it would be a truly magical moment to hear, just once, an employee say, "gee, my current workload is complete. I've got an extra four hours to kill, think I'll go innovate."

In practice though, I doubt many employees would be so frank as to come out and tell you that there workload is complete - which is what they would implicitly be saying if they took advantage of the four hours of innovation-time.

P.S. What do you have against Billy in Record Keeping?! :-)

[perrik]

So what do you do with employees who don't have the flexibility to be, well, flexible? I work in a large hospital department. Some of our employees are administrative types, and they tend to be pretty engaged already - educated, ambitious, ready to develop projects on their own initiative.

What of the others? We have a busy outpatient clinic, and the employees there are on set schedules. They can't finish their work early, because they work the hours the patients are there. There's no "let it roll to voicemail, I'll deal with it later" when you're checking in patients or filing medical records. Some of the non-nursing staff have AA or BA degrees, but most are HS/GED grads. Some positions are prone to high turnover. Some employees have been doing the same low-level job for years - almost 30 years for one employee - with no apparent interest in taking on more responsibility or learning marketable/promotable skills. How do we engage these employees? What about the medical secretaries who have been doing the same job for two or three decades - would they want time for projects, or additional training or education? They're content, but do we try to engage them - or should we, if they're competent and happy?

Does the nature of one's job determine whether or not it's even possible to be engaged? Is "engagement" a white-collar luxury?

[Kris Dunn]

perrik -

Don't have all the answers, but you bring up good points. Especially those regarding positions that are "always available" to customers. As for the three decade people you don't think would take advantage of such a program, that's why I'm an advocate of the "get your work done in less time and you can use the rest" to innovate.

If they don't want to do it, you never hear from them. Those that want the time increase their efficiency. Coffee's for closers...

Andres - I never liked Billy. A slacker and a little slow on the uptake...

KD