Trailblazers with tinkering time on their hands

von Rhymer Rigby

Giving workers the chance to pursue pet projects can pay off.

Imagine a company where, one day a week, employees can work on pretty much anything that interests them. Instead of coming across something intriguing in the course of work, muttering "might be something in that" and forgetting about it five minutes later, they get to find out if there really is "something in that".

3M, the Minnesota-based industrial and technology group, has been giving people "tinkering time'' for as long as anyone can remember. "You can spend 15 per cent of your time on projects that interest you," says Paul Corbin, senior technical manager. "You don't have to do it but if you want to, it's there."

The reasoning is that "exploring different areas is a very good long-term way of keeping people inventive and keeping their imaginations fired up", he says. One of 3M's most famous products, the Post-it note, was a result of tinkering. More recently, someone looking at adhesives came up with a better, recyclable way of using advertisement posters on the London Underground.

Google has a similar arrangement. "Engineers can spend 20 per cent of their time on pet projects if they want," says Randy Knaflic, Google's EMEA engineering staffing manager. Gmail came out of such pet-project time as did the new flight simulator feature on Google Earth, which was started by a single engineer with a passion for flight.

Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Lancaster University in the UK, is a fan of giving people work time to pursue their own projects. "You see people on trains with their BlackBerries and mobiles and laptops. All they are doing is responding. They never have time to have the ideas that become great new products or services," he says.

"Thinking time" is not usually limited to engineers or developers, as might be expected. If you work in human resources or marketing and want to spend time thinking of better recruitment or sales strategies, that's fine, too. "We all need time to think - whether it's a project, people or a new marketing strategy," says Prof Cooper.

Another benefit is that time for creative thinking can make a business more attractive to innovative people. Mr Corbin says 3M's diverse range of products is in large part due to the explorations of the tinkerers.

Companies might reasonably worry that if they let staff do their own thing, they might really do their own thing. Mr Knaflic says this is rarely a problem as Googlers usually tend to be interested in activities that benefit the business. Mr Corbin adds that the ethos engendered by the programme at 3M fosters a trust that usually means that if someone appears to be heading way off-piste, all that's needed is for their supervisor to suggest they try a different route.

Prof Cooper observes that many businesses might say this is all very well for a company on the scale of Google, but that they do not have the resources to give people this sort of time. But he believes that is a chicken and egg argument. If you want your people to generate world-beating, high-revenue ideas, you must give them the time to think.

Also, businesses offering thinking time do not expect everything to make money or even result in something useful - for every fantastic new adhesive or globally adopted webmail platform there are plenty of interesting avenues that turn out to be blind alleys.

"It's a bit like running a record label," says Mr Knaflic. "You sign a lot of bands and hope that a few will be big successes."