Wow, how cool is this job perk
“Engineers can devote 20 percent of their time to projects of their choice.”
That is seriously cool and a great way, IMO, to have your employees come up with cool new ideas for your company. In many companies, the only time cool new ideas are brought forth is when someone is trying to solve a specific problem they are working on. Someone could be totally buried in daily issues which is removed from their “cool” thoughts and never get to produce something they really want to unless they go off and do it on their own outside of work. Many employees won’t spend that extra time working on the cool stuff in their own time as they have probably already spent a ton of time working on work and away from the family. Hence the company may lose out on cool new innovative ideas. Keep in mind, companies get good new ideas from the employees, the company itself doesn’t produce them. In fact, the company itself doesn’t produce anything, it is the employees. Companies that forget that their employees are what make the company succeed and beyond that… to be great…. are doomed to fail or only perform at best “adequately”.
This “perk” or “benefit” in my opinion helps Google more than anyone else by keeping the employees engaged and interested and give them some feeling of ownership and that their ideas and opinions are important.
This little perk was mentioned in an article with other items about working at Google.
The article is
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/253401_googlehiring26.html
Sounds great but I spoke to a few Google people at their London open house about this…it’s one of those “fantastic in theory” benefits, but it doesn’t always pan out the way that it should.
One of things that I LOVE abou Avanade is the gadgets allowance…or extended benefits. Whatever the jargon, it’s a “go and spend on fun stuff” funny money in my mind. I love my TV. Sorry, external monitor.
Actually the most interesting thing at the Google open house was hearing about their internal operations. A couple of months ago they apparently lost an entire data centre but bc of their infrastructure no one noticed. At least I didn’t, and I’m surely one of the most Google-happy people out there. Surely my customers don’t think that I know what SMTP stands for off the top of my head do they?? 🙂