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This article was taken from the April issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Give employees creative autonomy
Through a combination of great computer code and smart business practices, Australian software company Atlassian, founded in 2002, rakes in about US $35m (£23.5m) per year -- and employs nearly 200 people. When they started, founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes were wary of company stagnation. So they decided to encourage their programmers to spend a one-off day working on any problem they wanted, even if it wasn't part of their regular job.
This offbeat "off day" gave birth to several ideas for new products, and plenty of repairs and patches. So Cannon-Brookes decided to make it a part of Atlassian culture. The catch for its staff is that the following afternoon, they have to show the results of their one-day labour to the rest of the company.
Atlassian calls these 24-hour bursts "FedEx Days" -- because people have to deliver something overnight.
As other future-facing businesses are discovering, a key motivator for staff is autonomy -- in particular, autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and with whom they do it. As Atlassian shows, people are more productive when they have autonomy over the four Ts: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.
In spring 2008, Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar announced that for the next six months, Atlassian developers could spend 20 per cent of their time working on any project they wanted. A surprisingly small number of other companies have moved in this direction. The best-known is Google, which has long encouraged engineers to spend one day a week working on a side project. Google News, Gmail, Orkut, Google Talk, Google Sky and Google Translate were all created in this way. At Atlassian, during a year-long trial, developers launched 48 new projects. So in 2009, Cannon-Brookes made autonomy a permanent part of Atlassian life. And if a finance guy objects to the price tag, Cannon-Brookes has a ready response: "I show him a long list of things we've delivered."
Daniel Pink: author of Drive (Canongate), from which this is an extract
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
