10% Time Pilot Program

10% Time Pilot Program

To keep our work environment fresh and to provide our employees with the time to accomplish their personal and work goals, I proposed a program, that is similar to Google’s 20% time.  This program would provide them with 4 hours of “free time” to work on projects or trainings of their choosing during their work week. I was given a chance to run a trial period. It was framed out with one of our teams participating, and during the trial we kept up with them to see what they were using the time for and what they accomplished. I gathered that data with 1-on-1 conversations and an online survey. After the trial, a report was created along with a recommendation on a path forward concerning expansion of the program. I would like to share what we implemented, how the participants used the program, the feedback we received, and our next steps.

Background and Setup

The software product I work on has three individual development teams with me as their Scrum Master (at the time of this pilot program).  During each release cycle, two teams are focused on forward work (feature team) such as new features and bug fixes for the next release. The other team (customer issues team) devotes their attention to customer issues. Each release cycle, teams are rotated between these two roles. For our pilot, it was determined to have just one team test out 10% time and the customer issues team was selected. This selection was made to lessen a potential regression in our feature team’s productivity. Once we determined the team that would be piloting this program, we established that 10% time would be available during the last four hours of their work day on Fridays.

You will also read mention of Innovate in this article. This is an event established around two years ago. It is held two times a year that lasts three to four days. Employees can create their own teams and work on projects of their own choosing. At the end of the event, it is expected that they have something demonstratable at the end. We then hold a showing of those projects, and afterwards, some projects make it to production for their products.

The Purpose, the Goals, and Observations

In my proposal for 10% time, I created a purpose statement. This was there to help establish the program and help us stay focused on what we wanted to do with the program.

“Provide our software teams with the last 4 hours of each Friday as available time to pursue other appropriate personal goals and/or projects. Examples of appropriate activities are: working on goals, learning new skills, Innovate projects, continuing education, cross training, experimenting with different solutions, etc. The most important aspect of this time is that the participant gets to choose how to appropriately use it.”

I also created five goals to strive for in using this 10% time. To sell the program for a wider release, we needed to set these goals, document our work, and determine if we met those goals and what we could do to alter the program to make it better and more valuable. Without that information, it would be hard to expand the program when you can’t show any data from the pilot. Here are those goals and my evaluations from our pilot:

Goal 1: “To provide our teams with time to self-improve and to reach and surpass personal, yearly goals.”

The time was provided, originally, on Friday afternoons. However, after a couple weeks of this framework, team members started to use the time outside of the original time block. The feeling in the group was that they wanted to utilize this time when they had downtime during the week. They felt that they could better serve if they used the program when an opportunity came up instead of time-boxing it to a specified time. When asked in the survey, no response suggested to contain it to a specified time but to be able to use it freely throughout the week. However, my current conclusion is that by allowing it to be open on when you use it, you run the risk of it not being utilized at all.

Three out of the four survey respondents mentioned working on their goals during the 10% time, among other things. Only one participant’s feedback indicated that they may have used it to surpass their personal goals. It reads:

“Annual goals, research projects, continuing innovate project research and implementation, watched training videos online (Youtube, Pluralsight ect...) on various development things I wanted to learn more about and spent time learning about industry trends and new technologies to make our products better and more innovative.”

During a 1-on-1 chat with another participant about the program, I received a piece of feedback that was in opposition to the above comment. I asked them how they wanted to use their time and the response was that they were not sure how they would use it because they had already met their yearly goals. They didn’t see an opportunity to use the program to exceed their goals. Two other noteworthy comments about the use of the time were: “I mostly used mine to play catch up. If not working on issues, used time for research” and “…I also looked to see if others were in need of assistance and was able to take some of that time for that as well.”

In summation of this goal, we did provide the time and, the majority of, participants used it to pursue their goals or support other teams not on 10% time.

Goal #2: “To promote experimentation and innovation by allocating time.”

This goal was not met by my observations or from the survey results. I did not witness any innovative ideas come out of 10% time during the pilot. However, the goal did provide an opportunity to reach this goal as indicated in the survey response above: “watched training videos online (YouTube, Pluralsight etc...) on various development things I wanted to learn more about and spent time learning about industry trends and new technologies to make our products better and more innovative.” This was the only evidence of this goal being addressed.  If the pilot was a long period of time, there might have been opportunities for innovative idea to come from the extra learning time that was provided.

Goal #3: “Create opportunities for people to work together that normally don’t.”

This goal was not achieved as it was intended to give opportunities for team members to work with people from other teams. Since the pilot only included one team, there was no opportunity for cross team work or collaboration.

Goal #4: “Make our teams more productive and motivated.”

The data that I collected for the team’s velocity does not support or dispute a more productive team. The information collected on velocity is not vast enough to be able to determine if the team became more productive or not. Velocity stayed within normal levels.

Motivation was observed to minimally be improved. There was some excitement from a few members of the pilot team to get to use the time. However, those that did not know how to use the time provided, didn’t have an appearance of increased motivation.

Goal #5: “Give some Innovate projects some time to get that final push to where we can include them in releases.”

This goal did meet expectations. The team members that are active in Innovate used this time to get a jump start on upcoming Innovate projects. The following survey quote is an answer to the question, “If 10% time continued, do you see yourself using it? If yes, what might you use that time for? If no, why not?”

“1000% yes, this 10% is very useful for many reasons, it has allowed me time to work research projects and find solutions to projects that I would not have had time to do during an innovate session. To be clear I still see great value in both, the 10% is way to work on larger projects or get innovate projects closer to a production ready state without adding additional load to our sprints. I think of it as 10% of my week I get to work on Research and Design projects or just improve my craft by studying and training.”

There is a lot of interest, and possibilities, to use this time to accomplish this specific goal. Especially on a wider scale release of the 10% time program.

Other Survey Feedback

I did receive other feedback from the survey that I did not mention above in the goal discussion that I feel is important to share. The entries that I will bring to the forefront here are ones that have caught my attention on the positive and negative side of the program.

The first entry to catch my attention was an answer to the question, “How did you use your 10% time?” The response: “I mostly used mine to play catch up. If not working on issues, used time for research.” I found this answer interesting as this program was intended to give the team members the ability to step away from that work and use the time as they wanted to, not to only use it if they could. Instead, this individual used this time to “play catch up.” This is against the spirit of the program. I don’t condemn this work and certainly see the value; however, it devalues the program itself.

To support this concern, I had two more entries from another question, “If you couldn’t/didn’t use all of the time available to you, why?”

“There were several days I had off/out of the office and/or we were under time constraints to get our product completed/out the door to beta”

“There were a few times when I chose to put sprint work first only because the team was behind, or we were waiting on me and I didn’t feel it was good to be working on non-sprint work when in those situations. This only happened 1 or 2 times.”

However, we did have a more positive response to the above question:

“At first, I didn’t have a lot of things that needed individual time set aside for – however as we went along, I was able to arrange things where the 10% time was more productive for me (different things would come up that were more applicable to 10% time).”

What is interesting to me here is the fact that they grew into finding ways to use the time allotted. This could be a hurdle with a lot of people first coming into a program like this. When you first don’t have the time, you may not be paying attention to what you would use that time for, after getting the time, you might become more interested in finding or recognizing activities that would be good to do during the available time.

My Opinion of the Pilot

There are 2 aspects of the pilot that prevented us from getting a better picture of the outcome 10% time could provide. First is the time frame of the pilot. It was conducted over 4-5 months. Over this time, we did not see a concrete change in the team’s velocity in either a positive or negative direction. For us to see a positive swing, we would need a longer period of people getting that extra training/education, or working on projects, to see fruits of those labors. For us to see a negative swing in team production, all three teams would need to participate each time, over a long period to gather data. My prediction if we were to proceed by having a long period of time and all teams participating, we would see a very slight decline at the start, but an improvement as we are able to use new knowledge and training and gain new momentum.

The second aspect that hurt the pilot was that limitation of the number of teams during the pilot. Using only one team for the pilot reduced a lot of potential data input. The more teams we have in the program, the more input we would get to help us understand the positives and negatives. Another negative effect of only one team participating is that team felt that they needed to help the non-participating teams instead of doing 10% time. This is demonstrated several times in the survey. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not saying what they did wasn’t right, but stating that it goes against the principle of the program. Being the only team working on it, there seemed to be a guilt factor that they got into the program while others were working on sprint work. So, instead of working on those 10% projects, they worked on other tasks owned by other teams.

Going Forward

After the pilot program, I created my report and packaged it along with all the survey responses and sent it up to management. I also included a proposal on moving forward:

“Seeing the small, positive outcomes from the pilot program, I would like to pursue this program at a wider scale. Expanding this to all teams would give us a much clearer understanding of the effects of a program like this. This would run for another 6-12 months and information gathering would be built in. I can see this becoming a great value add for our employees and our customers. I would work with other department managers to observe the program and monitor success and challenges.”

Since that proposal, I was given the approval to move forward with a larger pilot. We have expanded to all three of my teams for a ~3-4-month trial. After that, we would consider expanding this to all our development teams in our area.

Each Monday, the first four hours of your work day, is dedicated to 10% time at the time of the writing of this article. We are tracking what everyone is working on during managerial 1-on-1 sessions and collecting that data for future evidence of the value of the program. With the expansion of the program to all three teams, that guilt factor mentioned above, is almost non-existent.

Some of the immediate feedback we have gathered so far is extremely positive. Team members have been able to work on their yearly goals when previously they had been searching for a break to do so. Also, some of our Innovate projects have gotten more completed or spun up. Others are enjoying the time to do extra training in areas that they haven’t had an opportunity to explore. At the time of this article, we have only been running the program for two weeks and the participation is, observably, 100%.

Once this pilot is complete, a report will be created that documents all the work that was done during 10% time and the value that it created. That will be used to help open the wider release of the program. If we are able to continue to show value out of the program, we will be able to make this a permanent program.