How to strike the ideal balance of autonomy on your team (and how Trello can help)

Here’s a little-known business fact:?Post-It notes first came about because 3M was in favor of bootlegging.

Before 3M sends us a “cease and desist” letter, let’s clarify: not?that?kind of bootlegging. Rather than selling illegal alcohol during Prohibition, 3M’s gave its employees autonomy to work on their own company projects. Dubbed “bootlegging” on company time, 3M’s policy gave its employees carte blanche on these projects for about 15% of their total work time.

The?Post-It note?was partly the brainchild of 3M employee Spencer Silver, who worked on the concept for years—often in his 3M office. In one of the most famous case studies in favor of employee autonomy, 3M eventually unrolled Silver’s idea. The Post-It became part of office supply history.

But let’s face it, one case study does not support an entire argument. You could just as easily give employees autonomy and watch them abuse it—working on projects that go nowhere or using the time to slack off instead.

According to MIT's Sloan Management Review, which uses “slack resources” as code for this autonomy…

Different types of employees respond in different ways to slack innovation programs; that different kinds of slack resources are better suited to certain types of employees than they are to others; and that different kinds of slack innovation programs produce different kinds of innovation.

In other words, it’s a tough balance to strike. But if you want an employee to come up with?your?version of a Post-It, it’s worth taking the time to figure out how much “slack” you should give your own team.

Rule of thumb: Give employees 10-20% “Tinker time”

3M wasn’t the only company that saw the value in giving employees time to tinker.?Google long supported a “20%” rule—about in line with 3M’s 15%. According to co-founder Sergey Brin:

We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20 percent of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google.

Innovations we now or once associated with Google’s core services—Adsense, Gmail, and Google News—reportedly came out of this 20% rule. According to Inc’s report, Google continued this rule for decades.

Other examples abound. Hewlett-Packard long stuck to a similar 10-15% rule. BMW’s 12-cylinder engine and Pacific Tech’s graphing calculator also reportedly emerged from employee “bootlegging” initiatives.

Employees like roaming time, and it clearly delivers results. In fact, if you take nothing away from this article, simply giving your employees more autonomy might help you.?Consider this Officevibe Pulse Survey, which found 20% of employees wanted more freedom in deciding how they work.

But is the employee autonomy formula really as simple as cutting out one-fifth of the week for side projects?

Finding the “Goldilocks Zone” of employee autonomy

Your goal as a team manager should be to identify the “Goldilocks zone”—cutting just the right amount of slack to encourage innovation, but not so much that you lose track of why you built the team in the first place.

For starters: yes, some autonomy is a good thing, even in school.?According to one study, letting each student choose the materials they used to create a collage created a significant boost in creativity.

But that study was from 1984. Is it?really?a good idea to maximize team member autonomy at all stages? Do you really want to sound like this?

A more recent?study?divided teams into several groups and tested the various?styles?of autonomy each group had. One group, for example, was allowed to choose their teammates. Another was allowed to choose their ideas. One group was allowed to choose both. According to Harvard Business Review:

Interestingly,?our analysis suggested that some — but not total — autonomy yielded the best results. …?Overall, the top performing teams were those who were assigned their teammates but allowed autonomy over their ideas, closely followed by those who were assigned ideas and allowed to choose their teams.

In other words, the?type?of autonomy you assign is just as important as how much autonomy you allow. If those results bear out in the real world, the manager should choose the teams. The teams should choose how they achieve their goals.?

One important note: there is no one-size-fits-all approach here.?Spotify, for example,?believes in letting people pick which teams they work in as well as the ideas they work on. Ditto GitHub. But the HBR study should give you a framework for where to start experimenting with more employee autonomy on your own team.

Encouraging “entrepreneurial” innovation—without the negative side effects

Ideally, your team would be full of entrepreneurial superstars—people who are destined for greatness in business. But take a look around at how the most independent-minded business figures actually behave. Elon Musk. Steve Jobs.?

Does anything about those people scream “team player” to you?

According to one study, while “top management needs to encourage autonomous behaviors,” these behaviors aren’t without their downsides. For example, new ideas mean team managers have to pick which initiatives sound best. If you pick one employee’s idea over another’s, it can lead to hints of favoritism. The study recommends the following to mitigate these problems:

• Employee investment.?The study recommends stock options, but any way you can encourage employees to feel buy-in or?engagement?will help mitigate negative feelings when you select one initiative over another.
• Passive monitoring.?A good team manager knows when to let go—but without getting untethered from the team. Like an NFL referee dodging a football, you want to watch and regulate without affecting the play itself. A benefit to?Trello’s Dashboard View, for example, is that you can stay up-to-date on team progress without involving yourself in every little detail of your team’s daily tasks.
• Systematizing innovation.?It’s not enough to say “go ahead—have some autonomy” and do nothing else. Employees might like that at first, but they need to know how that autonomy works. You need a system. Draft up a policy for evaluating new ideas, or create?Trello labels?to differentiate autonomous work from assigned work. You can also use?Trello’s Table view?to see which employees have ideas that haven’t been addressed yet.
• Beware of giving away too much autonomy.?In the Harvard Business Review study, randomly-selected teams outperformed self-selected teams. Why? “Prior research has shown that people tend to gravitate to their friends or to people who look similar to themselves,” said Harvard Business Review. “And we observed the same kind of pattern in teams that chose their own members.” In other words, don’t forget why a team manager exists in the first place: without your intervention, self-selection can sometimes become counterproductive.

Continue reading via the Trello blog to find out how to use Trello for team autonomy