I spend a lot of time thinking about technology and the future (and yes, not just in relation to Star Trek). Lately, I’ve also been spending a lot of time thinking about innovation — namely, how we can do it well within our company, while also still executing on our client work at a high cadence.
This is likely also a problem your company is grappling with. It’s a version of the aspirational adage, “Work on your business, not in your business.” It’s important to serve clients and execute on your promises, but continuous learning is ultimately what fuels business growth.
What we’ve discovered is that deep, transformative innovation doesn’t happen without intentional investments in experimentation and complex learning. That’s why we decided to start paying our team members to focus on innovation each and every week. Here’s why.
“Improve & Innovate” is a core value at our company —“i2” for short. When we took the time to interrogate our performance relative to that value, it became clear that our learning and training efforts over the years had been largely ad hoc and informal. It worked for a long time, but as business problems and tools have grown more complex, we realized this approach put us at risk of falling behind.
Our new approach centers around a process we call our Grow Plans. It’s built collaboratively between an employee and their manager, and allows the employee to see how their passions and talents can grow to help the company.
After signing off, employees are given a weekly 2-4 hour paid block of “i2 time,” during which they are encouraged to learn, research and experiment in service of those goals. The result of any specific plan might lead to a tangible outcome, or it may not, but the whole process is intentional, documented, and reviewed.
Early results from the i2 pilot have been extremely promising. We have recorded thousands of hours of i2 time, with over 50 certifications gained since launch — all while still delivering on our client promises. Employee feedback indicates our team members increasingly feel like they have the time and support they need to grow professionally. They’re now using that time to solve complex process issues and develop cool cross-team projects with technology like AI.
Could this have happened without paid, dedicated innovation each week? Maybe, but likely without the same speed or collaborative nature. By making learning and innovation a regular part of the work week, we’re doing it with more intention, more dedication and fewer knowledge silos.
This is not a novel concept, of course. Plenty of companies, especially those in the tech and scientific sectors, invest heavily in employee innovation time. What I want to see is that approach filter down to more businesses in our region and state. If we are to become the high-innovation center of the country we aspire to be, we need to invest in unlocking it within every industry.
For as much as corporate culture around training is changing, there’s still plenty of bootstrapper mentality hanging on. I recently read an article in a trade journal for high-tech professionals titled “We Are All Busy.” As you can guess, it extolled the necessity of making time for professional certifications in spite of the fact that many are putting in “40+ hours a week, then go home and work more in the evenings and on the weekends.”
“We have plenty of time. We just choose to put other tasks ahead sometimes,” the author concludes.
I get it — in a fast-moving industry like ours, you’re not going to make it if you have to be forced to learn. But that kind of managerial attitude also breeds resentment, burnout and turnover, especially when the learning assignments are “become an AI expert” or “learn and implement this complex CRM.”
We all agree that learning is important. Let’s agree that driven, talented employees shouldn’t have to do it alone.
John Osako is president and CEO of Informatics Inc., a digital agency based in Cedar Rapids. Contact him at [email protected].
