An Iron-fisted Personal Development Policy
I have been thinking a lot lately about personal development. In a constantly evolving industry like web design, if you want to stay relevant, you need to stay current. Every day there is some new development, product release, or technique developed. If you don’t continue to learn, try, explore, and grow, eventually you will go the way of the dodo bird.
Realizing just how important personal development is to the graphic and web design industry, I’ve been seriously considering the implementation of a mandatory personal development policy for our employees at Zipline. What would it have in it, you may ask? The answer is, I am not quite sure. At this point I am thinking out loud. I have seen bits and pieces over the years about companies encouraging employees to partake in personal development. Some companies offer tuition reimbursement, others offer expense paid trips to conferences. While these are both great ways for employees to expand their skill set, they’re often cost prohibitive for small businesses.
My primary source of personal development is this blog. Every morning I get up at 4 AM and I read dozens of articles on marketing, advertising, graphic design, web design, and programming. After I have digested all of that content I will write an article relating to something that caught my eye, or something I experienced or learned the previous day. Then I will head into the office and attempt to put into practice the various interesting techniques, methods, and ideas I absorbed during my morning read. While I have learned a great deal by doing this, I am quite aware it would be unreasonable to ask my employees to work from 4AM – 5PM everyday, mostly because they’re a bunch of sissies.
So what if we paid our employees to blog, read, and network? During a time when many companies are banning social networking and other personal Internet usage it may seem counterintuitive to encourage employees to browse the Internet while on the clock. I think however that a couple hours of personal development per employee, per week would help the company become more innovative in the long run. I also think that this would help employees stay motivated. I know I personally feel excited and refreshed when I find new technologies or ideas to try. It helps to stave off the feelings of monotony that many developers begin to experience after their 1000th contact form.
While a personal development policy is an interesting concept, the question most managers will have is, how do you control it? In truth, I have no idea. Perhaps the first 30 minutes of every day is devoted to reading articles in a mandatory Google reader account and then it’s back to work. Maybe each employee is required to produce 2 work related blog entries a week. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer. Personally, I hate to try to govern creativity. Personal development should be something fun and enjoyable. I don’t want to have to stand over someone’s shoulder with a ruler like a Catholic school nun and force them to read Sitepoint or listen to BoagWorld. In reality, if they love what they do it should be something they want to do not something they have to do.
My intent with posting this article was get some ideas out there. I am sure some of you work at companies that have some sort of personal development policy. Please share any ideas, thoughts, or comments you have about what should go into a personal development policy like I described above. Whenever I get a good, comprehensive policy developed, I will share it on the blog open source style for all of you to read, adopt, and share.
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Comments
I wish my company would do something like this. I work for a web dev firm and if I get caught reading RSS or my blog there is hell to pay. I even tried to explain to the boss it was research but i can hardly get him to let us browse google for solutions.
I recently moved jobs. My previous job the boss was a timekeeper. We each had time sheets in 10 min intervals and every time block needed a job number. We had a couple of generic internal business job numbers but if we used them too much we got in trouble. So personal development time was non-existent. This ment there was no time to come up with new ideas for doing old tasks. No new technology… nothing. Unless it was done on out our time outside of the office. This was hindering the company and the boss didnt even notice. Not having the time to research new ideas or expand you skill set limited what we could achieve.
Then I throw timesheets out the window. My new job we dont have time sheets. Granted I’m no longer working on external projects for clients, but doing on a in house application that our sales team sell.
We have goals and timelines for development and make sure we meet them.
So we have the ability to spend a little time each day on ‘personal development’ – some times more than a little, some times none at all.
Having freedom in our work day means we can work in our own style. I like to come to work and go through my RSS feeds then get into work. Later on in the day I take a break and clear my head with a little more RSS goodness.
I (as does my boss) think this freedom make me a better employee, more up with the times, atop of new technologies etc.
What it comes down to in this office is trust. Our boss trusts the team to get the work done in the time frame we have. That means at times we take it easy and have some personal dev time, other times we knuckle down and get it done.
You need to find what works for you and your team.
How about presenting the results of learning to the other team members in person? For some, the first lesson would be how to present well, so they don’t fear it. Those who sell ideas to customers regularly will obviously have less problems with that.
The first presentations could be small, so that more than one will share his findings.
A discussion afterwards will help to find further topics for the search.
Just a suggestion