Atlassian has a concept of FedEx day wherein employees are free to do a project of their choice with people of their choice and have to show a tangible outcome.The whole idea behind doing the same is as mentioned by David Rock in the following extract from Your Brain at Work..
“In the workplace, in order to increase fairness some organizations allow employees to have “community days,” where they give their time to a charity of their choice.”
By Twenty percent of time on Training Wheels , Daniel Pink in his book Drive means that companies like Google , Atlassian in the modern age of innovation and creativity encourage their employees to devote 20% of their total time to do something of their own in order to create a shippable product.
This is the result because of which Google gave birth to Gmail and Google News and is regarded as a pre-requisite in the modern age of Motivation 3.0 where autonomy is a key ingredient to nurture mastery in modern day knowledge workers.
Adopted from Daniel Pink’s book Drive
Atlassian’s FedEx Day program wherein the employee is allowed to try , experiment and present his/her own idea is a great example of nurturing intrinsic motivation in employees.
This has been mentioned in more details by Daniel Pink in his book Drive.
The following link aptly highlights the innovative program undertaken by Atlassian to nurture Motivation 3.0 in its employees.
Source – ideachampions.com
http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/archives/2011/12/atlassian_is_a.shtml
Dan Pink’s book “Drive” emphasizes the importance of “intrinsic motivation” for a modern day knowledge worker.
He makes a mention of the iconic company named Atlassian(invented Jira ,Confluence etc. agile software lifecycle tools).
To encourage creativity as a drive towards intrinsic motivation one day every quarter is celebrated as “FedEx Day” wherein anyone can develop anything of his or her choice provided something is shown as a deliverable.
Amazing thought process!!