£5k Tech Budget for team productivity

I’m a big fan of openness and empowerment, and one of the areas that I’ve always struggle to understand, is how in most organisations it takes the same amount of effort to spend £100 than £10k.

I believe that we need to trust our employees (and teams) to make good decisions, since they are the ones on the frontline, with a very clear understanding of real-world problems and challenges.

Practically speaking this means that if somebody believes that we should spend £10 to £1000 on something that will help the team or her/him in their daily job, then we (management) should make that process very easy and smooth.

I’m very happy to say that I’ve just got approval from Glasswall CEO (Danny) and CFO (Mark) to allocate a £5k budget to the Glasswall Technology team (based in Chelmsford) to be spend on ‘anything that the team believes will help with their productivity’ (in the spirit of openness they are finding this out via this blog post)

Here are the rules of engagement:

• Funds are pre-approved by default (up to £5k), with usage shared regularly in weekly reports
• Anybody from the team can use the funds
• Only requirement is for the ‘item to be purchased’ to be shared with the team in a dedicated Teams channel
• If anybody from the team has questions about the use of funds, those questions should be answered before spending the funds (if there is no consensus, then we should disagree and commit)
• Funds are expected to be used on anything that improves the team performance and collaboration, for example: Books, Training Courses/Certs (online and offline), Developer tools, team lunches/dinners, online subscriptions (for example Medium), etc…

This is a good example of wisdom of the crowds and trusting that the teams will make the right decisions :)

Note: for an example doing this kind of model at a wide scale see the OWASP GSD Project (GSD = Get Stuff Done)