Karman, Culture, and Policy Pt6 — Research Time
Saving the best for last! Ever feel like you or your team are falling behind because you’re busy with the current work in the office? Wouldn’t it be great, to explore all these new techniques and technologies you read about on Hacker News?
Keeping Relevant
One of the big issues we’ve had in the past was that work that made the company money today was not going to be relevant tomorrow. In most organizations, once you’re effective at doing something, and it’s profitable for your company, it’s hard to justify major changes to “what works”. Low risk incremental adjustments are usually the only changes you can justify let alone find time for. Unfortunately this environment causes you and your team to keep the status quo until it completely falls apart. Maybe you held onto the waterfall production process just a bit too long, kept creating experiences in Flash when the writing was on the wall, or overlooked more efficient programming practices. Without taking the time to try something new you’re essentially racing your career and team towards cliffs.
So what do you do about it?
This is where research time comes into play at Karman. Separate from all of the typical studio practices (hack weeks, lunch and learns, etc…) each team member accrues what we call research time throughout the year. Just like vacation, research time is booked off in blocks with advanced notice. While on research time people still come into work but can work on anything they want.
Seriously. Anything.
Want to try out React Native? Cool. Want to get familiar with After Effects? Great! Want to learn how to knit? No problem!
The only catch is that at the end of your research time you have to share whatever you’ve learned with the team. This is the slight social pressure to make sure you actually pursue a result rather than twiddle your thumbs the whole time.
With this undirected time you have the opportunity to pursue moon shots, increase your technical/design capabilities, explore a related field or gain fresh perspective. Not to mention, it’s a refreshing break from your average day to day.
Most of the time these projects, by their nature, won’t result in any major revelations. However, every project provides clear benefit to the individual and keeps us aware of the world outside of our current business.
Going Deeper…
That’s basically it. The policy itself goes into great detail explaining the ins and outs of research time. If you’re interested take a read through.
The Awkward Truth
In all honesty, while there’s a lot of excitement around this program not many people have taken advantage of it. This past year has been really busy for everyone on the team and maybe people don’t feel like they can ask to take research time. That’s unfortunate because it’s when we’re busy that taking time to step back is the most important.
If you see something or can think of a reason why people might not be taking advantage of the program we’d love to hear your perspective. This year we’re really going to badger people to take the time and see what happens.
In The End, What’s Ours Is Yours
This concludes the policy series. Dedicating so many posts to policy was a bit strange but we really wanted to put our way of doing things out there. Hopefully someone finds a glaring issue and brings it up in one of these posts!
If you’re an individual and want to work with our team either on contract or full time don’t hesitate to reach out! We’re always on the lookout for that next great addition.
If you’re in a position to enact policy in your own company, feel free to steal any or all of the wording from our policy docs, it’s yours to iterate on. We’d be delighted to see more studios take the approach we do! If you want to take the discussion further we’re always happy to grab a drink and discuss these ideas with people too. I’d like to say I’ll post updates about how these policies pan out but take a look at my old Year in Review posts and you’ll notice I can’t keep a post schedule. So, in the meantime, good luck!
