Pledge 1% of your team's effort
What could you get done with 1% of your team's time? Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash
What could you get done with 1% of your team's time? It doesn't sound like much. What if I were to ask what your team could do with 200 hours? That sounds a bit more like you could achieve something, right?
In a team of 10 people, working 40 hours a week (I'm using round figures for ease of calculation), 1% of your team's time is close enough to 200 hour across the year. It's 200 collective hours (not 200 hours for each person), but still enough to get meaningful work done. It's enough time to get a whole lot of insights from key stakeholders. It's a lot of time to research into competitors or users. It's a lot of time for a lot of meaningful work. It's also only 1% of the time, so it's not that much time in comparison to what else is available.
This week's post was inspired by my attendance at an event last week that was for the Pledge 1% community. It's built on the premise that corporate philanthropy has got it wrong. That instead of making a lot of money and using what's left over at the end to give back to a cause that makes a difference, the model could be flipped around. If companies committed to donating little bits (1%) of things like profit, products or equity to charity, then things could change significantly. Pledge 1% (and Atlassian) founder, Scott Farquhar spoke eloquently about the long term difference that this could make and I'd encourage you to look into it further.
More importantly for this discussion, it got me thinking about what this means for our teams. Teams are working hard. And fast. Relentlessly. It seems to lead to a mirroring of the established corporate philanthropy model. We intend to do these good things (like strengthen stakeholder relationships or teach each other new skills) when we have enough spare capacity. In reality, the spare capacity doesn't seem abundant in most of our teams. So...what if we built in tiny amounts for this. What I suspect might happen is that we would think it was achievable and reasonable, which makes it more likely to happen. Some of those efforts are likely to lead to improved performance and maybe even become a part of the way our teams work.
This idea of making small changes is not original or ground breaking. Among others, James Clear has sold millions of books based on the premise of Atomic Habits. By doing this at team level we can leverage the scale so that instead of 20 hours for one person in a year, we are talking about 200 hours for a team. If the initiative works, your team has spent 200 hours really well. If it doesn't, you've got the other 99% of your time to cover it.
Some questions for you to consider:
What would be a good thing for your team to spend 1% of your time on?
What is the worst thing that could happen if you did?