It boils down to three key elements: growth, creativity, and feedback
— @kiva
People need opportunities to be creative; it’s absolutely vital. What I’ve learned is that if people feel like they need to paint by numbers, they’ll work at one-third of their productivity level. So we’ve created a system in which once in every five iteration cycles, our engineers do an “innovation” iteration, in which they can release any kind of programming code they want. And what we’ve found is that they create three times as much code during the innovation iteration. People can experiment without asking for permission, and this creates a huge boost in morale.
This is a partial except from an essay in the bestseller End Malaria. Click here to find out more.