I’ve never seen shared shadow work get rewarded, and in environments where they reward individual local optima and # of stores completed in a sprint (instead of innovation and teamwork), you may want to keep your shadow projects to yourself and use them to beat out other workers metrics-wise.
Doing secret projects, that never get revealed, to increase your personal competitive advantage is an interesting idea. There are probably work cultures that are hostile enough to developer initiative, where this would be the better option. I am usually bothered enough about inefficiencies in general process, that I can't help but try to fix them, even though it requires revealing my work and getting buy-in. But, doing this may not always be in my best interest. Thanks for the comment!
In a work utopia, I think all effort would be undertaken by means of persuasion not assignment. You make a good point, that this might naturally help workers to more appropriately balance their shadow work with official work, since they would have more information.
Good call. In fact, now that I think about it, a workplace utopia would be free of management all together and consist solely of self-organizing workers. All work would be self-initiated.
I’ve never seen shared shadow work get rewarded, and in environments where they reward individual local optima and # of stores completed in a sprint (instead of innovation and teamwork), you may want to keep your shadow projects to yourself and use them to beat out other workers metrics-wise.
Doing secret projects, that never get revealed, to increase your personal competitive advantage is an interesting idea. There are probably work cultures that are hostile enough to developer initiative, where this would be the better option. I am usually bothered enough about inefficiencies in general process, that I can't help but try to fix them, even though it requires revealing my work and getting buy-in. But, doing this may not always be in my best interest. Thanks for the comment!
In a work utopia, I think all effort would be undertaken by means of persuasion not assignment. You make a good point, that this might naturally help workers to more appropriately balance their shadow work with official work, since they would have more information.
Good call. In fact, now that I think about it, a workplace utopia would be free of management all together and consist solely of self-organizing workers. All work would be self-initiated.