As Google has reported they let their employees work 20% of their time on the projects they like, and then many amazing things happened inside Google.

  Many new products came from this approach, for example, Google Translate, Gmail, Google Sky.

 But how? because this approach helped their employees with autonomy to be motivated, to do the stuff which they really like to do.

FedEx day is a similar approach. Atlassian was the first company starting to use the FedEx day inside their development team.

 They started this approach last  Thursdays of the month from 2 p.m. till next Fridays at 4 p.m and during this time the employees worked on the projects which they like and enjoy. For example, they liked to resolve the bugs of their systems but in the routine tasks, they couldn’t. Or some of them wanted to start a new project to help the functionality of the existing system.  With using this approach, the motivation and the engagement of the employees really increased and at the end the year they noticed that the profit of the company increase too, while people worked better and harder to resolve a lot of bugs inside of the system. On the other hand, employees had many interesting new ideas to improve the products and using new methodology to increase the performance too. 

So I believe that If you are working in a team and want to increase the people motivation and productivity its worth to try this approach for 3 months and then ask your people about their feedback and motivation. You can find more information on google about this approach. Let me know your experiences if you use this approach in your team.

You can search on the internet about it