It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a hip person in possession of great talent must be in want of a job at Google. There are many, many articles that say so.
Needless to say that the visit to the Darling Harbour office of Google was a highlight of the Innovation Study Tour, although there was an early misstep when, ironically, Google Maps lead some of the group to the wrong side of the building.
It was everything you might expect, and then some…
The reception was suitably hip with a vertical fernery, tire swing and plenty of parking spaces for scooters.1 There were dogs because it was bring-your-dog-to-work-month which is something to be expected in all the cool workplaces.2 Apparently it seems that not even Google can escape Rules being proclaimed earnestly in printed A4 notices taped to walls and doors (e.g. only small/medium dogs, must be regularly walked to avoid accidents, must stay at your workstation, must be on a lead, don’t use the stairs, etc.)
There was a quick tour through some of the legendary Google break-out spaces complete with awesome cafeteria, library, power-nap pods, pool tables, pin-ball machines, and food – lots of food.
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Food is important at Google. It’s free, high quality and easily accessible. But it’s not just another perk to encourage people to join the company, or a sneaky way to make employees stay longer at work – it’s really about creating a time and a space where people interact, talk, and create. For a company like Google, creating ideas is gold, so a couple of things they do to encourage interaction and collaboration:
- a lunch-date roster for employees to have lunch with someone from a separate area they wouldn’t normally meet.
- micro-kitchens are strategically placed mid-way between work groups3
In a similar vein, people who rent a desk at a start-up space in Melbourne are trained to use an enormous coffee machine that was probably a bus in a previous life. The bonus is excellent coffee, but the real reason is that it is slower. It encourages people to pause for a few minutes while making a coffee, help each other out, talk to other people waiting and perhaps spark an idea.
After our an excellent lunch and much envy due to the limited likelihood of pool tables or even free museli bars appearing anytime soon in Federal Government offices, we moved to a series of presentations about innovation at Google.
The first part was, understandably, a bit of a sales pitch about the Google ecosystem of online tools. Spruiking aside, the point was well made that there are plenty of tools and applications now available that improve interaction and collaboration on projects and documents, making creation and development faster. Regardless what flavour of cloud-based thin-client office app you choose, there really is no excuse anymore for a document to bounce around as an email attachment, branching into several versions until some poor soul has to decipher a filename like ‘Working-Group-Report-v2-4+TWA-edit-Nov-DRAFT-FINAL.doc’ before the 1:00 pm deadline with the Minister’s office. With the strong push of Chromebooks and online apps into the education scene on the back of reduced up-front and ongoing costs, and similar moves in overseas (e.g. the UK civil service, NOAA), how long before the mobile thin-client trend moves deeply into government here too?
In the second part of the presentation things took an interesting turn. Innovation was still the theme, but it wasn’t the technology, it was the managers.
Google is strongly dominated by its software engineering start-up beginnings which includes a very flat management structure as a conscious effort to avoid becoming a ‘conventional company’. Keeping traditional management at arms length may work fine for a start-up with only a few people, it’s a bit hard to run a multinational company employing tens of thousands without some organisational rigour. But do managers matter? So began Project Oxygen where Google applied its own big data analytics to thousands of performance reviews (done quarterly at Google) and various feedback surveys and interviews. They wanted to understand what made good managers, and asked the question:
What if everyone had an awesome manager?
Turns out the specification list for a good manager is almost embarrassingly simple and could be boiled down the Eight Habits Of Highly Effective Google Managers:
- Be a good coach
- Empower your team and don’t micro-manage
- Express interest in employees’ success and well-being
- Be productive and results-oriented
- Be a good communicator and listen to your team
- Help your employees with career development
- Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
- Have key technical skills, so you can help advise the team
Note that technical skills was the least important in the list and Google had also fallen into the common trap of promoting excellent technical people on the assumption that they would somehow be good managers. Managers are now assessed against these eight attributes with feedback from their reports every six months – and pay is linked to performance (kinda…), the best managers get paid more.
There was also some in-built cultural aspects of life at Google that aims at driving innovation such as a weekly all-hands TGIF meetings where employees can ask any question of anyone – all the way up to Larry Page and Sergey Brin who regularly attend the weekly meetings at the Mountain View HQ. Transparency is also a key feature, everyone has access to sensitive information such as product launches and are trusted to keep it confidential4. The weekly meetings are also an opportunity to discuss failures big and small in a safe environment. And with a global reach like Google, some failures can be big.
This leads to a parallel study undertaken by Google to understand how teams work which lead to a list of five key features of successful teams:
The top attribute was psychological safety – the ability to take risks in a safe environment and being vulnerable, especially being able to get past ‘Imposter’s Syndrome’ and say you don’t know something or ask for help.
Finally, because Google are such good sorts, they have bundled up their learnings about people management on a website: https://rework.withgoogle.com/ . There’s some excellent stuff in there so dig in.
And then it was all over… We handed in our badges and headed back across Darling Harbour to the next visit whilst carefully avoiding getting tangled in dog leads.
