Why is Google so successful? There are many firms and experts that have spilt a lot of ink on that one, and there may be no simple answer, but at least there is no shortage of strong opinions. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998 while still at Stanford getting graduate degrees, and their youthful outlook remains dominant in both company culture and practice.
Is Google’s success directly and inseparably tied to innovative corporate culture policies? Has a collaborative and festive company atmosphere made growth and profit possible? Or has growth and profit made the luxury of Google culture possible, indulging the whims of its managers?
How Things Work at the Googleplex
Fortune describes Google as the best company in the world to work for, and most observers heap praise on them for the dominance of their technology and the length of their tenure as the premier search engine. It was not difficult to rate their efficiency or effectiveness. Google does more business than all their competitors combined, and they do it at a lower cost.
Organizationally, Google maintains a casual and democratic atmosphere, resulting in its distinction as a “Flat” company. The company does not boast a large middle management, and upper management is so hands on, it’s hard to qualify them in a separate category. Teams are made up of members with equal authority and a certain level of autonomy is maintained. "We're a highly collaborative culture," said Karen Godwin, the office's online sales and operations manager and a former Kodak executive. "There's no top-down hierarchy." (Yung p. 1)
This techno-democracy takes a good deal of effort to maintain. In order to secure it, a sort of bread and circuses environment is created. Google boasts some unique cultural aspects:
- Local touches like ski gondolas in Zurich, expressing each office's unique location and personality.
- Dogs, lava lamps, and massage chairs.
- Double rooms (few single offices!) with three or four team members.
- Foozball, darts, assorted video games, pianos, ping pong tables, lap pools, gyms that include yoga and dance classes.
- Social groups of all kinds, such as meditation classes, film clubs, wine tasting groups, and salsa dance clubs.
- Health food at a wide variety of cafés, and outdoor seating for sunshine brainstorming.
- Snacks and drinks to keep Googlers going throughout the day.
Is all this worth it? Kevin Ryan, a vice president at SearchEngineWatch.com, an industry newsletter, puts it this way: "The Google culture is probably one of the most positive, influential, all-encompassing, productivity-inducing environments the world has ever seen." (Yung p.1) This sort high praise is typical from industry experts, and there is no shortage of emulation recommendation in industry magazines.
Personnel
Google has consistently scored in the top five slots of Fortune magazine “Best Companies to Work For” rankings. This fact is not lost on the next generation of the computer savvy. In fact, a Universum Ideal Employer Survey found that nearly one in five undergraduate students, 17%, chose the web's leading search engine as their ideal employer.(wright 56) Trust is established during the hiring practice, which follows a highly technical line. In this way, it echoes much of the for-engineers, by engineers corporate culture there.
When a new applicant is considered, information collected about where they went to school or worked previously is parsed and stored in the ATS. The system matches that information to data about existing Google employees-say, an applicant who graduated from Temple University is matched to an employee who graduated from there. A prospective employee applies for a job. The company uses its applicant tracking system (ATS) to ask workers to weigh in on applicants who have submitted their resumes online.
Following a match, an e-mail automatically asks employees for internal references. Employees can respond via e-mail, thereby updating the system. Karp says this allows recruiters to tap employees who best understand the demands of the jobs and the nature of the culture in assessing the fit of potential hires. It allows current employees to build the community- even if they are not part of the formal interview process. (Wright 57)
Once inside, employees function in loose teams in a relaxed atmosphere. The combination of this atmosphere with the methodical nature of Google task-based, engineer design system makes for a difficult fit. A previous head of design at Google, for example, was compelled to quit when the company expected a collaborative discussion over even the tiniest details of his work.
These kind of restrictions derive from the Laboratory environments at Stanford where Google was originally designed by its founders. Deeply methodical methods and big expectations on employee behavior, even if those expectations are casual, make for a Laboratory employee relationship.
Leadership
Larry Page and Sergey Brin still play an active role in the day-to-day affairs of Google Inc. That being said, they have constructed a corporate culture that deeply believes in delegation. Individual employees are encouraged to speak their mind from the first day, and even decisions classically reserved for management, such as hiring, are done through a collaborative process. (Wright p.56)
The result of their efforts is perhaps the best example of a Loose-Tight company; one where the core employees have autonomy, but under the regime of a single unifying philosophy.
Google is, and will likely remain, one of the most dynamic and competitive firms in the world today. Its willingness to learn from its experiment and learn from its mistakes compliment perfectly its internal collaborative structure.
References
Aliah D Wright. (2009, January). At Google, It Takes A Village To Hire an Employee. HRMagazine: SHRM's 2009 HR TREND BOOK,56-57
Katherine Yung. (5 September). Google's engine for change. Knight Ridder Tribune News Service
Greg Goth. (April 2008): "Googling" test practices?(Currents)(Google's culture encourages process improvement). IEEE Software 25.2 p92(3).
Staff, Fortune Magazine (2009)
Richard Burton. (2009) Organizational Design, step by step approach. Cambridge University Press.
Greg Johansson - Gregory Johansson has been a Web marketing consultant for nearly a decade and has published copy on dozens of websites ranging from online ...
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