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In Search of Perfection

When your company name becomes a verb, you know you’ve arrived.

That’s precisely the position Google finds itself in. You don’t look for information on the internet anymore, you google it. Founded by two grad students in 1998, the company has grown to become the undisputed leader of the web search market and one of the worlds’ most recognizable brands. Google is also a major force in HR. Going straight to the top of Fortune’s 100 Best Employers to Work For list on it’s first appearance there in 2007, it’s also held on to the position this year. ‘Googlers’, as the company’s people are known, display an almost missionary zeal with regards to their employer. HRM had to find out what Google was doing so right.

Initially conceived as an interview with Laszlo Bock, VP of People Operations, the article you’re reading quickly took on a new dimension. In a typically unorthodox move, Google themselves suggested that we also speak to a few other members of the staffing setup. After all, why limit yourself to just one perspective? It’s an approach that sums up Google’s attitude to both its business and its people. Several months and numerous interviews later we had sat down with some of the firm’s top HR managers and found out a great deal about what makes this award-winning department tick.

When Laszlo Bock was appointed to his current position in March 2006, some saw it as a conscious move to tighten things up at a company famous for it’s freewheeling spirit. Coming in from the rather more straight-laced GE, such a suspicion is understandable. But any idea that Bock arrived with the intention of applying a more rigid, top-down structure is quickly dispelled. “I think it’s a misnomer to say that greater structure has been put in and then to contrast it with what you described as the company’s reputation,” he says. “If you think about Google, we’re a tremendously innovative company with a huge amount of freedom across just about everything we do. We are also a company that operationally executes extremely well.” He goes on to describe the sheer amount of sophisticated technology required to marshal the sheer amount of data that Google deals with on a day to day basis. “It takes a tremendous amount of process and structure, balanced with a tremendous amount of creativity and insight to be able to constantly improve.”

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This is all undeniably true, you don’t get to be in Google’s position by goofing off. But even the shortest tour of the company’s Mountain View Campus gives a fair indication of how these misconceptions might spring up. Office chairs are replaced with colored rubber balls, ping-pong tables are a constant feature and pet dogs roam the halls. In one room you come face to face with a T-Rex skeleton, in another a replica spaceship is suspended from the ceiling. This isn’t your average workplace. While some may see this environment as indicative of a lack of seriousness, a kind of never ending Hawaiian shirt Friday, those at Google clearly view the place differently. “We believe strongly that if you have remarkable, bright, inquisitive people and you give them tremendous freedom they will do amazing things,” Bock explains.

Bock sees his job, and that of People Operations as a whole, to be about finding these people and providing them with the minimally sufficient infrastructure that they need to excel in their roles. “It’s a fine balance between doing too much, at which point they become dependent on you,” he explains “and not doing enough, at which point they’re underserved.”

The freedom on offer is something that Stacy Sullivan, HR Director and Chief Culture Officer, also identifies as being a major factor in Google’s continuing popularity as a workplace. As one of the longest serving members of the HR team, she explains that this has been the case from the company’s early days. “The culture that was created from the very beginning was really important,” she says. “When the company started it was vital to have an environment where people wanted to work. It was important that people were drawn there because of the work, the fact that they’d be changing the world with information in terms of whatever they were working on. But it was also that it was a really pleasant place to be and that there were nice perks and nice benefits. It’s all designed to bring people together, to collaborate, to communicate and to create innovative ideas.” The idea is to build a place that people aren’t in a rush to leave. If more everyone spends more time on-site, they spend more time talking and bouncing ideas off each other.

This emphasis on collaboration and making the best use of employees’ ideas permeates throughout the company. A good example is Google’s peer review process. Running alongside the more familiar annual performance review, this asks employees to do a write up of their colleagues and managers. While similar systems operate in many offices, true to form Google take things a stage further. Sullivan explains: “What’s unique about most of our organizations, is that they’ve chosen that peer feedback be transparent, so you can see in the report back to you who said what.”

While you might think that this open approach would lead to watered-down commentary, Sullivan is adamant that this is not the case. “Once we started doing it people realized that it’s so much more thoughtful,” she says. “They are having to articulate in words with examples the points they are trying to get across, particularly in constructive areas. It’s really different and highly valuable for us.”

Laszlo Bock is also a firm believer in the power of open communication. Asked about the kind of changes that have taken place since he joined the organization, the concept features regularly in his responses. “As a team, I think we have worked together much more collaboratively,” he says. “We’re doing things much more cross-functionally not only within People Operations, but also across Google.”

A concrete effect of this free exchange of ideas and information can be seen in the company’s recruiting practices. As a consequence of this more holistic approach, average time to offer has reduced by between 30 and 40 percent. “We’ve reduced the number of interviews and we’ve increased quite dramatically how happy candidates are with the process,” Bock explains. “We’ve increased our ability to predict whether somebody will be successful at Google by anywhere between 10 and 30 times what it had been before. This was a result of work that was done between the Staffing Organization, our Analytics Team and Google across the company.”

Prasad Setty is Google’s Director of People Analytics and someone intimately involved with this increased efficiency. “We want to use data and analytics information to make sure that we are designing the processes in the best way possible,” he says. “We take analytics very seriously both on the business side as well as on the people side. What my group does is to enable and to make sure that we are using data to drive every decision.” Setty describes a desire to innovate with people, as well as with product. For a company whose main stock is managing data, it seems logical that some of that expertise would be turned inwards. “We collect a lot of information about our candidates, including their resumes, their transcripts, their GPAs and prior work experiences,” Setty explains. “It’s a very elaborate process because we want to make sure that we are bringing in the best employees.”

But data without a purpose is useless. In order to ensure that the correct information is being zeroed in on and that the absolute cream of candidates is being selected, Google has turned to those already within the organization. “We undertook a survey of our own employees some time back to figure out exactly which characteristics led to high performance,” Setty says. “We asked people within Google about not just their educational background, but also about their personality traits and so on. Out of that, we were able to paint a big, broad picture of what traits make a candidate more successful with Google than not. We are now using that information to decide on our professional candidates and figure out which ones are favorable.”

This rigorous focus on hiring the right people also applies to the People Operations section itself. To ensure that the right balance of skills and experiences are being brought in on the people side, what Bock calls a three-thirds hiring model is employed. “We specifically look for people with three kinds of backgrounds for our organization,” he says. “One is people from a traditional HR background, who bring a lot of strength. The second is people from a consulting background but have a skill set that lends itself to People Operations issues. The third are people with very robust analytic skills, so PhDs, Masters’ degrees in physics or statistics.” The benefit of these diverse groups is that they all have tremendous things to learn from each other. “When you get them in a room, you have this amazing team of people who bring different perspectives to every problem we try to solve,” Bock explains.

Since its inception Google has placed a consistently high value on technological innovation. It’s therefore no surprise to find that this attitude is also a feature of the People Operations team. “All the systems we use were created internally,” Bock explains. “We create systems that work for us that also harvest the incredible engineering talent that Google has to offer. More broadly, technology isn’t just what we do. It’s not just a business. It’s actually who we are.” To the casual listener, this may sound a little overblown, but Bock is adamant. “People who come to work at Google believe in the ability of technology to change the world. From a People Operations perspective, everywhere, anywhere we have activity we try to think how to make it better through technology. We look at what can we do by leveraging our amazing engineering talent to make things easier and more transparent.”

Judy Gilbert, Director of Talent Management, agrees that Google’s background in the nuts and bolts of engineering and the quest for continual improvement impacts on the people space. “Part of everyone’s mindset is the idea that we focus on the user and all else will follow,” she says. “That is also true of the way we do HR and in this case the users are the employees.” The aim is to create a culture of audience participation, with considerable resources devoted to gathering feedback from Googlers. “We make it a priority to really listen to that feedback, take it to heart and then get the people involved to help us drive the next iteration,” Gilbert explains. “I think that’s a good example of how something that grew out of our engineering culture applies to the way we run our own business, as well.”

Much of the positive press about Google as a place to work springs from its unorthodox attitudes and general sense of fun. But an enjoyable day at the office doesn’t pay the bills. It’s therefore no surprise to find that cold, hard cash does play a part in the organization’s appeal. Everybody has heard about the Google millionaires, employees who joined the company in its earlier days and ended up with some very attractive stock options. Googlers signing up today, or Nooglers as they are dubbed in the company’s internal lingo, may not expect to hit such grand financial heights but there are still some very attractive awards on the table. Frank Wagner is Director of Compensation and he believes the company is an excellent performer on monetary terms. “We actually compare to market surveys on a regular basis,” he explains. “We do it on a granular basis, like most good compensation departments would do for their organizations.” These surveys have shown that pay at Google is highly competitive both in base salary or equity incentives and our cash incentives. Wagner also describes how the system is implemented in the fairest way possible, with those that excel able to avail themselves of the biggest rewards.

“Before I joined Google I worked with lots of different companies, and this is the biggest meritocracy that I’ve ever seen,” he continues. “For the folks who are really stellar performers, we actually have a system that allows them to get a much, much greater bonus or annual incentive than what would be typical in other organizations. Our top performers can really do, far, far better here than they could at another company.”

As you would expect from an employer with such a huge focus on teamwork, bonuses aren’t just about individuals. “We bring in the company performance as well,” Wagner says. “That manifests itself in our company bonus plan. If the company does well there is an enhancement that comes from company performance. We’ve done very well financially over the four years since we became public.”

But regardless of the pay packets, there is an unshakeable impression that the real reason people love working at Google is its culture. This is a company which has the motto ‘Don’t be evil’, that has committed millions of dollars to renewable energy projects and where you can get your hair cut while you’re at work. Despite the rumblings that it is becoming more corporate, it’s still pretty much unlike any other employer. Speaking to all these Googlers leaves you with the impression that this talk of community and collaboration is far more than just PR. People feel a genuine affinity and affection for the place quite unlike anything we’ve experienced elsewhere. Even Laszlo Bock uses the possessive ‘we’ when talking about the foundation of the company, an event that occurred some eight years before he joined it.

Asked about what’s in the pipeline for People Operations, Bock promises more of the same. “As we grow there’s a lot of initiatives that are going on, a lot of experiments being run across our organization,” he says. “We also have to work very hard to make sure people within People Operations have a sense of what others are doing and can plug in across the organization.” He espouses a future where every piece of People Operations, Engineering, Products Organization and Sales Organization comes together to figure out changes that need to be made and paths that need to be followed. It’s an impressively holistic vision and one that would seem slightly ‘touchy-feely’ and out of place at virtually any other company of Google’s stature. It’s a testament to the energy pf the People Operations team that it all seems to be working so well. Bock sums it up: “That special chemistry you have from having the right team together is a really, really powerful thing for us.”

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