When my business partner handed me a book – Insights from Inside Google – WORK RULES and said, “you might find this interesting”, my initial response was…. “A book about Google and technologies I won’t understand, this is going to be a hard slog….” . Imagine my surprise when I realised it was about people management, more specifically, innovative and thought-provoking people management strategies that could actually be applied outside the Google environment, by any organisation. This is the first in a series of articles sharing some of the insights that really resonated for me as a HR and Change Management Practitioner.
In his book – Insights from Inside Google – WORK RULES, Laszlo Bock, Senior VP of People Operations at Google discusses the influence of Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin on the organisational culture. As Laszlo points out, Larry and Sergey started out with some very specific ideas and ambitions about how they wanted people to be treated at work and the employee experience at Google. As the founders of Google, they had a significant influence on that culture. However, he also suggests that all of us can act like founders and have just as significant a role to play in founding, shaping and sustaining desired organisational culture.
Google’s Culture
Some of the more well-known attributes of Google’s culture include weekly ‘all staff’ meetings, which started when Google was a handful of employees, (now tens of thousands) but the meetings still continue, with Q&A sessions run by Larry and Sergey. Another is the way Google recruits, and specifically, that recruitment decisions are made by groups rather than individual managers. When it comes to sharing information – Google’s ‘Default to Open’ policy is quite extraordinary. They start from the position that access to information at Google for all employees should be the default, then if there is a risk identified in sharing specific information, consider how it should be treated, this being the exception, rather than the norm. Finally, there is Google’s generosity to its employees including their employee share scheme, free meals, healthcare and washing machines. Google’s founders believe it’s a small price to pay to assist their employees focus on the job and achieve amazing things.
Employees as Cultural Founders
For me though, the most important thing about the actual Google founders is that they left room for others to act like, and be founders and they continue to demand it. Laszlo argues very strongly that all of us can be founders of culture, within entire organisations, within departments and within teams. You don’t need to be a CEO, an Executive or Senior Manager to be a culture founder. It is up to each of us as individuals and we must choose whether we want to be a founder or an employee, which is not a question of literal ownership, but of attitude. This is an incredibly powerful and empowering way to view organisational culture and our individual impact on it.
But is it Possible?
But is it possible? Laszlo explains that as the organisation continues to increase in size, the key attributes of their culture become more difficult to maintain – makes sense. He says “we enjoy a constant state of paranoia about losing the culture”, but he maintains this is a good thing, in fact a great thing, because it focusses the organisation (and the founders) on maintaining the key cultural attributes at all costs. Google achieves this through their network of ‘culture clubs’ – groups of ‘founders’ whose job it is to ‘nudge the local office culture’ along and ensure an ongoing connection with Google’s key cultural attributes. These clubs have really modest budgets which can be used for staff functions and events to promote Google’s culture. There is no application process for the role of culture founder, you become or are appointed to these roles simply by acting like a culture founder, and the HR Manager will seek you out.
What a simple, but effective strategy for managing and sustaining desired organisational culture. After reading Google’s story, I am convinced this can work in larger organisations for either sustaining existing cultural attributes or affecting cultural change. In fact I’ve seen some good examples of similar strategies in Australian organisations to manage specific cultural change initiatives, with cultural change conversations supported by morning/afternoon teas, brief presentations and then participants being encouraged to share their opinions on different topics. However, perhaps if we had self-appointed cultural founders keeping an eye on and ‘nudging our culture along’ in the right direction all of the time, significant cultural change initiatives and interventions would be required far less.
