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It’s no surprise that Google has topped the list of Fortune 100’s “Best Companies to
Work "Their jaw-dropping company campus Googleplex is enough to make any professional drool for an
opportunity to work for the world’s largest search engine.
Subsidized massages, afternoon volleyball
breaks, bowling alleys and basketball courts – personally, free chef-prepared
food is the best perk. Formula behind their success lies in the intangible:
an organizational culture that is the paragon for every company across all
industries.
It is one of the key factors that make it
even more impressive for a company of this magnitude (more than 40,000
employees!) to become a pioneer for corporate culture and stay true to its
founding philosophy.
Google Spent years studying Great
Teams:
A few years ago, Google went on a quest to build the perfect team. The basic aim
was to find out why some teams perform well while other teams don’t.
Researchers code-named the study Project Aristotle, a tribute to the
philosopher`s famous quote: "The whole is greater than the sum of its
parts." For this, first, researchers identified 180 teams to study,
including both high- and low-performing teams. They then focused through the
data and interviewed hundreds of executives, team leads, and team members.
Interestingly, the data revealed that Executives and team members had
different opinions as to how to measure effectiveness. Executives cared much
more about results (e.g., sales numbers or product launches), while
individual team members agreed that "team culture was the most important
measure of team effectiveness."
Apparently, it is not surprising. But it
discovers a major insight:
“To build a successful team, you must find
the balance between results and culture”
Further they found five factors having a
significant effect which are 1) Physiological safety, dependability,
structure and clarity, meaning and impact.
Employee Recognition for small and
big contributions
Google recognizes that appreciation is the best
way to reward employees for their contributions. Recognition like The
Founders’ Award provides incentives for employees to do the best work they
can do, the rewards from which, paid in the form of Google Stock Units that vest over time, are pretty enticing.
But as much as Google likes to seize opportunities to acknowledge strong
performances, the company is equally willing to celebrate failure as well.
Google products are known to always be in Beta –
mistakes are praised. Before she became the COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg
was a vice president at Google whose responsibilities included managing their automated advertising system.
When she made a mistake that cost Google several million dollars, she
admitted her error to co-founder Larry Page, whose response sums up the
company’s attitude on failure: “I’m so glad you made this mistake,” he said.
“Because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing
too much, not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don’t have any
of these mistakes, we’re just not taking enough risk.”
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