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Ivey Business Journal

Distributed leadership at google: lessons from the billion-dollar brand.

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By any standard or metric, Google is a standout company, and perhaps the main reason for its superiority is its remarkable style of leadership. What employee turnover or attrition? That enviable style, however, was not established overnight. At least, not quite, as readers will learn.

Google now provides free net-search services in more than 120 languages, with a large number of web-based products in its portfolio and generates about 97 percent of its revenue through online advertisements (Google Adwords and Adsense). The Google brand is valued at USD 100 billion, making it the world’s first ‘one-hundred billion brand.’ In 2009, Fortune magazine ranked it as the best place to work in the U.S., which is indeed a tribute to the company’s leadership and people-management practices.

Like many other well-known companies, Google Inc. too had a garage startup. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin met in the Stanford PhD program in computer science, they developed the idea of a search engine company. They decided to drop out of the PhD program and to launch the new company from a friend’s garage, which they did in 1998. Both Page and Brin have academic ancestries: Page’s father, Dr. Carl Victor Page, was a computer science professor at Michigan State University; Brin’s father and paternal grandfather were both mathematicians, and his mother was a research scientist with NASA. Brin was Russia-born and emigrated to the U.S. when he was six years old.

Both Page and Brin were researchers at heart (though neither of them completed their PhD). Their venture was a rather ‘unanticipated’ outcome of their research project on “The Anatomy of a Large-scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” The search engines available at that time were not very efficient in quickly finding the most relevant results for the user. This issue was becoming increasingly complex, with the explosive growth of the materials on the web. Hence, the duo took up the challenge of designing an efficient system for crawling information from the web, keeping the crawled information up to date, storing the indices efficiently, and handling many queries quickly. In the process, they developed the PageRank technology (now proprietary to Google), which ranks the quality of each web page using a complex calculation of link structure based on the linkages among web pages. Their confidence in their invention was so high that when selecting a name for their company they picked up a modification of a mathematical term (GOOGOL, which is the name of the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeroes). In doing so, they indirectly conveyed the company’s unique vision to organize and procure ‘infinitely’ large amounts of information for users, and possibly make as much money.

The Google style

The academic ancestry of the founders and their own inclinations for independent thinking and research may have had an impact on their leadership style, especially in matters of empowering their employees and encouraging them to come up with innovative ideas and implement them. They have a policy of recruiting only class-A employees and giving them the freedom to exercise their creativity. While there could be some cost saving in recruiting class-B people, it would push the organization into mediocrity in the long run.

There is a 70-20-10 norm about time allocation by employees: 70 percent of the time should be devoted to Google’s core business of search and advertising, 20 percent to off-budget projects related to the core-business, and 10 percent to pursue ideas based on one’s own interest and competencies. There are also generous rewards and awards for implementing innovative ideas. Though employees perceive such systems as perks, the company sees these systems as “the seed corn for its future,” as it would ensure that entrepreneurial employees implement their innovative ideas within the company rather than go out and create a competing new venture. It is estimated that about 50 percent of Google’s new products are generated using the ‘free’ time that employees are granted.

Leadership that empowers

Interestingly, the choice of a new product or strategy is not dictated by the founders nor is it based on the grandeur of its sponsor’s title. Ideas must compete on their merits, in a ‘Darwinian environment’ of survival of the fittest. Many of Google’s popular products and strategies came on the market through this process, as exemplified by the creation of Gmail by Paul Buchheit, or the informal motto of the company (“Don’t be evil”) coined by Buchheit and Amit Patel. Though this slogan does not appear in the exposition of the official management philosophy of Google, it was a major theme in the founders’ letter in connection with their 2004 IPO, so much so that this letter was subsequently called the “Don’t-Be-Evil Manifesto.” The basic thrust of this manifesto is that one should not exploit customers’ ignorance, but should be ready to forego short-term gains if this is what is required to provide sustainable services to society. One specific implication of this belief is that the company will not strive to get the authentic search content confused with or influenced by the advertised material.

Who wouldn’t want to work for Google

Communicating the vision and granting employees the freedom to implement it is one part of Google’s people-management system. The other is to provide the employees with a hassle-free environment so that they can concentrate fully on work. In other words, the goal is to strip away everything that gets in the employees’ way. The company provides a standard package of benefits to employees that it tops up with a seemingly endless – and highly enviable – array of perks: first-class dining facilities with a free and unlimited supply of wholesome food, snack stations in various parts of the office, gyms, laundry rooms, massage rooms, haircutting salons, car washes, dry cleaning services, commuting buses equipped with bike racks, leather seats, internet access, and facilities to carry pets onboard — and just about anything a hardworking employee might want to be taken care of while he/she is at work. In fact, employees don’t even have to worry much about getting dressed up, as Google’s corporate vision includes such axioms as: “You can be serious without a suit.”

Leadership’s policy of empowering and facilitating employees’ work has led to a large number of innovations and, consequently, to the explosive growth of the company. As a startup, Google had relied primarily on the personal funds of the founders. “We had to use all of our credit cards and our friends’ credit cards and our parents’ credit cards”, recalls Larry Page. Finally, Page and Brin decided to bring in venture capitalists. They also started to allow unobtrusive text advertisements alongside search results. By 2000, the company had started making a profit.

The founders managed the company until 2001, with Larry Page as the CEO. By the year 2001, Google had grown to more than 200 employees, and it had widened its board to include representatives of the venture capitalists. They brought in a professional manager, Eric Schmidt, as the CEO, with the responsibility for providing the organizational and operational expertise and company leadership. Page and Brin continued to provide the engineering, technological, and product development leadership – Page as President of Products, acknowledged as the company’s thought leader, and Brin as President of Technology, with the responsibility for advertisements, the major source of the company’s revenues. Thus, the foundation of the leadership triumvirate at Google was laid in the year 2001.

Between 2001 and 2004, the salaries of the top three executives were US$250,000 per annum for Schmidt, and US$150,000 each for Page and Brin. However, just before the IPO in 2004, the trio asked the board to cut their salaries to US$1, with a view to boosting investor confidence in the company. This was indeed a smart move whereby the leaders could convey to potential investors the immense confidence they had in their company’s performance and tell them that they were willing to link their own remuneration to the market performance of their company.

They also adopted an innovative method for fixing the price of the IPO; they used a Dutch auction, in which the market determined the initial stock price, and that helped prevent insiders and institutions from selling immediately for a quick profit. Their confidence in their own company and the market was not misplaced. Schmidt’s 12.45 million shares of Google are now worth about US$4.86 billion. Similarly, Brin’s 31.6 million shares and Page’s 32 million shares are each worth more than US$12 billion. Considering the strong performance of the company following the IPO, the board in 2006 offered to raise the salaries of the top trio from the nominal amount of US$1. All three declined.

As pointed out by Ken Auletta in his book, Googled , Eric Schmidt was primarily the choice of venture capitalist and Google board member John Doerr, which was why others viewed him apprehensively, at least initially. His past performances gave out mixed messages. He had been a successful chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems in its glory days, but had performed poorly in his one stint as CEO at Novell . Besides, there was worry that the Mercedes he drove and the suit and tie he wore would not go down well with Google’s informal culture. In any case, nobody thought that he was an inspirational leader, a great speaker or salesman, a take-charge leader like Paul Otellini of Intel, Carol Bartz of Autodesk, or John Chambers of Cisco. While the founders themselves shared some of the apprehension, Schmidt’s staunchest critic was another venture capitalist member of the board, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital. He felt that Schmidt lacked the toughness required for pushing ahead with the revenue plan based on the advertising formula being experimented with during 2001-02.

But for a company like Google, which took pride in its “distributed leadership” culture, it was perhaps possible that the patient, unobtrusive engineering management style of the mild-mannered Eric Schmidt was better than the more aggressive, go-getter style of individual-oriented leadership. However, it took some time and another intervention by John Doerr, who brought in Silicon Valley’s best-known management coach, Bill Campbell, to mentor and coach the triumvirate and mediate between the new CEO and the founders as well as the two VCs, Moritz and himself.

Campbell, then 61, was probably the right person to mediate between the founders, then in their twenties, and the new CEO, who was 20 years older than they were. Campbell’s prior work experience also added credibility to his new role. He had once been Columbia University’s head football coach, a senior executive at Apple, and the CEO of several Silicon Valley companies, including Intuit. His major contribution was to take emotion out of the decisions and help the principal decision-makers evaluate the options in an objective manner. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the mentoring and mediation by Bill Campbell have made a major contribution to the development of Eric Schmidt into a ‘Superman CEO’ who could win over not only the founders but also the ever-skeptical, venture-capitalist critic on the board, Michael Moritz. Google’s results speak for its performance. The company reached $1 billion in revenue in six years, 10 years faster than Microsoft. In April 2007, Schmidt was elected chairman of the board while simultaneously holding the position of CEO. In 2011, Schmidt became the Executive Chairman, as Larry Page once again assumed the post of CEO.

Eric Schmidt’s best leadership practices

Analysts are of the view that, though Eric Schmidt came from a corporate background, his leadership style had many things in common with the culture already created and put in place by the founders of Google.

Schmidt’s leadership practices could be summarized in the following five precepts:

1. Get to know your employees.

2. create new ways to reward and promote your high-performing employees., 3. let your employees own the problems you want them to solve., 4. allow employees to function outside the company hierarchy., 5. have your employees’ performance reviewed by someone they respect for their objectivity and impartiality..

Examples of such behavior include the following:

Schmidt used to make a list of his best employees, as identified by multiple levels of peer-references, and interact with them personally to encourage them to implement their innovative ideas and to insulate them from unwanted interferences by others.
For rewarding high performers, there were a few systems already in place, such as financial incentives, stock option plans, dinner with the CEO, and so on. In addition, Schmidt created a five-hour long video called The Factory Tour, where the protagonists themselves would explain the idea and its working.
In order to make the employees the owners of their work, Schmidt used to provide a very broad definition of the company goal and leave the implementation entirely to the employees. In defining the goal, care was taken to highlight the benefits to the customers and society at large rather than to the company. For example, Schmidt has defined Google’s goal as: “Organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.” This is something that every employee can easily relate to, compared to a statement of company targets like increasing turnover by 200 percent.
As corporate hierarchies can often obstruct employees’ work, Schmidt reinforced the existing system of allowing employees a certain degree of freedom to create their own projects and choose their own teams.
In reviewing employees’ performance, Schmidt made it a point to identify reviewers from among professionals whom the concerned employee respects for their objectivity and impartiality.

The happiness trickles down and out the door

The leadership practices of the triumvirate cascaded throughout the organization and had an enormous impact on the cadres. According to Laszlo Bock, Google’s innovative Senior Vice-President for Human Resources, the teams working under the best managers perform better, are happier, and stay longer with the company. He therefore initiated a project to identify the key qualities of such managers based on an analysis of data available and collected internally. His research team has come up with the following eight qualities of leader-managers at Google (listed in the order of importance as identified by the study):

Be a good coach
Empower your team and don’t micromanage
Express interest in your team members’ 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 technical skills so you can advise the team

The qualities identified are amazingly simple and do not require a manager to change his or her personality. Rather, the changes required are a matter of behavioral changes, which can be accomplished by regular and deliberate practice. Bock simplifies them further: “The two most important things I can do are to make sure that I have some time for them and to be consistent.” It may be noted, ironically, that though Google is a hi-tech company, having the technical skills has emerged as the least important among the eight qualities of leadership. Obviously, the quality of any technology will only be as good as the quality of the people who operate it.

7.1 Decision-Making Culture: The Case of Google

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is one of the best-known and most admired companies around the world, so much so that “googling” is the term many use to refer to searching information on the Web. What started out as a student project by two Stanford University graduates—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—in 1996, Google became the most frequently used Web search engine on the Internet with 1 billion searches per day in 2009, as well as other innovative applications such as Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps, and Picasa. What is the formula behind this success?

Google strives to operate based on solid principles that may be traced back to its founders. In a world crowded with search engines, they were probably the first company that put users first. Their mission statement summarizes their commitment to end-user needs: “To organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful.” While other companies were focused on marketing their sites and increasing advertising revenues, Google stripped the search page of all distractions and presented users with a blank page consisting only of a company logo and a search box. Google resisted pop-up advertising, because the company felt that it was annoying to end-users. They insisted that all their advertisements would be clearly marked as “sponsored links.” This emphasis on improving user experience and always putting it before making more money in the short term seems to have been critical to their success.

Keeping their employees happy is also a value they take to heart. Google created a unique work environment that attracts, motivates, and retains the best players in the field. On their Mountain View, California, campus called the “Googleplex,” employees are treated to free gourmet food options including sushi bars and espresso stations. In fact, many employees complain that once they started working for Google, they tend to gain 10 to 15 pounds! Employees have access to gyms, shower facilities, video games, on-site child care, and doctors. These perks create a place where employees feel that they are treated well and their needs are taken care of. Moreover, they contribute to the feeling that they are working at a unique and cool place that is different from everywhere else they may have worked.

In addition, Google encourages employee risk taking and innovation. How is this done? When a vice president in charge of the company’s advertising system made a mistake costing the company millions of dollars and apologized for the mistake, she was commended by Larry Page, who congratulated her for making the mistake and noting that he would rather run a company where they are moving quickly and doing too much, as opposed to being too cautious and doing too little. This attitude toward acting fast and accepting the cost of resulting mistakes as a natural consequence of working on the cutting edge may explain why the company is performing much ahead of competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo! One of the current challenges for Google is to expand to new fields outside of their Web search engine business. To promote new ideas, Google encourages all engineers to spend 20% of their time working on their own ideas.

Google’s culture is reflected in their decision making as well. Decisions at Google are made in teams. It is common for several small teams to attack each problem and for employees to try to influence each other using rational persuasion and data. Gut feeling has little impact on how decisions are made. In some meetings, people reportedly are not allowed to say “I think…” but instead must say “the data suggest….” To facilitate teamwork, employees work in open office environments where private offices are assigned only to a select few.

How do they maintain these unique values? In a company emphasizing hiring the smartest people, it is very likely that they will attract big egos that may be difficult to work with. Google realizes that its strength comes from its “small company” values that emphasize risk taking, agility, and cooperation. Therefore, they take their hiring process very seriously. Hiring is extremely competitive and getting to work at Google is not unlike applying to a college. Candidates may be asked to write essays about how they will perform their future jobs. Recently, they targeted potential new employees using billboards featuring brain teasers directing potential candidates to a Web site where they were subjected to more brain teasers. Each candidate may be interviewed by as many as eight people on several occasions. Through this scrutiny, they are trying to select “Googley” employees who will share the company’s values, perform at high levels, and be liked by others within the company.

Based on information from Elgin, B., Hof, R. D., & Greene, J. (2005, August 8). Revenge of the nerds—again. BusinessWeek . Retrieved April 30, 2010, from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2005/tc20050728 _5127_tc024.htm ; Hardy, Q. (2005, November 14). Google thinks small. Forbes, 176 (10); Lashinky, A. (2006, October 2). Chaos by design. Fortune , 154 (7); Mangalindan, M. (2004, March 29). The grownup at Google: How Eric Schmidt imposed better management tactics but didn’t stifle search giant. Wall Street Journal , p. B1; Lohr, S. (2005, December 5). At Google, cube culture has new rules. New York Times . Retrieved April 30, 2010, from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/technology/05google.html ; Schoeneman, D. (2006, December 31). Can Google come out to play? New York Times . Retrieved April 30, 2010, from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/fashion/31google.html ; Warner, M. (2004, June). What your company can learn from Google. Business 2.0, 5 (5).

Discussion Questions

What are the benefits to involving all employees in decision-making? What are some of the potential drawbacks?
How might you strike a balance — that is, harness the benefits of employee empowerment while also avoiding some of the pitfalls?

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11.1 Decision-Making Culture: The Case of Google

Figure 11.1

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

Keeping their employees happy is also a value they take to heart. Google created a unique work environment that attracts, motivates, and retains the best players in the field. Google was ranked as the number 1 “Best Place to Work For” by Fortune magazine in 2007 and number 4 in 2010. This is not surprising if one looks closer to how Google treats employees. On their Mountain View, California, campus called the “Googleplex,” employees are treated to free gourmet food options including sushi bars and espresso stations. In fact, many employees complain that once they started working for Google, they tend to gain 10 to 15 pounds! Employees have access to gyms, shower facilities, video games, on-site child care, and doctors. Google provides 4 months of paternal leave with 75% of full pay and offers $500 for take-out meals for families with a newborn. These perks create a place where employees feel that they are treated well and their needs are taken care of. Moreover, they contribute to the feeling that they are working at a unique and cool place that is different from everywhere else they may have worked.

Google’s culture is reflected in their decision making as well. Decisions at Google are made in teams. Even the company management is in the hands of a triad: Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Eric Schmidt to act as the CEO of the company, and they are reportedly leading the company by consensus. In other words, this is not a company where decisions are made by the senior person in charge and then implemented top down. It is common for several small teams to attack each problem and for employees to try to influence each other using rational persuasion and data. Gut feeling has little impact on how decisions are made. In some meetings, people reportedly are not allowed to say “I think…” but instead must say “the data suggest….” To facilitate teamwork, employees work in open office environments where private offices are assigned only to a select few. Even Kai-Fu Lee, the famous employee whose defection from Microsoft was the target of a lawsuit, did not get his own office and shared a cubicle with two other employees.

Will this culture survive in the long run? It may be too early to tell, given that the company was only founded in 1998. The founders emphasized that their initial public offering (IPO) would not change their culture and they would not introduce more rules or change the way things are done in Google to please Wall Street. But can a public corporation really act like a start-up? Can a global giant facing scrutiny on issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship maintain its culture rooted in its days in a Palo Alto garage? Larry Page is quoted as saying, “We have a mantra: don’t be evil, which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.”

Discussion Questions

Do you think Google’s decision-making culture will help or hurt Google in the long run?
What are the factors responsible for the specific culture that exists in Google?
What type of decision-making approach has Google taken? Do you think this will remain the same over time? Why or why not?
Do you see any challenges Google may face in the future because of its emphasis on risk taking?

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Google's Chief Executive: In Need of a Change Leadership Style?

By: Arpita Agnihotri, Saurabh Bhattacharya

Length: 12 page(s)
Publication Date: Feb 1, 2022
Discipline: Organizational Behavior
Product #: W25879-PDF-ENG

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In 2015, Sundar Pichai was appointed chief executive officer (CEO) of California-based Google LLC (Google), and by December 2019 had also become the CEO of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. By June 2021, thirty-six vice-presidents out of 400 executives had quit Alphabet Inc., and Pichai faced criticism from the senior leadership team for his risk-averse decision-making style. Senior executives believed Pichai had made Google more bureaucratic in its operations, even though the company's size and market-based performance had improved under his leadership. In the face of this criticism, what should Pichai do? Should he respond to the criticism? Should he begin to make more risk-aggressive decisions?

Arpita Agnihotri is affiliated with Pennsylvania State University - Harrisburg. Saurabh Bhattacharya is affiliated with Newcastle University.

Learning Objectives

The case is intended for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on leadership, human resource management, or organizational behaviour. The case deals with the CEO's dilemma following criticism of his leadership style and the resignation of several senior executives from Google. The case presents students with the opportunity to understand factors that influence the leadership style of a CEO. The case further encourages students to explore whether radical innovation is possible in a large firm. After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to critically analyze whether the leader should respond to the criticism of his leadership style; evaluate the leadership style of a CEO and the reasons why CEOs develop a certain kind of leadership style; evaluate the challenges of both innovating and managing current operations in the organization; and examine whether CEOs of large companies should be aggressive and act fast in their decision-making.

Feb 1, 2022

Discipline:

Organizational Behavior

Geographies:

United States

Ivey Publishing

W25879-PDF-ENG

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Google’s Secret Formula for Management? Doing the Basics Well

Raffaella Sadun

Employees learn how to run meetings, have conversations, and set goals.

Google has opened its trove of management processes to one and all, for free. It might not feel that surprising – after all, Google has created plenty of other free tools for the world to use. And it also follows Google’s many years of work in people analytics. But in fact, there is something surprising in the details of what they revealed: Their management tools focus on some pretty basic stuff like how to run meetings, have conversations, and set goals. As basic and unsurprising as some of these practices may look, they are really hard to do well on a consistent basis. Reasons for that include a lack of awareness that better processes are needed, a lack of the skills needed to do those processes, and organizational politics.

Basic management fundamentals are hard to implement. It’s part of the reason you can’t just copy another company’s management practices (even Google’s) and simply sit back and wait for success. Companies still have to do the hard work of addressing the essential ways their management practices function.

Google has opened its trove of management processes to one and all, for free. It might not feel that surprising — after all, Google has created plenty of free tools for the world to use, from internet search to email. Management tools may not seem that different. And it also follows Google’s many years of work in people analytics .

But, in fact, there is something surprising in the details of what Google revealed. Turns out a lot of its management tools focus on some pretty basic stuff, like how to run meetings, have conversations, and set goals.

Why would Google release its management processes? I see three reasons.

First, the company has nothing to lose by doing it. That’s because as basic and unsurprising as some of these practices may look, they are really hard to do well on a consistent basis. My coauthors and I explore this in detail as part of a study of how well 12,000 firms in 34 countries performed 18 core management practices . We found many reasons for weak adoption of basic things like target setting and talent management, but some of the most prominent ones include:

A lack of awareness that better processes may be needed
A lack of the skills needed to adopt those better processes
Organizational politics — but more generally a lack of trust within the organization to adopt new processes. Taking steps like standardizing the way interviews are conducted, for example, may be perceived as excessive bureaucracy by some employees even if they are beneficial to the organization as a whole.

These hurdles are hard to overcome — because of them, even basic management fundamentals are hard to implement. It’s part of the reason why you can’t just copy another company’s management practices (even Google’s) and simply sit back and wait for success. Without building the core competencies that allow those practices to work, all you’ve got is something that sounds good on paper.

Consider the difficulties researchers find in replicating lab experiments . It turns out that even the small differences in methods led to failure for efforts to replicate certain results. Management practices have a similar flavor — you need a whole set of practices, and standards around those practices, to be in place for them to be effective. So in this light, there’s very little downside to Google being “open source” about management; it’s so hard to copy good management that the company isn’t risking much.

Research Shows Good Management Is Incredibly Hard to Copy

The second reason Google might choose to release these practices exists in some tension with the first: When really implemented, even simple management practices can have a huge payoff. In other words, because basic management practices are difficult to adopt, the firms that manage to do so see a major impact on organizational performance. Any company that successfully adopted Google’s management tools would be likely to see huge gains.

In our sample, the average firm that managed to improve from the bottom 10% to the top 10% in management skill would see a $15 million increase in profits, 25% faster annual growth, and 75% higher productivity. To see why, consider something as basic as process implementation. Adherence to a common set of processes is a way to remove common biases in an organization and to focus on objective results rather than gut feelings . It’s an important part of teamwork, especially when very skilled individuals with complementary specialties have to work together. Surgeon Atul Gawande’s focus on simple checklists as a way to reduce errors in the operating room is an example of this; his checklist is a common process that helps keep teams of diverse and highly skilled people focused on the job at hand. Basic practices like the ones Google focuses on are often the glue and cohesiveness needed across all sectors, including tech. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai said : “I also value teamwork quite a bit and I think it’s really important to build organisations where people really want to work together. Everything comes out of that. So, setting up collaborative cultures is another big thing I’ve been trying to focus on.” Management practices are an essential ingredient in building culture.

Third, and finally, Google might also choose to release its management tools because doing so could help macroeconomic growth. When firms grow, the economy grows. We’ve found that better-managed firms spend 10 times as much on R&D as poorly managed ones and also increase their patenting by a factor of 10. All that innovation is good for the broader economy. Indeed, in our study the average management quality in a country was strongly correlated with standard measures of economic growth.

While they may not always feel glamorous, strong managerial processes really matter. It’s great that Google made its public, but companies still have to do the hard work of addressing the essential ways that their management practices function.

Raffaella Sadun is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a co-chair of its Managing the Future of Work project.

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Case Study: How Google Boosts its Employees’ Engagement

You might have heard about this mantra: ‘Happy employees produce better results.’ This is the mindset of Google to keep its employees productive and satisfied. This article explains more.

Let’s say you’re a company providing software development services . If your developer’s team isn’t enthusiastic about their projects every day, you’re not going to achieve excellence. This is productivity’s power. But remember productivity is dependent on the company’s culture.

Why is everyone talking about Google’s culture or work environment? We know that Google is one of the most influential and powerful companies around the globe. The company follows a pretty well unique culture instead of corporate culture.

It has something that every big organisation needs to follow to level up their employees’ engagement or morale. The culture of any company is vital to its success and Google is perfectly right on the track.

It has one sole purpose: Keep the employees happy and keep up the productivity.

Google has been at number ONE place from the past six years and featured on Fortune’s annual list of ‘Best Companies to Work For.’ And this is not it. Google has also been named as the tech company with the best culture. (Reported by Forbes) Furthermore, Google has a 4.4 rating on Glassdoor based on 6000+ employees reviews.

Google’s morale

This is what the employees of Google answered the questions asked about their work culture.

Acknowledged for the efforts?

Yes: 61 % Employees

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No: 39% Employees

Job Security?

Very Secure: 34 % Employees

Neutral: 19% Employees

Insecure: 8% Employees

Very insecure: 5% Employees

Work Environment?

Positive: 85% Employees

Negative: 15% Employees

Excited about going to work daily?

Yes: 80% Employees

No: 20% Employees

So, without further ado, let’s move towards the ways Google uses to boost its employees’ engagement .

“There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week. But if you love what you do, it (mostly) doesn’t feel like work.”- Elon Musk.

How Google Keeps Its Employees Productive And Engaged?

Exclusive perks.

Today, employees want a job in a company that makes them love what they do. Never for financial benefit or intellectual recognition. Yet instead of chance to add to the common good.

The major differentiator is to make a real difference.

Google offers different perks to its employees to show them that they are not only investing in their overall health but their future as well.

Chef-prepared free organic food (breakfast, lunch, and dinner);
Free dental and health checkup;
Free and unlimited dry cleaning;
Subsidised massages;
Several foosball, ping pong, video games stations;
On-site physicians;
Gyms/swimming pools memberships;
Free haircuts from professional hairdressers;
In-house nap pods;
Death benefits to deceased employees’ families, and;
Hybrid car subsidies.

Flexibility

Google has been one of the very first companies that had a vision of understanding the employees’ needs. It lets its workers have a flexible schedule so that they can work on their terms and enhance creativity and productivity. They have given their employees complete freedom to work in a way that is most suitable to them.

Knowing the employees well

Google had gone through a series of laboratory tests to figure out the productivity of their employees. They had four different experiments that included 700 participants. All the employees were treated to free drinks, fruits, and chocolates or shown a comedy movie clip.

They also enquired some of the participants about the family tragedies as a part of their assessment. After this, they found that happiness is the reason for 12% more productivity.

Google promotes an innovative and diverse organisational culture that has been a part of its employee’s life. A positive creative atmosphere and a safe working space offered by Google to its workers keep them comfortable and happy at work. The concept that being a part of Google is about being smart and wise encourages the employees to think openly and keeps them productive.

Nowadays, there are different creative coworking spaces which are known to be a perfect alternate to a workplace. These spaces are believed to deliver various advantages such as strong networking and increased engagement.

Google’s founders were researchers who had a belief in innovation and freedom of thinking. This is one of the main factors that influenced the style of Google’s leadership.

According to Brassfield, 2013, a positive leadership style stimulates inspiring and motivating employees to develop innovative ideas and inventions.

Keeping people inspired

Future Workplace, in 2017, demonstrated in a study that one of the biggest threats to employees’ engagement is employee burnout. It has also been found out that many proficient workers are often overburdened with the tasks that lead to halted innovation, incomplete work, etc.

What does Google do about keeping its employees productive, inspired, or motivated? Google’s strategy for this is 20% time . Every employee devours up to 20% of his time at work each week on ventures that inspire him.

This concept inspires employees as it allows them to concentrate on things they love or are passionate about. It can prevent burnout, decrease turnover, increase engagement.

Image: Pexels

Career development

Google provides an extensive professional growth program that is successful and creative and guarantees long-term performance for all the employees. The career development program of Google is one that ensures incentives are provided to employees to meet their professional and personal progression.

Google has adopted a unique way to promote the professional development of all its employees. CareerGuru is a career coaching that provides all the details to the employees by Google’s leaders about working at a specific role in the company.

Creativity Encouragement

The companies that believe in fostering a culture of creativity have happy, satisfied, and motivated employees. Google leads the way in promoting creativity in their employees.

They are free to express their ideas as a solution to any problem. Moreover, employees are encouraged to work wherever they are comfortable in the workplace. Google has a set up where rather than just considering an applicant’s professional background, they look to recruit people who are normally inquisitive and fond of learning.

Trusting Employees

Google believes in trusting their workers because trusted employees feel more valuable. It can also boost the sense of job satisfaction and can also decrease the rate of staff turnover.

In a survey by PwC, reliable employees are 76% more engaged in their work than those in a low trusting environment. Trusted employees are happier and they have the urge to go the extra miles.

Culture based on qualitative data

Google has always been searching out different ways to optimise the performance of its employees while ensuring their happiness and satisfaction. Everything done at Google is based on real data. They use the qualitative and quantitative facts to set up processes and every single rule that is streamlined.

Google has additionally performed researches to discover how much paid time off new mothers would need and ways of building an improvised and better culture.

Fun workplace

Have you ever been allowed to design your own workstation at your company?

Probably not. But Google does it. It lets the employees design their desks or workstations.

When you see the pictures of the workplace, it seems an interesting adult play and work area and not a dull and lifeless space.

Google has always tried to push the boundaries of its workspace.

Collaboration of coworkers

At Google, the employees are urged to collaborate. They have a program called ‘Googler to Googler’ to keep them productive and promote skills such as management, public speaking, orientation, or extracurricular activities.

It is crucial to build a sense of community to create a positive culture. The company has arranged several micro kitchens around the whole workspace where coworkers can have a little chit-chat session. No one has to spend time on deciding where to eat because Google has various break-out spaces for lunch.

Google’s way of listening

Google employees have developed great software and projects that include Gmail, AdSense, Google News, etc. and all these big projects were originated because of its staff productivity approach. Google has a way of collecting employees’ feedback and listening to their suggestions that is gDNA.

The employees utilise a device ‘Google Moderator’ , the result of 20% time strategy, to inquire about something and vote on inquiries of others;
The company holds a meeting, every Friday, where the managers react to the most famous inquiries of the week;
Leaders or managers utilise a charting instrument called Google-O-Meter to measure the prominence of various worker bits of advice;
Leaders likewise plan “Fixits” to comprehend huge, critical issues; and,
Fixits are 24-hour runs where team members give their full focus around discovering solutions for explicit issues.

So, can Google teach us anything?

If you are planning to adopt these learnings at your organisation just like Google keeps its employees productive, it’s essential to test the progressions first and measure the results.

It’s a great deal of work, however, the engagement advantages will make the difficult function admirably justified.

About the Author

Usman Akram is a digital marketer and SEO specialist who’s passionate about experimenting and discovering new SEO tactics and strategies to dominate search rankings while bringing an unmatched user-experience. As of now Usman is serving Buzz Interactive , a leading digital marketing agency as the head of SEO.

Revealed: Key Components of Employee Engagement

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Home » Management Case Studies » Case Study: Analysis of Organizational Culture at Google

Case Study: Analysis of Organizational Culture at Google

Google Inc came to life with the two brilliant people as the founder of the company. Those two were Larry Page and Sergey Brin . Both of them are a PhDs holder in computer science in Stanford University California. In their research project, they came out with a plan to make a search engine that ranked websites according to the number of other websites that linked to that site. Before Google was established, search engines had ranked site simply by the number of times the search term searched for appeared on the webpage. By the brilliant mind of Larry and Sergey, they develop the technology called PageRank algorithm . PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of document, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of measuring its relative importance within the set. All this in-depth research leads to a glorious day which is on September 15, 1997 where Google.com domain was registered. Soon after that, on September 4, 1998, they formally incorporated their company, Google Inc, at a friend’s garage in Menlo Park California. The name Google originates from “Googol” which refers to the mathematical equivalent of the number one followed by a hundred zeros. In March 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto. After that, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View. Ever since then, the location of the headquarter remain unchanged.

Google’s core business is to provide a search engine for the cyber user who would like to go to their desire site. The Google search engine attracted a number of internet users by its sleek and simple design but result in amazing search result. After the initial stage of Google establishing itself in the world, it began selling advertisements associated with the search keywords. The advertisements were text-based in order to maximize the page loading speed. Most of the Google Inc revenue relies on the advertisement and they had been successfully with the help of AdWords and AdSense in their system. After having some experience in the industry, Google itself launched its own free web-based email service, known as Gmail in 2004. This service is established to meet the need of the cyber user in order to store and send their document through online. In the same year, one of the most captivating technologies that Google had launched is the Google Earth. Google Earth is an amazing creation that is a map of the earth based on the satellite image. It requires you to type the desire location that you want to view and it will process the image for you. Furthermore, Google Inc made a new partnership with NASA with even enhances the Google technologies. Google also had its own Google Video which allows user to search the internet for videos. One of the most important things in the Google Inc is that they have a strong organizational culture which brings them closer and stronger compare with other firms. The values that they emphasis on are creativity, simplicity and innovation in order to gain competitive advantage against their competitor.

The Google Culture

Google is well known for their organizational cultures distinctiveness and uniqueness compared to their immediate competitors. On the Google corporate website, they have listed down 10 core principles that guide the actions of the entire organization. These are the values and assumptions shared within the organization. These values are also termed as ‘espoused values’, where it is not necessarily what the organization actually values even though the top executives of the company embrace them.

In Google, the daily organizational life is distinctive and is one that thrives on informal culture. The rituals that portray the organization’s culture as unique and possesses a small-company feel are portrayed daily at lunchtime, where almost all employees eat together at the many various office cafes while at the same time having an open, relaxed conversations with fellow Googlers that come from different teams. Also, because one of the Google culture’s main pillars are the pillar of innovation, every Googler are very comfortable at sharing ideas, thoughts, and opinions with one another in a very informal working environment. Every employee is a hands-on contributor and everyone wears several hats. Sergey and Brin also plays a big part of laying the foundation on what the Google culture is and the founders have continued to maintain the Google Way by organizing a weekly all-hands “TGIF” meetings for employees to pose questions directly at them.

Here are some of a few of their core principles which will provide a look into Google’s management philosophy and the type of culture they want to possess:

In Google, the motivated employees who ‘live’ the Google brand and are aligned to the company call themselves ‘Googlers’. Even former employees of Google have a name which they refer to themselves as ‘Xooglers’. This shows that in Google, their employees are so involved in the organization that they have their own symbolic name that mirrors the organization’s name and image, which is a sure sign of existing strong cultural values that are present within the company.

After tremendous growth in Google, the organization moved from a humble office building in Palo Alto, California back in its early days to its current office complex bought over from Silicon Graphics. The complex is popularly known as the Googleplex, which is a blend of the word ‘Google’ and ‘complex’. Googleplex is the result of a careful selection that serves to establish Google’s unique and individualistic culture in the eyes of the employees and the public. The corporate campus is built to provide a very fun, relaxed and colorful environment both inside and outside. Innovative design decisions provides Google employees 2000 car lots underground so that open spaces above and surrounding the building are filled with unique and interesting architectures that includes an on-site organic garden that supplies produces for Google’s various cafes, a bronze casting of a dinosaur fossil, a sand volleyball court, heated “endless pools” and also electric scooters along with hundreds of bikes scattered throughout the complex for Googlers to get to meetings across campuses. Googleplex is a significant departure from typical corporate campuses, challenging conventional thinking about private and public space. This also points out the alignment of values that are present in Google’s culture such as innovation, fun, laid-back, creativity and uniqueness that clearly shows that their organizational culture is truly unique and different from that of their competitors and other organizations.

Within the Googleplex, a truly attractive, fun and extraordinary workplace environment exists for Google employees. The interior of the headquarters is furnished with items like lava lamps and giant rubber balls while sofas, Google color coded chairs, and pool tables can be found at lounges and bar counters to express Google’s laid-back working atmosphere. The lobby contains a grand piano and a projection of current live Google search queries. The employees’ various needs are also taken care of by facilities such as the 19 cafes on campus which serves a variety of food choices for their diverse workforce, a gym, massage parlor, laundromats, and even micro kitchens, which provides snacks for employees who want a quick bite. This ensures that employees can be more productive and happy without ever leaving the workplace. A manifestation of Google’s creative and innovative culture is shown by the unconventional building design with high ceilings to let natural light in, durable floors made of tiny quartz stones, working British phone booths splashed in Google colors, and lounges that also serve as DIY libraries with cleverly placed low-reach book racks adorned with colorful Lego sets and cubes. All these innovative, creative and colorful designs are symbols of Google’s unique organizational culture that emphasizes on continuous innovation.

Google engages their employees by applying adaptive culture in the organization. From their core competency in search engine technology, Google has responded to customers change in needs by expanding onto the mobile market. The employees analyze, anticipate and seek out the opportunities to improve the organization’s performance by being proactive and quick in coming out with new technologies and solutions for mobile services. It aims to help people all over the world to do more tasks on their phone, not to mention the several different ways to access their Google search engine on a mobile phone. In addition, Google recently entered the smartphone market by launching the Google Nexus One smartphone in response to customer’s increasing need for smartphones, which is gaining ground on popularity because everyone is going mobile in the Information Age. This is the result of Google employees’ common mental model that the organization’s success depends on continuous change to support the stakeholders and also that they are solely responsible for the organization’s performance. The employees also believe that by entering into other markets beyond their core competency, the change is necessary and inevitable to keep pace with an ever changing and volatile technological market.

Google’s organizational culture places a huge importance of trust and transparency by having an informal corporate motto namely “Don’t be evil”. This slogan has become a central pillar to their identity and a part of their self-proclaimed core principles. It also forms the ethical codes of the organization where Google establishes a foundation for honest decision-making that disassociates Google from any and all cheating. Its ethical principles means that Google sets guiding principles for their advertising programs and practices, which is where most of their revenues come from. Google doesn’t breach the trust of its users so it doesn’t accept pop-up advertising, which is a disruptive form of advertisement that hinders with the user’s ability to see the content that they searched. And because they don’t manipulate rankings to put any of their partners higher in their search results or allow anyone to buy their way up the PageRank, the integrity of their search results are not compromised. This way, users trust Google’s objectivity and their ethical principles is one of the reasons why Google’s ad business had become so successful. The founders of Google believe strongly that ‘in the long term we will be better served, as shareholders and in all other ways, by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.’

Analysis of Google Culture

Satisfied employees not only increase productivity and reduce turnover, but also enhance creativity and commitment. Google is already having a playful variation culture in the organization for the employees. This can enable the employees to have an enjoyment environment and this will be able enhance the relationship between the employees and strengthen their bond to work as a team. An enjoyment environment definitely can let the employees to feel satisfied and subsequently will increase productivity. Apart from that, this will shape a convenient work process for the employees that will smoothen the decision making process for the management team. Google already identified the employees are the organization’s internal customers and this is the reason why it has been constantly giving employees a sense of purpose, enhancing their self-esteem and sense of belonging for being a part of the organization. The company was reorganized into small teams that attacked hundreds of projects all at once. The founders give the employees great latitude, and they take the same latitude for themselves. Eric Schmidt says that Google merely appears to be disorganized. “We say we run the company chaotically. We run it at the edge. This can adapt the culture Google and therefore they can individually to generate the ideas on their own.

On the other hand, Google hires employees that have good academic results but without practical experience and this will be a threat to Google in terms of their organization’s operation. Google is a results-driven organization and if employees with only creative ideas but lacking of skills to realize the ideas they have initially planned, this will absolutely reduce the productivity of the organizations. Google had been public listed on year 2004 and therefore Google had to take the shareholders’ views into consideration before making any decision. The shareholders had been strongly emphasizing on reducing the employee benefits due to the high cost invested on it. This leads to the organizational culture would be degraded and the employees would feel less satisfied and affect their produced results. Employees are very important asset the Google while the shareholders also the contributor of funds for Google. The management team has to weight the importance of both of the stakeholders for the Google as this will create a different organizational culture .

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Google Organisational Culture

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, describes an important belief that guides Google's company culture:

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Make sure that everybody in the company has great opportunities, has a meaningful impact, and is contributing to the good of society.

The Google organizational case will tell you more about the Google company and its organizational culture. After reading this case study you will learn not only about Google and its culture, but also about Google's organizational structure, the management style it employs, and how it addresses problems.

About Google

Before we dive into the organizational case study of Google, we first need to know a little more about the Google company. Google is an innovative American search engine company founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The company's history began in 1995 at Stanford University, where the founders met and before Google was born, it was called "Backrub". Today, the company produces a variety of products that are used around the world. Google uses a universal approach to cater to everyone's preferences - developers, businesses and all users. Products include Gmail, Google Maps, Pixel and more.

The company's mission is to organise universal information and make it accessible to all. To achieve this, Google strives to innovate quickly.

Google's core company values are to: put the user first and maximize their experience; when it comes to service, fast is better than slow; master one thing very well; and make money without doing something bad. These are Google's principal core values.

As an innovative company, Google is known for its flexible and informal culture where people are the most important asset. Google strives to bring diverse people together and create innovation.

Google Organisation Structure

Google's organizational structure is relatively flat and supports informal communication between different organizational units. Google uses a matrix organisation structure , also known as the cross-functional organisational structure. Moreover, their organizational culture supports changes and encourages openness between employees. Most importantly, Google's structure and culture align with each other.

Google Organisational Structure and Culture

Now let's have a look at Google's organizational structure and culture in more detail.

Google's organisational structure

Google follows a cross-functional organizational structure, or in other words, a m atrix corporate structure .

Using the cross-functional or matrix structure means that staff from different functions with a variety of skills are grouped together to work on a certain project or product development. Each cross-functional group is usually headed by a senior manager who is responsible for leading that group.

Google 'structure involves three main characteristics which are:

Function-based - Google's structure involves a functional side as the company has its separate functions such as finance, sales, and marketing, research and development, etc. grouped into different functional departments. All functions are led by an executive who manages the function and makes strategic decisions.

Product-based - The products that the company produces are developed through product groups that involve employees from various functions. Google has two main product-based groups which are responsible for cloud operations and another one for artificial intelligence operations. There is also an executive responsible for each of those groups that assist in developing product lines.

Flatness - The organization is relatively flat meaning that employees are able to communicate to managers of various levels throughout the organization without middle management being involved. Even in the functional-based areas, employees are able to communicate with higher managers . This allows for information to flow effectively within the function and across departments which encourages innovation.

Google's organizational structure can be illustrated in the diagram below.

Google Organizational Culture, Google Organizational Structure, Vaia

Google's organizational culture

As mentioned previously one of the main reasons for Google's success as being a highly innovative company is an alignment between structure and culture. The keywords that can be used to describe Google's organizational culture are innovative, open, and social. Not to forget that the main belief that Google's culture follows is that the people are the most important assets in the organization.

Now let's have a look at the main characteristics that make up Google's culture. These are:

Openness - Google's culture encourages employees to share knowledge and ideas with each other.

An open organisational culture allows marketing department employees to interact with product design employees and gain valuable knowledge in this field. This is particularly useful when designing a new product line, as good communication between both sides will enhance the product's design and add value to its promotion to consumers.

Innovation - Google's culture strongly encourages employees to be innovative in whatever they do. To encourage innovation, Google supports risk-taking and offers financial rewards for successful innovations.

Excellence - Google's culture is built around the expectation that every employee can achieve excellence. To achieve this, the company offers further education and training programs to employees so they continue to improve and achieve exceptional results at work.

Hands-on approach - Google's culture follows the concept that employee development is best accomplished through on-the-job training. Therefore, Google supports experimental learning and encourages risk-taking as it is believed to encourage innovation.

Social - Google's culture encourages employees to communicate between departments and to make social connections. As informal relationships between employees not only make sharing ideas easier but also improve employees' wellbeing.

Google company problems and solutions

There are certain ways that Google addresses and solves problems that arise in the company. Here are some ways Google deals with problems when they occur in the company.

Give opportunity for employees to solve problems - Problems are not assigned to specific individuals at Google, rather they are solved by people who are passionate about solving them. Solutions are therefore more effective.

Expose everyone to a problem - At Google, it is believed that exposing everyone to a problem is one of the best ways to find a solution.

A poster with a problem Google is trying to solve would be printed out and hung up in the kitchen for everyone to see. Once it's exposed to everyone, someone may see it and have an effective idea on how to solve it.

Understand when employees mistakes are made - Instead of being strict with employees when they create problems they cannot fix, managers at Google understand them and encourage them to take risks and come up with solutions . That is the reason why employees are not afraid to take risks and try various methods until problems are solved.

Google management style

The management style that is widely used in Google is democratic . At Google, this management style was implemented by one of the CEOs, Larry Page. Page believed that involving employees in decision-making and being part of the company will maximize their motivation and reflect in their performances. In addition, at Google, managers ensure that the employees are doing work that is meaningful and they communicate openly with employees and actively ask for their opinion.

Democratic management style means that employees are encouraged to be part of the decision-making. Managers make decisions together with subordinates, which involve frequent discussions to achieve mutual goals.

As a whole, Google's culture has an impact on its success in innovation. Culture is aligned with the company structure and is driven by openness, innovation, social aspects, and many more. And not to mention, people are the company's greatest assets.

Google Organisational Culture - Key takeaways

Google is an innovative American search engine company founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Google follows a cross-functional organizational structure , also known as Matrix corporate structure.

Google's structure involves three main characteristics which are function-based definition, product-based definition, and flatness.

One of the main reasons for Google's innovation is the alignment between Google's culture and structure.

The key characteristics of Google's culture are openness, innovation, excellence, hands-on approach, and socialness.

There are three main ways that Google deals with problems when they occur in the organization. These are: give opportunities for employees to solve problems, expose employees to problems and understand employees when mistakes are made.

The management style that is widely used in Google is democratic.

About.Google, From the garage to the Googleplex , 2020.

Carol Sanford, How Google's Larry Page became a responsible entrepreneur, 2014.

Nathaniel Smithson, Google's Organizational Structure & Organizational Culture (An Analysis) , 2019.

Savoia and Copeland, Entrepreneurial Innovation at Google, 2011.

Spector, A., Norvig, P. and Petrov, S., Google's Hybrid Approach to Research, 2012.

Stabile, SJ, Google Benefits or Google's Benefit, 2008.

Flashcards inGoogle Organisational Culture 26

What type of business is Google?

Google is an innovative American search engine company.

Can you name a few products/services that Google has produced?

Gmail, Google Maps, Pixel etc.

What type of organisational structure does Google follow?

Google follows a cross-functional organisational structure, also known as Matrix corporate structure.

What are the main characteristics of Google's organisational structure?

The main characteristics of Google's organisational structure are:

Function-based definition
Product-based-definition

What is the main belief that Google's culture is built upon?

The most important belief on which the Google culture is built is that employees are the company's most important asset.

What are the main characteristics of Google's culture?

The main characteristics of Google's culture are:

Hands-on approach

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Frequently Asked Questions about Google Organisational Culture

What type of organizational culture is Google?

Google is centred around its organizational culture. The main characteristics that describe Google's organizational culture are innovative, open, and social. The main idea that Google's culture follows is that the people are the most important assets in the organization.

How is Google's work culture?

The main characteristics that make up Google's work culture are openness which allows employees to share knowledge and ideas with each other; innovation which encourages employees to take risks; excellence; a hands-on approach; and social, as Google's culture encourages employees to communicate between departments and make social connections.

How has Google established its unconventional company culture?

Google has established its unconventional company culture through its organisational structure. Google follows a cross-functional organizational structure, also known as a Matrix corporate structure. This allows staff from different functions, with a variety of skills, to meet and collaborate.

What are Google's organizational values?

Google's core organisational values are to: put the user first and maximize their experience; when it comes to service, fast is better than slow; master one thing very well; and make money without doing something bad.

What are the factors responsible for the specific culture that exists in Google?

Organisational structure is one of the factors responsible for the specific culture that exists in Google. Google's organisational structure is relatively flat and supports informal communication between different organisational units. Moreover, their organisational culture supports changes and encourages openness between employees. Most importantly, Google's structure and culture align with each other.

Test your knowledge with multiple choice flashcards

Democratic management style means that employees are encouraged to be part of the decision-making

"Managers make decisions together with subordinates, which involve frequent discussions to achieve mutual goals."This is characteristic of a:

An open organisational culture is particularly useful when designing a new product line.

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Chapter 21 - Organizational Change Management in SRE

Table of Contents
Foreword II
1. How SRE Relates to DevOps
Part I - Foundations
2. Implementing SLOs
3. SLO Engineering Case Studies
4. Monitoring
5. Alerting on SLOs
6. Eliminating Toil
7. Simplicity
Part II - Practices
9. Incident Response
10. Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure
11. Managing Load
12. Introducing Non-Abstract Large System Design
13. Data Processing Pipelines
14. Configuration Design and Best Practices
15. Configuration Specifics
16. Canarying Releases
Part III - Processes
17. Identifying and Recovering from Overload
18. SRE Engagement Model
19. SRE: Reaching Beyond Your Walls
20. SRE Team Lifecycles
21. Organizational Change Management in SRE
Appendix A. Example SLO Document
Appendix B. Example Error Budget Policy
Appendix C. Results of Postmortem Analysis
About the Editors

Organizational Change Management in SRE

By Alex Bramley, Ben Lutch, Michelle Duffy, and Nir Tarcic with Betsy Beyer

In the introduction to the first SRE Book , Ben Treynor Sloss describes SRE teams as “characterized by both rapid innovation and a large acceptance of change,” and specifies organizational change management as a core responsibility of an SRE team. This chapter examines how theory can apply in practice across SRE teams. After reviewing some key change management theories, we explore two case studies that demonstrate how different styles of change management have played out in concrete ways at Google.

Note that the term change management has two interpretations: organizational change management and change control. This chapter examines change management as a collective term for all approaches to preparing and supporting individuals, teams, and business units in making organizational change. We do not discuss this term within a project management context, where it may be used to refer to change control processes, such as change review or versioning.

SRE Embraces Change

More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus claimed change is the only constant. This axiom still holds true today—especially in regards to technology, and particularly in rapidly evolving internet and cloud sectors.

Product teams exist to build products, ship features, and delight customers. At Google, most change is fast-paced, following a “launch and iterate” approach. Executing on such change typically requires coordination across systems, products, and globally distributed teams. Site Reliability Engineers are frequently in the middle of this complicated and rapidly shifting landscape, responsible for balancing the risks inherent in change with product reliability and availability. Error budgets (see Implementing SLOs ) are a primary mechanism for achieving this balance.

Introduction to Change Management

Change management as an area of study and practice has grown since foundational work in the field by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s. Theories primarily focus on developing frameworks for managing organizational change. In-depth analysis of particular theories is beyond the scope of this book, but to contextualize them within the realm of SRE, we briefly describe some common theories and how each might be applicable in an SRE-type organization. While the formal processes implicit in these theoretical frameworks have not been applied by SRE at Google, considering SRE activities through the lens of these frameworks has helped us refine our approach to managing change. Following this discussion, we will introduce some case studies that demonstrate how elements of some of these theories apply to change management activities led by Google SRE.

Lewin’s Three-Stage Model

Kurt Lewin’s “unfreeze–change–freeze” model for managing change is the oldest of the relevant theories in this field. This simple three-stage model is a tool for managing process review and the resulting changes in group dynamics. Stage 1 entails persuading a group that change is necessary. Once they are amenable to the idea of change, Stage 2 executes that change. Finally, when the change is broadly complete, Stage 3 institutionalizes the new patterns of behavior and thought. The model’s core principle posits the group as the primary dynamic instrument, arguing that individual and group interactions should be examined as a system when the group is planning, executing, and completing any period of change. Accordingly, Lewin's work is most useful for planning organizational change at the macro level.

McKinsey’s 7-S Model

McKinsey’s seven S’s stand for structure, strategy, systems, skills, style, staff, and shared values. Similar to Lewin’s work, this framework is also a toolset for planned organizational change. While Lewin’s framework is generic, 7-S has an explicit goal of improving organizational effectiveness. Application of both theories begins with an analysis of current purpose and processes. However, 7-S also explicitly covers both business elements (structure, strategy, systems) and people-management elements (shared values, skills, style, staff). This model could be useful for a team considering change from a traditional systems administration focus to the more holistic Site Reliability Engineering approach.

Kotter’s Eight-Step Process for Leading Change

Time magazine named John P. Kotter’s 1996 book Leading Change (Harvard Business School Press) one of the Top 25 Most Influential Business Management Books of all time . Figure 21-1 depicts the eight steps in Kotter’s change management process.

Kotter’s process is particularly relevant to SRE teams and organizations, with one small exception: in many cases (e.g., the upcoming Waze case study), there’s no need to create a sense of urgency. SRE teams supporting products and systems with accelerating growth are frequently faced with urgent scaling, reliability, and operational challenges. The component systems are often owned by multiple development teams, which may span several organizational units; scaling issues may also require coordination with teams ranging from physical infrastructure to product management. Because SRE is often on the front line when problems occur, it is uniquely motivated to lead the change needed to ensure products are available 24/7/365. Much of SRE work (implicitly) embraces Kotter’s process to ensure the continued availability of supported products.

The Prosci ADKAR Model

The Prosci ADKAR model focuses on balancing both the business and people aspects of change management. ADKAR is an acronym for the goals individuals must achieve for successful organizational change: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement.

In principle, ADKAR provides a useful, thoughtful, people-centric framework. However, its applicability to SRE is limited because operational responsibilities quite often impose considerable time constraints. Proceeding iteratively through ADKAR’s stages and providing the necessary training or coaching requires pacing and investment in communication, which are difficult to implement in the context of globally distributed, operationally focused teams. That said, Google has successfully used ADKAR-style processes for introducing and building support for high-level changes—for example, introducing global organizational change to the SRE management team while preserving local autonomy for implementation details.

Emotion-Based Models

The Bridges Transition Model describes people’s emotional reactions to change. While a useful management tool for people managers, it’s not a framework or process for change management. Similarly, the Kübler-Ross Change Curve describes ranges of emotions people may feel when faced with change. Developed from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s research on death and dying, 1 it has been applied to understanding and anticipating employee reactions to organizational change. Both models can be useful in maintaining high employee productivity throughout periods of change, since unhappy people are rarely productive.

The Deming Cycle

Also known as the Plan-Do-Check-Act (or PDCA) Cycle, this process from statistician Edward W. Deming is commonly used in DevOps environments for process improvements—for example, adoption of continuous integration/continuous delivery techniques. It is not suited to organizational change management because it does not cover the human side of change, including motivations and leadership styles. Deming’s focus is to take existing processes (mechanical, automated, or workflow) and cyclically apply continuous improvements. The case studies we refer to in this chapter deal with larger, organizational changes where iteration is counterproductive: frequent, wrenching org-chart changes can sap employee confidence and negatively impact company culture.

How These Theories Apply to SRE

No change management model is universally applicable to every situation, so it’s not surprising that Google SRE hasn’t exclusively standardized on one model. That said, here’s how we like to think about applying these models to common change management scenarios in SRE:

Kotter’s Eight-Step Process is a change management model for SRE teams who necessarily embrace change as a core responsibility.
The Prosci ADKAR model is a framework that SRE management may want to consider to coordinate change across globally distributed teams.
All individual SRE managers will benefit from familiarity with both the Bridges Transition Model and the Kübler-Ross Change Curve , which provide tools to support employees in times of organizational change.

Now that we’ve introduced the theories, let’s look at two case studies that show how change management has played out at Google.

Case Study 1: Scaling Waze—From Ad Hoc to Planned Change

Waze is a community-based navigation app acquired by Google in 2013. After the acquisition, Waze entered a period of significant growth in active users, engineering staff, and computing infrastructure, but continued to operate relatively autonomously within Google. The growth introduced many challenges, both technical and organizational.

Waze’s autonomy and startup ethos led them to meet these challenges with a grassroots technical response from small groups of engineers, rather than management-led, structured organizational change as implied by the formal models discussed in the previous section. Nevertheless, their approach to propagating changes throughout the organization and infrastructure significantly resembles Kotter’s model of change management. This case study examines how Kotter’s process (which we apply retroactively) aptly describes a sequence of technical and organizational challenges Waze faced as they grew post-acquisition.

The Messaging Queue: Replacing a System While Maintaining Reliability

Kotter’s model begins the cycle of change with a sense of urgency . Waze’s SRE team needed to act quickly and decisively when the reliability of Waze’s message queueing system regressed badly, leading to increasingly frequent and severe outages. As shown in Figure 21-2 , the message queueing system was critical to operations because every component of Waze (real time, geocoding, routing, etc.) used it to communicate with other components internally.

communication-paths-between-waze-components

As throughput on the message queue grew significantly, the system simply couldn’t cope with the ever-increasing demands. SREs needed to manually intervene to preserve system stability at shorter and shorter intervals. At its worst, the entire Waze SRE team spent most of a two-week period firefighting 24/7, eventually resorting to restarting some components of the message queue hourly to keep messages flowing and tens of millions of users happy.

Because SRE was also responsible for building and releasing all of Waze’s software, this operational load had a noticeable impact on feature velocity—when SREs spent all of their time fighting fires, they hardly had time to support new feature rollouts. By highlighting the severity of the situation, engineers convinced Waze’s leadership to reevaluate priorities and dedicate some engineering time to reliability work. A guiding coalition of two SREs and a senior engineer came together to form a strategic vision of a future where SRE toil was no longer necessary to keep messages flowing. This small team evaluated off-the-shelf message queue products, but quickly decided that they could only meet Waze’s scaling and reliability requirements with a custom-built solution.

Developing this message queue in-house would be impossible without some way to maintain operations in the meantime. The coalition removed this barrier to action by enlisting a volunteer army of developers from the teams who used the current messaging queue. Each team reviewed the codebase for their service to identify ways to cut the volume of messages they published. Trimming unnecessary messages and rolling out a compression layer on top of the old queue reduced some load on the system. The team also gained some more operational breathing room by building a dedicated messaging queue for one particular component that was responsible for over 30% of system traffic. These measures yielded enough of a temporary operational reprieve to allow for a two-month window to assemble and test a prototype of the new messaging system.

Migrating a message queue system that handles tens of thousands of messages per second is a daunting task even without the pressure of imminent service meltdown. But gradually reducing the load on the old system would relieve some of this pressure, affording the team a longer time window to complete the migration. To this end, Waze SRE rebuilt the client libraries for the message queue so they could publish and receive messages using either or both systems, using a centralized control surface to switch the traffic over.

Once the new system was proven to work, SRE began the first phase of the migration: they identified some low-traffic, high-importance message flows for which messaging outages were catastrophic. For these flows, writing to both messaging systems would provide a backup path. A couple of near misses, where the backup path kept core Waze services operating while the old system faltered, provided the short-term wins that justified the initial investment.

Mass migration to the new system required SRE to work closely with the teams who use it. The team needed to figure out both how to best support their use cases and how to coordinate the traffic switch. As the SRE team automated the process of migrating traffic and the new system supported more use cases by default, the rate of migrations accelerated significantly .

Kotter’s change management process ends with instituting change . Eventually, with enough momentum behind the adoption of the new system, the SRE team could declare the old system deprecated and no longer supported. They migrated the last stragglers a few quarters later. Today, the new system handles more than 1000 times the load of the previous one, and requires little manual intervention from SREs for ongoing support and maintenance.

The Next Cycle of Change: Improving the Deployment Process

The process of change as a cycle was one of Kotter’s key insights. The cyclical nature of meaningful change is particularly apparent when it comes to the types of technical changes that face SRE. Eliminating one bottleneck in a system often highlights another one. As each change cycle is completed, the resulting improvements, standardization, and automation free up engineering time. Engineering teams now have the space to more closely examine their systems and identify more pain points, triggering the next cycle of change.

When Waze SRE could finally take a step back from firefighting problems related to the messaging system, a new bottleneck emerged, bringing with it a renewed sense of urgency : SRE’s sole ownership of releases was noticeably and seriously hindering development velocity. The manual nature of releases required a significant amount of SRE time. To exacerbate an already suboptimal situation, system components were large, and because releases were costly, they were relatively infrequent. As a result, each release represented a large delta, significantly increasing the possibility that a major defect would necessitate a rollback.

Improvements toward a better release process happened incrementally, as Waze SRE didn’t have a master plan from square one. To slim down system components so the team could iterate each more rapidly, one of the senior Waze developers created a framework for building microservices. This provided a standard “batteries included” platform that made it easy for the engineering organization to start breaking their components apart. SRE worked with this developer to include some reliability-focused features—for example, a common control surface and a set of behaviors that were amenable to automation. As a result, SRE could develop a suite of tools to manage the previously costly parts of the release process. One of these tools incentivized adoption by bundling all of the steps needed to create a new microservice with the framework.

These tools were quick-and-dirty at first—the initial prototypes were built by one SRE over the course of several days. As the team cleaved more microservices from their parent components, the value of the SRE-developed tools quickly became apparent to the wider organization. SRE was spending less time shepherding the slimmed-down components into production, and the new microservices were much less costly to release individually.

While the release process was already much improved, the proliferation of new microservices meant that SRE’s overall burden was still concerning. Engineering leadership was unwilling to assume responsibility for the release process until releases were less burdensome.

In response, a small coalition of SREs and developers sketched out a strategic vision to shift to a continuous deployment strategy using Spinnaker , an open source, multicloud, continuous delivery platform for building and executing deployment workflows. With the time saved by our bootstrap tooling, the team now was able to engineer this new system to enable one-click builds and deployments of hundreds or thousands of microservices. The new system was technically superior to the previous system in every way, but SRE still couldn’t persuade development teams to make the switch. This reluctance was driven by two factors: the obvious disincentive of having to push their own releases to production, plus change aversion driven by poor visibility into the release process.

Waze SRE tore down these barriers to adoption by showing how the new process added value. The team built a centralized dashboard that displayed the release status of binaries and a number of standard metrics exported by the microservice framework. Development teams could easily link their releases to changes in those metrics, which gave them confidence that deployments were successful. SRE worked closely with a few volunteer systems-oriented development teams to move services to Spinnaker. These wins proved that the new system could not only fulfill its requirements, but also add value beyond the original release process. At this point, engineering leadership set a goal for all teams to perform releases using the new Spinnaker deployment pipelines.

To facilitate the migration, Waze SRE provided organization-wide Spinnaker training sessions and consulting sessions for teams with complex requirements. When early adopters became familiar with the new system, their positive experiences sparked a chain reaction of accelerating adoption . They found the new process faster and less painful than waiting for SRE to push their releases. Now, engineers began to put pressure on dependencies that had not moved, as they were the impediment to faster development velocity—not the SRE team!

Today, more than 95% of Waze’s services use Spinnaker for continuous deployment, and changes can be pushed to production with very little human involvement. While Spinnaker isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, configuring a release pipeline is trivial if a new service is built using the microservices framework, so new services have a strong incentive to standardize on this solution.

Lessons Learned

Waze’s experience in removing bottlenecks to technical change contains a number of useful lessons for other teams attempting engineering-led technical or organizational change. To begin with, change management theory is not a waste of time! Viewing this development and migration process through the lens of Kotter’s process demonstrates the model’s applicability. A more formal application of Kotter’s model at the time could have helped streamline and guide the process of change.

Change instigated from the grass roots requires close collaboration between SRE and development, as well as support from executive leadership. Creating a small, focused group with members from all parts of the organization—SRE, developers, and management—was key to the team’s success. A similar collaboration was vital to instituting the change. Over time, these ad hoc groups can and should evolve into more formal and structured cooperation, where SREs are automatically involved in design discussions and can advise on best practices for building and deploying robust applications in a production environment throughout the entire product lifecycle.

Incremental change is much easier to manage. Jumping straight to the “perfect” solution is too large a step to take all at once (not to mention probably infeasible if your system is about to collapse), and the concept of “perfect” will likely evolve as new information comes to light during the change process. An iterative approach can demonstrate early wins that help an organization buy into the vision of change and justify further investment. On the other hand, if early iterations don’t demonstrate value, you’ll waste less time and fewer resources when you inevitably abandon the change. Because incremental change doesn’t happen all at once, having a master plan is invaluable. Describe the goals in broad terms, be flexible, and ensure that each iteration moves toward them.

Finally, sometimes your current solutions can’t support the requirements of your strategic vision. Building something new has a large engineering cost, but can be worthwhile if the project pushes you out of a local maxima and enables long-term growth. As a thought experiment, figure out where bottlenecks might arise in your systems and tooling as your business and organization grow over the next few years. If you suspect any elements don’t scale horizontally, or have superlinear (or worse, exponential) growth with respect to a core business metric such as daily active users, you may need to consider redesigning or replacing them.

Waze’s development of a new in-house message queue system shows that it is possible for small groups of determined engineers to institute change that moves the needle toward greater service reliability. Mapping Kotter’s model onto the change shows that some consideration of change management strategy can help provide a formula for success even in small, engineering-led organizations. And, as the next case study also demonstrates, when changes promote standardizing technology and processes, the organization as a whole can reap considerable efficiency gains.

Case Study 2: Common Tooling Adoption in SRE

SREs are opinionated about the software they can and should use to manage production. Years of experience, observing what goes well and what doesn’t, and examining the past through the lens of the postmortem, have given SREs a deep background coupled with strong instincts. Specifying, building, and implementing software to automate this year’s job away is a core value in SRE. In particular, Google SRE recently focused our efforts on horizontal software. Adoption of the same solution by a critical mass of users and developers creates a virtuous cycle and reduces reinvention of wheels. Teams who otherwise might not interact share practices and policies that are automated using the same software.

This case study is based on an organizational evolution, not a response to a systems scaling or reliability issue (as discussed in the Waze case study). Hence, the Prosci ADKAR model (shown in Figure 21-3 ) is a better fit than Kotter’s model, as it recognizes both explicit organizational/people management characteristics and technical considerations during the change.

Problem Statement

A few years ago, Google SRE found itself using multiple independent software solutions for approximately the same problem across multiple problem spaces: monitoring, releases and rollouts, incident response, capacity management, and so on.

This end state arose in part because the people building tools for SRE were dissociated from their users and their requirements. The tool developers didn’t always have a current view of the problem statement or the overall production landscape—the production environment changes very rapidly and in new ways as new software, hardware, and use cases are brought to life almost daily. Additionally, the consumers of tools were varied, sometimes with orthogonal needs (“this rollout has to be fast; approximate is fine” versus “this rollout has to be 100% correct; okay for it to go slowly”).

As a result, none of these long-term projects fully addressed anyone’s needs, and each was characterized by varying levels of development effort, feature completeness, and ongoing support. Those waiting for the big use case—a nonspecific, singing-and-dancing solution of the future—waited a long time, got frustrated, and used their own software engineering skills to create their own niche solution. Those who had smaller, specific needs were loath to adopt a broader solution that wasn’t as tailored to them. The long-term, technical, and organizational benefits of more universal solutions were clear, but customers, services, and teams were not staffed or rewarded for waiting. To compound this scenario, requirements of both large and small customer teams changed over time.

What We Decided to Do

To scope this scenario as one concrete problem space, we asked ourselves: What if all Google SREs could use a common monitoring engine and set of dashboards, which were easy to use and supported a wide variety of use cases without requiring customization?

Likewise, we could extend this model of thinking to releases and rollouts, incident response, capacity management, and beyond. If the initial configuration of a product captured a wide representation of approaches to address the majority of our functional needs, our general and well-informed solutions would become inevitable over time. At some point, the critical mass of engineers who interact with production would outgrow whatever solution they were using and self-select to migrate to a common, well-supported set of tools and automation, abandoning their custom-built tools and their associated maintenance costs.

SRE at Google is fortunate that many of its engineers have software engineering backgrounds and experience. It seemed like a natural first step to encourage engineers who were experts and opinionated about specific problems—from load balancing to rollout tooling to incident management and response—to work as a virtual team, self-selected by a common long-term vision. These engineers would translate their vision into working, real software that would eventually be adopted across all of SRE, and then all of Google, as the basic functions of production.

To return to the ADKAR model for change management, the steps discussed so far—identifying a problem and acknowledging an opportunity—are textbook examples of ADKAR’s initiating awareness step. The Google SRE leadership team agreed on the need ( desire ) and had sufficient knowledge and ability to move to designing solutions fairly quickly.

Our first task was to converge upon a number of topics that we agreed were central, and that would benefit greatly from a consistent vision: to deliver solutions and adoption plans that fit most use cases. Starting from a list of 65+ proposed projects, we spent multiple months collecting customer requirements, verifying roadmaps, and performing market analysis, ultimately scoping our efforts toward a handful of vetted topics.

Our initial design created a virtual team of SRE experts around these topics. This virtual team would contribute a significant percentage of their time, around 80%, to these horizontal projects. The idea behind 80% time and a virtual team was to ensure we did not design or build solutions without constant contact with production. However, we (maybe predictably) discovered a few pain points with this approach:

Coordinating a virtual team—whose focus was broken by being on-call regularly, across multiple time zones—was very difficult. There was a lot of state to be swapped between running a service and building a serious piece of software.
Everything from gathering consensus to code reviews was affected by the lack of a central location and common time.
Headcount for horizontal projects initially had to come from existing teams, who now had fewer engineering resources to tackle their own projects. Even at Google, there’s tension between delegating headcount to support the system as is versus delegating headcount to build future-looking infrastructure.

With enough data in hand, we realized we needed to redesign our approach, and settled on the more familiar centralized model. Most significantly, we removed the requirement that team members split their time 80/20 between project work and on-call duties. Most SRE software development is now done by small groups of senior engineers with plenty of on-call experience, but who are heads-down focused on building software based on those experiences. We also physically centralized many of these teams by recruiting or moving engineers. Small group (6–10 people) development is simply more efficient within one room (however, this argument doesn’t apply to all groups—for example, remote SRE teams). We can still meet our goal of collecting requirements and perspectives across the entire Google engineering organization via videoconference, email, and good old-fashioned travel.

So our evolution of design actually ended up in a familiar place—small, agile, mostly local, fast-moving teams—but with the added emphasis on selecting and building automation and tools for adoption by 60% of Google engineers (the figure we decided was a reasonable interpretation of the goal of “ almost everyone at Google”). Success means most of Google is using what SRE has built to manage their production environment.

The ADKAR model maps the implementation phase of the change project between the people-centric stages of knowledge and ability . This case study bears out that mapping. We had many engaged, talented, and knowledgeable engineers, but we were asking people who had been focused on SRE concerns to act like product software development engineers by focusing on customer requirements, product roadmaps, and delivery commitments. We needed to revisit the implementation of this change to enable engineers to demonstrate their abilities with respect to these new attributes.

Implementation: Monitoring

To return to the monitoring space mentioned in the previous section, Chapter 31 in the first SRE book described how Viceroy—Google SRE’s effort to create a single monitoring dashboard solution suitable for everyone—addressed the problem of disparate custom solutions. Several SRE teams worked together to create and run the initial iteration, and as Viceroy grew to become the de facto monitoring and dashboarding solution at Google, a dedicated centralized SRE development team assumed ownership of the project.

But even when the Viceroy framework united SRE under a common framework, there was a lot of duplicated effort as teams built complex custom dashboards specific to their services. While Viceroy provided a standard hosted method to design and build visual displays of data, it still required each team to decide what data to display and how to organize it.

The now-centralized software development team began a second parallel effort to provide common dashboards, building an opinionated zero-config system on top of the lower-level “custom” system. This zero-config system provided a standard set of comprehensive monitoring displays based on the assumption that a given service was organized in one of a handful of popular styles. Over time, most services migrated to using these standard dashboards instead of investing in custom layouts. Very large, unique, or otherwise special services can still deploy custom views in the hosted system if they need to.

Returning to the ADKAR model, the consolidation of monitoring tools at Google began as a grassroots effort, and the resulting improvements in operational efficiencies provided a quantifiable basis ( awareness and desire ) to initiate a broader effort: SRE self-funded a software development team to build production management tooling for all of Google.

Designing a migration of interdependent pieces is often more complicated than a blank-sheet design. But in real life, the hardest engineering work ends up being the evolution of many small/constrained systems into fewer, more general systems—without disturbing already running services that many customers depend on. In the meantime, alongside the existing systems, new small systems are added—some of which eventually surprise us by growing into large systems. There is an intellectual attraction to starting anew with the big design, only backing into constraints that are really necessary, but the migration of systems and teams turns out to be the most difficult work by far .

Designing horizontal software requires a lot of listening to prospective end users, and, in many ways, the tasks of building and adoption look much like the role of a product manager. In order for this effort to achieve success, we had to make sure that we absorbed and prioritized priorities. Meeting customer needs—of both SREs and other production users—was also a critical element of success. It is important to acknowledge that the move toward common tooling is still a work in progress. We iterated on the structure and staffing of the teams building our shared technologies to better enable meeting customer needs, and we added product management and user experience talent (addressing missing knowledge ).

In the past year or two, we have seen uptake of these SRE-designed and -built products across a broad swath of teams at Google. We have learned that to achieve success, the cost of migration (from older, fragmented but specialized solutions) needs to be small relative to the net benefits of the new common solution. Otherwise, the migration itself becomes a barrier to adoption. We continue to work with the individual teams building these products to reinforce the behaviors needed to delight customers with the common solutions the teams are delivering.

One common theme we discovered across horizontal software development projects was that no matter how good new software and products were, the cost of migration—away from something that was already working to something new—was always perceived as very high. Despite the allure of easier management and less specific deep knowledge, the costs of migrating away from the familiar (with all its warts and toil) were generally a barrier. In addition, individual engineers often had a similar internal monologue: “I’m not improving or changing the system; I’m swapping out one working piece for another working piece.” ADKAR describes this resistance as the “knowledge-to-ability gap.” On the human side, in order to recognize and embrace change, people need time, coaching, and training in new tools and skills. On the technical side, implementing change requires understanding adoption costs and including work to minimize these costs as part of the launch process.

As a result, migration costs need to be nearly zero (“just recompile and you pick up new $thing”) and the benefits need to be clear (“now you’re protected from $foo vulnerability”) to the team, to individuals, and to the company.

SRE commonly used to build products that we committed to in a “best effort” way, meaning that the amount of time we gave the product fit into the cracks between everything else we were doing (managing primary services, capacity planning, dealing with outages, etc.). As a result, our execution was not very reliable; it was impossible to predict when a feature or service would be available. By extension, consumers of our products had less trust in the end result since it felt perpetually delayed and was staffed by a rotating cast of product managers and individual engineers. When individual SREs or SRE teams built tools for their own use, the focus was on solving individual problems to reduce the cost of maintaining SLOs for supported systems. In endeavoring to build common tooling for most use cases at Google, we needed to shift the focus to measuring the success of this effort in terms of product adoption.

Owing to both our organizational culture and our wealth of resources, we approached this project in a bottom-up, rather than top-down, fashion. Instead of mandating that users migrated to our new monitoring system, we sought to win over users by demonstrating that our new offering was better than existing solutions.

Over time, we learned that how we conducted our development process would inform how potential internal users perceived the end result. These projects gained real traction only when staffed by production-experienced engineers 100% dedicated to building software, with schedules and support identical to the rest of Google’s software development. Building common software transparently, like clockwork, with great communication (“We’ll have X done by Y date”), greatly improved the speed of migration to the new system. People already trusted the new system because they could observe how it was developed from an early stage. Perceptions of how the sausage is made turned out to be more important than we anticipated from the get-go . Our initial thought that “if you build something great, people will naturally flock to it” didn’t hold true. Rather, these projects had to be clearly defined, well advertised in advance, evaluated against a multitude of user cases (targeted to the grumpiest adopters first), leaps and bounds better than existing options, and adoptable with little to no effort.

The more consumers you have for common tooling and adoption, the more time you actually have to spend doing things other than writing code. This may sound obvious in retrospect, but clear end goals, believable dates, regular updates, and constant contact with consumers is paramount. Often skeptical consumers will ask, “If my current one-off shell script works okay, do I really need this?” Adoption of common software or processes is analogous to reliability as a feature—you may build the best thing in the world, but if people don’t adopt it (or can’t use it if it’s not reliable), it’s not useful to anyone. Having a plan for adoption—from champions to beta testers to executive sponsors to dedicated engineers who understand the importance of minimizing barriers to adoption—is both the end goal and the starting point when it comes to building and adopting common tools and practices.

This is because adoption drives a network effect: as the scale and reach of common software tools increases, incremental improvements to those tools are more valuable to the organization. As the value of the tools increases, development effort dedicated to them also tends to increase. Some of this development effort naturally goes toward further reducing migration costs, incentivizing greater adoption. Broad adoption encourages building organization-wide improvements in a consistent, product-like fashion, and justifies staffing full teams to support the tools for the long term. These tools should be characterized by rapid development, feature stability, common control surfaces, and automatable APIs.

When it comes to measuring the impact of such efforts, we can ask questions similar to the following:

How quickly can a new product developer build and manage a world-scale service?
Enabled by common tools and practices, how easily can an SRE in one domain move to another domain?
How many services can be managed with the same primitives, as end-to-end user experiences versus separate services?

These are all possible and highly valuable ways to measure impact, but our first measurement must be adoption.

As demonstrated by the Waze and horizontal software case studies, even within a single company, SRE change management may need to tackle a variety of problem spaces and organizational context. As a result, there’s likely no single formal model of change management that will neatly apply to the spectrum of changes any given organization may tackle. However, these frameworks, particularly Kotter’s eight-step process and the Prosci ADKAR model, can provide useful insights for approaching change. One commonality across any change necessary in an environment as dynamic as SRE is constant reevaluation and iteration. While many changes may start organically in a grassroots fashion, most can benefit from structured coordination and planning as the changes mature.

1 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families (New York: Scribner, 1969).

Chapter 20 - SRE Team Lifecycles

Google Democratic Leadership Style – Compared to Amazon

To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

Google and Amazon are large companies with unique leadership styles. However, there are some differences in their leadership and decision-making processes. Google’s leadership style is known for emphasizing innovation, creativity, and collaboration. This can involve elements of democracy, such as encouraging employees to share their ideas and giving them a voice in decision-making processes.

In contrast to Google’s democratic leadership, Amazon is oriented toward efficiency and customer satisfaction. Data and metrics drive the company’s leadership style, and the company leaders are expected to make decisions based on hard evidence and analysis. Read the essay to discover more about the leadership styles of Google and Amazon.

Introduction

In the past, Google and Amazon were not major competitors; they are now. The competition between the two has been long in coming, but eventually, it has now caught pace since Google launched its ‘Google shopping express’ business line. The launch propelled Google into the on-demands goods market, which for many years, has been dominated by Amazon. Moreover, it is worth observing that while Amazon’s business forte was in the online sale and delivery of goods, it is cited as a major competitor to Google’s search engine.

The foregoing notwithstanding, this report is concerned about the comparisons and points of contrast between Google and Amazon. Specifically, the report compares and contrasts the leadership styles of Amazon Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jeff Bezos and Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. To justify this report’s choice of Amazon as Google’s competitor, it is important to note that based on internet searches conducted on Amazon alone, Eric Schmidt (cited by Griswold 2014), thinks that Amazon is his organisation’s greatest competitor. Every product search on Amazon is undeniably a lost chance for Google to offer its search engine services to one more person in the world.

In relation to leadership styles of Schmidt and Bezos, this report will provide evidence that the two leaders are a complete opposite of each other. Schmidt is a democratic leader, while Bezos is more confrontational and autocratic. Schmidt has an interest in both people and performance, while Bezos’ main interest seems to be in the performance of his employees.

Several leadership theories are proposed in the literature. They include behavioural theories, trait theory, the great man theory, participative leadership theory, situational leadership theory, transformational leadership theory, contingency theory and transactional leadership theory. The trait and great man theory hold on to the assumption that leadership is an inherent trait (Stefanovic 2007). Behavioural theories, on the other hand, assume that leadership can be defined and that it can be learned (Robbins 2004). Additionally, behavioural theories assume that although some leaders are born, others can be made (Stefanovic 2007).

This report will concentrate on behavioural theories. According to Warrick (2004), the behavioural theories contain two leadership dimensions and four leadership styles (Warrick 2004). The two leadership dimensions are: a concern for people and concern for performance or production. The four leadership styles include: “autocratic leader (high emphasis on performance and low emphasis on people), laissez-faire leader (low emphasis on performance and people), human relations leader (low emphasis on performance and high emphasis on people), and democratic leader (high emphasis on performance and people)” (Warrick 2004, p. 157.

Manimala and Wasdani (2013) have written extensively about Google and the leadership style that is practiced in the company. They also summarise Schmidt’s leadership style as one that strives to: know the employees that work under him; reward high-performing employees; let employees own problems and by extension their solutions; enhance employees’ ability to function outside the company hierarchies; and uphold impartiality and objectivity in performance reviews.

Schmidt has a supportive style of leadership, where he advocates for the welfare of the workforce, in the belief that they (employees), will function better at work, when they are satisfied with their work environment. The foregoing observation is supported by his sentiments where he is quoted as saying, “make sure that they’re happy and that they have everything to do their job” (Nguyen 2010, p. 13). Schmidt does not believe in controlling employees, and he is on record for saying that a leader can tell employees what to do “…but you can’t tell them how to do it” (Nguyen 2010, p. 13).

The cliché ‘nothing travels like bad news’ is true in Bezos case. Bezos is known to humiliate his employees when they don’t live up to his expectations. He is also on record for sending six-page memos and requiring his employees to read them during meetings. According to Schnuer (2014), Bezos is the personification of bad news to anyone who does not meet his expectations. His leadership style arguably defies the team work and good working relations that the modern leadership gurus support.

Schnuer (2014) argues that if people admire Bezos, it is not for his confrontational style of leadership; rather, it because they cannot deny that his style has led Amazon to success. As a result, a lot has been written about him. In a book authored about him by Stone (2013), Bezos is painted as a leader who does not respect good communication, and one who looks down on anyone who is not ‘good enough’. Unlike Schmidt, Bezos tells his employees what to do and also dictates how to do the same. In Stone’s (2013, p. 243) book, for example, Bezos is on record for instructing his employees to pursue small book publishers “the way a cheetah pursues a sickly gazelle.” In other words, he was not only telling them what to do, but how to do it.

Applying behavioural leadership style theories in Bezos and Schmidt’s case reveals that the Amazon CEO is an autocratic leader while the Google CEO is a democratic leader. Choi (2007) makes a distinction between autocratic and democratic leadership by indicating that in the latter style of leadership, leaders have a high degree of control and decision-making power. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, encourage group discussion and decision making. In a true reflection of Bezos’ style, Choi (2007, p. 245) notes that autocratic leaders “keeps tight control over group decisions and activities”. Additionally, such leaders are personal in the manner that they praise or criticise employee performance (Choi 2007). Bezos is on record for making enemies from his former employees due to his harsh criticism.

True to what Schmidt does at Google, democratic leaders are described as participative. Additionally, they share the decision-making powers with people working under them. People who work under a democratic leader report high commitment, involvement, satisfaction and productivity. Employees who work under an autocratic leader like Bezos, on the other hand, report high involvement, high productivity and low commitment and satisfaction (Hackman & Johnson 1996).

They register high involvement and productivity because such is demanded from them. They however are not as highly committed to the job or satisfied in the current workplace. As Hackman and Johnson (1996) indicate, working under an autocratic leader places too much pressure on employees. Such is the situation at Amazon as narrated by Schnuer (2014) and Stone (2013). In Google, however, the situation is completely different from what is documented about Amazon. As Kuntze and Matulich (2010) note, Google is ranked among some of the best companies to work for. Employees enjoy numerous leave days, and other workplace benefits such as childcare facilities, sports facilities and laundry services.

This report has looked at leadership theories and applied them in the context of Google and one of its largest competitors, Amazon. The report indicates that Google’s CEO has a democratic style of leadership while Amazon’s CEO has an autocratic style of leadership. Interestingly, and in spite of the difference in leadership styles, both CEOs are leading their respective companies to greater competitiveness. The success of both Google and Amazon can, therefore, be interpreted to be an indication that different leadership styles can work in different organisations.

Choi, S 2007, ‘Democratic leadership: the lessons of exemplary models for democratic governance’, International Journal of Leadership Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 243-262.

Griswold, A 2014, Google thinks Amazon is its biggest competitor , The Slate Group, Web.

Hackman, M & Johnson, C 1996, Leadership: a communication perspective , 2 nd edn, Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, IL.

Kuntze, R & Matulich, E 2010, ‘Google: searching for value’, Journal of Case Research in Business and Economics, vol. 2, pp.1-10.

Manimala, M & Wasdani, K 2013, ‘Distributed leadership at Google: lessons from the billion-dollar brand’, Leadership, vol. 5-6, pp.1-6.

Nguyen, H 2010, ‘Eric Schmidt – a legendary leader’, Business Review, vol. 1, no.6, pp. 8-15.

Robbins, S 2004, Essentials of organisational behaviour, Prentice Hall, San Diego.

Schnuer, C 2014,’How one creative entrepreneur can change the game’, Connection Review, vol.1, no.2, pp. 17-18.

Stefanovic, N 2007, ‘One-dimensional and two-dimensional leadership styles’, International Journal for Quality Research, vol. 1, no.2, pp. 104-111.

Stone, B 2013, The everything store: Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon, Little Brown, New York.

Warrick, D 2004, ‘Leadership styles and their consequences’, Journal of Experimental Learning and Simulation, vol.3-4, no.1, pp. 155-172.

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IvyPanda. (2020, June 22). Google Democratic Leadership Style – Compared to Amazon. https://ivypanda.com/essays/google-and-amazon-companies-leadership-styles-comparison/

"Google Democratic Leadership Style – Compared to Amazon." IvyPanda , 22 June 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/google-and-amazon-companies-leadership-styles-comparison/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Google Democratic Leadership Style – Compared to Amazon'. 22 June.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Google Democratic Leadership Style – Compared to Amazon." June 22, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/google-and-amazon-companies-leadership-styles-comparison/.

1. IvyPanda . "Google Democratic Leadership Style – Compared to Amazon." June 22, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/google-and-amazon-companies-leadership-styles-comparison/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Google Democratic Leadership Style – Compared to Amazon." June 22, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/google-and-amazon-companies-leadership-styles-comparison/.

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Google Organisational Culture

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, describes an important belief that guides Google's company culture:

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About Google

The company's mission is to organise universal information and make it accessible to all. To achieve this, Google strives to innovate quickly.

As an innovative company, Google is known for its flexible and informal culture where people are the most important asset. Google strives to bring diverse people together and create innovation.

Google Organisation Structure

Google Organisational Structure and Culture

Now let's have a look at Google's organizational structure and culture in more detail.

Google's organisational structure

Google follows a cross-functional organizational structure, or in other words, a m atrix corporate structure .

Google 'structure involves three main characteristics which are:

Google's organizational structure can be illustrated in the diagram below.

Google Organizational Culture, Google Organizational Structure, StudySmarter

Google's organizational culture

Now let's have a look at the main characteristics that make up Google's culture. These are:

Openness - Google's culture encourages employees to share knowledge and ideas with each other.

Google company problems and solutions

There are certain ways that Google addresses and solves problems that arise in the company. Here are some ways Google deals with problems when they occur in the company.

Expose everyone to a problem - At Google, it is believed that exposing everyone to a problem is one of the best ways to find a solution.

Google management style

Google Organisational Culture - Key takeaways

Google is an innovative American search engine company founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Google follows a cross-functional organizational structure , also known as Matrix corporate structure.

Google's structure involves three main characteristics which are function-based definition, product-based definition, and flatness.

One of the main reasons for Google's innovation is the alignment between Google's culture and structure.

The key characteristics of Google's culture are openness, innovation, excellence, hands-on approach, and socialness.

The management style that is widely used in Google is democratic.

About.Google, From the garage to the Googleplex , 2020.

Carol Sanford, How Google's Larry Page became a responsible entrepreneur, 2014.

Nathaniel Smithson, Google's Organizational Structure & Organizational Culture (An Analysis) , 2019.

Savoia and Copeland, Entrepreneurial Innovation at Google, 2011.

Spector, A., Norvig, P. and Petrov, S., Google's Hybrid Approach to Research, 2012.

Stabile, SJ, Google Benefits or Google's Benefit, 2008.

Flashcards inGoogle Organisational Culture 26

What type of business is Google?

Google is an innovative American search engine company.

Can you name a few products/services that Google has produced?

Gmail, Google Maps, Pixel etc.

What type of organisational structure does Google follow?

Google follows a cross-functional organisational structure, also known as Matrix corporate structure.

What are the main characteristics of Google's organisational structure?

The main characteristics of Google's organisational structure are:

Function-based definition
Product-based-definition

What is the main belief that Google's culture is built upon?

The most important belief on which the Google culture is built is that employees are the company's most important asset.

What are the main characteristics of Google's culture?

The main characteristics of Google's culture are:

Hands-on approach

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Democratic management style means that employees are encouraged to be part of the decision-making

"Managers make decisions together with subordinates, which involve frequent discussions to achieve mutual goals."This is characteristic of a:

An open organisational culture is particularly useful when designing a new product line.

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Home — Essay Samples — Business — Google — Google Case Study: Organization Culture And Project Management

Google Case Study: Organization Culture and Project Management

Categories: Google Organizational Culture Project Management

About this sample

Words: 1916 |

10 min read

Published: Dec 3, 2020

Words: 1916 | Pages: 4 | 10 min read

Is a good coach.
Empowers the team and does no micromanage.
Expresses interest in and concern for team members' success and personal well-being.
Is productive and results-oriented.
Is a good communicator-listens and shares information.
Helps with career development.
Has a clear vision and strategy for the team.
Has key technical skills that help him or her advise the team.

Works Cited

Baer, Drake. “13 qualities Google looks for in job candidates.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 27 Apr. 2015, www.businessinsider.com/what-google-looks-for-in-employees-2015-4.
Garvin, David. A. 'Google's Project Oxygen: Do Managers Matter?'. Harvard Business Review. 15 Oct 2013. Web. 30 Jan 2018.
Smithson, Nathaniel. “Google's Organizational Structure & Organizational Culture.” Panmore Institute, 28 Jan. 2017, panmore.com/google-organizational-structure-organizational-culture.
Thompson, Andrew. “Google's Generic Strategy & Intensive Growth Strategies.” Panmore Institute, 28 Jan. 2017, panmore.com/google-generic-strategy-intensive-growth-strategies.

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