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Google Ties Employee Bonuses To +1 Success

Posted by Unknown on from the negativity-is-impolite-mmkay dept.

jfruhlinger writes "Last week Google introduced the +1 button, its attempt to tie its search offerings more closely with users' social networks. Now, a leaked memo reveals that every Google employee will have a stake in the outcome, with bonuses tied to the success or failure of the initiative."

13 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Wait what? Bonuses depending on results? by lxs · · Score: 3, Funny

    Wait until the banking community hears of the blasphemy! Mammon weeps!

    1. Re:Wait what? Bonuses depending on results? by Hazel+Bergeron · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As far as I can tell, this is tying the bonuses of everyone at Google to the efforts of the few people at Google involved in social media crap - in turn coming down to the efforts of the few managers who actually want to push the social media crap. It's the ultimate PHB power trip: you are so insistent that a repeatedly-failing idea is good, while at the same time wanting to acknowledge none of evidence or the responsibility that it isn't, so you declare that everyone else has a stake in it. Then it's everyone's fault: after all, they had financial incentive to succeed - which, as everyone knows, is the reason everyone wants to do anything - so the only reason the plan failed must be because all 24k employees just weren't trying hard enough.

      Page (Gates) is an intelligent egomaniac who happened to be in the right place at the right time, carried to success by Schmidt (Ballmer) and a few venture capitalist titans. Now add cowardly to his list of properties.

    2. Re:Wait what? Bonuses depending on results? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If each one of them can just make one other person aware [...]

      ugh.. enough reason to keep away from googlers for a while.

    3. Re:Wait what? Bonuses depending on results? by Hazel+Bergeron · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Most people think they get better deals from friends. Sometimes they are right, often they're the same and sometimes they're worse. In most cases, though, people feel better going to someone they know. That is not a nefarious scheme, it's human nature.

      It's understandable if a Google employee himself chooses to use Google's social networking crap because he believes that he'll get more money for doing so. But ultimately the success must depend on persuading others outside the company - and it's absolutely nefarious if your "friend" is this Google employee who is taking advantage of your trust and who stands to benefit financially when you follow his advice/example. The ethics of this sort of behaviour has been debated so much in terms of the harm of MLM and cult membership that, if you genuinely are ignorant, ... well, you know how to use Google.

      I don't know that this is what Page expects employees to do, but this sort of geek-grass-roots-marketing thing works approximately once - with an "innocent" start-up when the competition is wanting and people are yearning for an alternative, as with the original and still fairly good Google search engine proper. After that you just look like Microsoft with its, "Wow, it was Vista all along - and there was me thinking Vista was a failure!" ads.

      Car analogy effort notwithstanding, this is nothing whatever to do with choosing Peugeot because you're on good terms with a Peugeot dealer. A good business relationship which may come from a good underlying personal relationship, while often risky, is not proselytism.

    4. Re:Wait what? Bonuses depending on results? by Hazel+Bergeron · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Bonus culture has completely ruined service provision in local and national government in England over the past decade. Unfortunately, we are severely lacking an ideology which recognises what you state.

    5. Re:Wait what? Bonuses depending on results? by Hazel+Bergeron · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Which is arguably still irrational because an organisation's mission rarely aligns with the short term profit goals of employees/management. Optimum behaviour would be to strip the company and sell off its assets, or as close as possible to that as constraints will allow.

      (Hence, again, many recent examples of corporate and public sector plundering.)

    6. Re:Wait what? Bonuses depending on results? by tophermeyer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But bonuses are never guaranteed. The reason that bonuses exist in the first place is to offer incentive for employees to get behind whatever initiative the company has in a given quarter and is not part of their base salary.

      Google could just as easily take away bonuses from the other teams altogether.

    7. Re:Wait what? Bonuses depending on results? by hey! · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The summary posted here at Slashdot invites us to infer more than the memo in TFA says. It seems to imply that Google employees won't get any annual bonus unless the "+1 Button" feature is a success. What the memo says is is that 1/4 of the bonus will be tied to Google's success in its social media efforts *as a whole*.

      You get paid for doing your job. Bonuses are something different. I have doubts about the effectiveness of bonuses, particularly for engineers, but if they do have a function it is to get you thinking, not just about the task at hand, but how it might be tweaked to contribute to the overall success of the company. In a company like Google where engineers have considerable scope for creativity, a bonus policy like this might have some positive effect.

      As for "social media" being crap, this attitude is *precisely* why managers contemplate steps like this. Just because you have good, even unassailable reasons to believe social media is crap doesn't mean it's an unimportant business. It doesn't matter what *you* think or how justified you are when your customers think differently. Google has to consider Facebook as a key competitor. Facebook has moved into product niches that are important to Google. There's advertising, for one. Everyone one uses Google search, but nobody spends the kind of time many people do on Facebook. Facebook is well positioned to move into other areas such as email and cloud services.

      What is really a mystery is why Google chose to pull the plug on Wave. It was poorly marketed, that is true, but it was an unique take on social media: actually using it for *doing* things. The one thing Facebook is *not* positioned to do is launch services that people can readily see require *trust*.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    8. Re:Wait what? Bonuses depending on results? by SecurityGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not overreacting at all. This is a poor implementation of a good idea. It's well known that to be effective bonuses have to be valluable to the employee (I won't work harder for a bottle of bubble bath), credible (if I accomplish something extraordinary for you, you'll actually follow through and give me the reward) and attainable (this thing you want me to do is actually something I -can- do).

      They get 3/3 for everyone working on the project. 2/3 for everyone not.

      I've been in that position myself, where there was a bonus if we reached certain metrics, like customer satisfaction. Problem? A large fraction of the company was research (me) and never, and I do mean never, dealt with customers. Giving me a bonus because the customer facing side did a good job is a waste of money.

  2. Welcome to business. by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is how my company, and I imagine many others, do bonuses. They're not givens.

    Every year HQ releases the metric/equation for our bonus. Sometimes it's company wide. Sometimes it's division wide.

    For example: (Round numbers, not real)
    No one gets a bonus unless we hit a $0.50 dividend.
    After that. For every $0.01 above $.50, we get that much as a 'multiplier'.

    So as a salary grade 10. I get 10% of my annual salary as my bonus. Multiplied by the multiplier. I earn $50,000 year. We hit $1.20 dividend. That means I get 50k*.10*1.20 = $6000 bonus.

    It's not like the +1 button is their entire metric, but I'm sure it plays a role. Unless +1 hits 10% of market usage AND some other things happen, then the bonuses are given.

  3. I wouldn't want to be working there now by Mouldy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "...every Google employee..." -- Really?

    If the projects I was working on at Google had absolutely nothing at all to do with +1, I'd be pretty pissed if my bonus was riding on whether or not somebody else's project did well.

    1. Re:I wouldn't want to be working there now by pmontra · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Some (most?) of the people working there know they are not working on this +1 thing. Maybe they can make it somewhat relevant to their job, maybe not. I don't want to make guesses about Google's case but that very thing happened to me in a company I was working for years ago. The bonuses were linked to 3 or 4 goals that made sense for the long term success of the company but that were under the control of very different subsets of the employees. One of them could be somewhat linked to what I was doing but there was no chance I could help at achieving the other ones. It was demotivational and it didn't benefit our appreciation of the management and of the company. Furthermore, if one of those goals looks difficult to achieve employees get the impression that is a way for the company to save money at the end of the year. That's also very demotivational.

      By the way, everybody understands what a Like is but with +1... I'm adding 1 unit of what? They could have reused the thumbs up and down of youtube or copied the rating system of Slashdot. I'm looking forward to a -5 Spamindexing, on a scale from -5 to -1.

    2. Re:I wouldn't want to be working there now by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Small scale thinking. Bonuses should depend on a how well a company does. If you exceed expectations you get a bonus. If anything this is an indication of the direction that Google wishes to head. It is clear they are not content with being a search king or a mobile king. The CEO has just defined success as breaking into social networks, and the employees will be rewarded if the company is successful.

      It's the same everywhere. Where I work our bonuses currently ride on no lost time injuries. We have a big problem with safety on site currently. But WTF do I have to do with lost time injuries? I work in an office in front of a computer! But yet when I'm walking around I tend to take notice of things, manhole covers not closed properly, fence railings in disrepair. Now that I have a stake in injuries I report things that are wrong. The system works, sometimes.