Google's Idea of Productivity Is a Bad Fit For Many Other Workplaces

New submitter rjupstate writes "Google places a lot of value on the spontaneous creativity that can occur when two employees from completely different parts of the company meet. It's an ideal that Google has perfected over the years, but it's not something that will work for most other organizations. Executives trying to replicate Google's approach could even create major problems among their workforces."

Comments

The secret of Google's success

[91degrees]

When a company is successful - especially a sexy tech company - other companies always seem to try to copy their working practices to try and emulate that success. 20 years ago it was Microsoft. Before that it was IBM. These days it's Google.

Well, I can reveal the one thing you need to be as successful as Google: Have an effective monopoly on internet searches. Or Operating systems. Or computers.

The thing is, Google can be as inefficient as it likes. It has a hefty cash cow bringing in the money. Perhaps Google's idea here works, perhaps it doesn't. The fact that Google does it doesn't make it magic. You need a product to make a lot of money.

Re:The secret of Google's success

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is at least trying to look past the internet search monopoly. When was the last time Microsoft did something new? Yes, they didn't. What they do is buy some new ideas that some small company has created (looks like they always manage to fail those too). Google is simply trying to get those new ideas done in-house. Might be cheaper, might not. What it surely is, is greating a great work place for the types of people that enjoy creating something new. It's not likely that kind of people will switch jobs, even to a higher paying one, if they don't get the perks and freedom they now might have.

Re:The secret of Google's success

[91degrees]

This isn't a criticism of Google. Google is at liberty to experiment with management ideas because they've earned that right (or at least the money to do so). It's a criticism of management types who think they can emulate Google's success by doing what Google does.

Re:The secret of Google's success

[JaredOfEuropa]

Managers and executives are always looking at successful companies (or reading books about them). That's part of their job: to keep up with developments in their professional field. And if something seems to be working well for one company, it makes a lot of sense to try it in another.

The difference is made by the quality of the manager. Bad ones will blindly copy something they think worked for another firm, then fail to recognise success or understand the reasons behind a failure. Sadly I've seen my share of those, but there are plenty of good managers too, who don't copy blindly. They understand key factors in the success of a particular way of doing things, know if these are also applicable in their own company, know how to implement change and to evaluate its effects. At a distance, it might seem all these managers are doing the same thing and can only hope to achieve success by accident, but that's not always the case.

The article points out such details: there are good reasons for Google to be doing this, and there may be good reasons why the same approach isn't going to work for someone else.

Re:The secret of Google's success

[mysidia]

When a company is successful - especially a sexy tech company - other companies always seem to try to copy their working practices to try and emulate that success.

Also.... Google's current practices might be what they need to do to stay ahead; Not what you need to do, if you are not at the top and want to get there and win.

When you're not at the top... you may be better served by concentrating your efforts on a smaller number of products, to become the best; small number of products/innovations, to become the leader in one specific product -- choose a product that can easily be expanded upon (Search can be expanded upon naturally, because you get people visiting your site for search, now you have a chance to start offering them additional things later).
Because your available cash is very limited, and the risk of not producing is high; even if you were to develop a large number of ideas, it would probably be fiscally irresponsible to attempt to pursue or use all the resources to consider as many product ideas as Google could consider...

For a non-leader, innovation is important, BUT constraint on innovation is also important. You need a way of deciding upon a few innovations, that can be protected or are not easily replicated, in order to win.

Then once you are at the top, you have succeeded, after you have committed all the appropriate investments into strategic uses and maintaining leadership and expanding your business... you might want to devote some resources to expanding into other areas mainly as a hedge against risk from competitors, innovating is a lot harder -- and you can afford some extra costs in terms of inneficiency, if it will probably help give you the ideas and ability to execute you need to expand into additional territory, maintain your edge, and avoid being eclipsed by a competitor.

Since you are already on the top in one area -- what's the worst that could go wrong? You could have a secondary product fail at a small cost, but huge prospects for more profit.

Maybe loss of worker productivity does not adversly affect the bottom line for an internet business like Google; which have few interactions to manage with customers or users of their products.

Maybe the way you define productivity (And therefore: what kind of influence Telework would have on it), is inherently connected to the current goals and state of the company.

What workers are more likely to do who telework or with random encounters, might translate differently dependant on the company's needs

In other words: someone who accomplishes the exact same amount of work, and comes up with the exact same amount type and nature of ideas and collaborations, has the exact same discussions

Might be defined to be less productive in one company, and more productive in another company.

Because different things that they did (such as participation in discussions) might have different value.

In other words company-relative productivity. In this case, there are no hard and fast rules, about what makes workers more productive, because different companies get different utility, and a single-dimensional numerical access is a misleading way of representing worker utility

Re:The secret of Google's success

[Anonymous Coward]

Chicken and egg situation here:

Which came first, the nice product, or people working that product up, under the guise of 'doing whatever the hell they wanted'?

Re:The secret of Google's success

[Medievalist]

Well, I can reveal the one thing you need to be as successful as Google: Have an effective monopoly on internet searches. Or Operating systems. Or computers.

Nonsense! Alta Vista dominated search, there were a half dozen smaller competitors, and Google had nothing. Nothing, not even name recognition. Fast forward eight years, nobody even remembers what Alta Vista was, and "googling" something is synonymous with searching the verb.

The smartest thing Google did was understand Dijkstra's observations about fitting computing strategies to human capacities. Google's nearly blank search screen was vastly preferable to Yahoo, Alta Vista, et al., because it wasn't covered with distracting crap. You can pretend they were magically granted a monopoly but in reality they earned their dominance of internet searching.

Rubbish

[evilmidnightbomber77]

I used to find out more interesting stuff in a couple of minutes in the smoking shelter than in any organised meeting. I work in IT infrastructure btw.

Examples?

[TheLink]

Any examples of new _profitable_ and _innovative_ (copying others doesn't count for much) Google stuff that has come out of Google's idea of productivity?

So far they're still mostly making money from ads right? What else?

I doubt most companies will be so happy that their employees come out with innovative stuff that doesn't actually make the company more money.

Re:Examples?

[Instine]

they make so much money from ads, in part, because they are trusted by customers to be clever enough to magically put the right ads in front of the right people, and enough right people. Their other products may not make a lot directly, but boy are they strategically beneficial. Search is absolutely key, obviously, but youtube is the second biggest search engine. Gmail puts ads infront of people but also aids the AI behind context aware smarts.Everything they do can be said to help those ads become more effective, larger in volume, more trusted and seen by more people. Their may be some obscure contradictions, but name a few. I bet we can see how they help their ad revenue.

Re:Examples?

[Anonymous Coward]

Being a little dismissive of maps there I think, given streetview.

They've photographed entire countries from the roadside, pretty epic (though perhaps not money making)

of-course

[roman_mir]

Of-course they create problems.

First: Google business was growing with the developers that worked there, so they knew and understood the business model and processes. It's unlikely that in most other companies business is fully understood by the developers.

Second: Google hiring practice ensures they have above average employees, I know that many companies say this sort of thing, but it's just not true for most companies. Their hiring practice and pay levels are nowhere near sufficient to attract and retain top level talent.

Third: Google can survive many failed projects and still get publicity out of some of them, they are an advertising agency, but they are a tech company. Most other companies have tech bolten on top somehow, but their core is some other business, not tech itself. The more tech things Google does, the more it has to invest in tech infrastructure and this always heps their business model, so even many failed projects force thinking about further growth of tech infrastructure and from Google perspective that's what grows their business anyway.

Re:Google, eh?

[davester666]

You've got to make the numbers some random individuals who call themselves "analysts" each quarter, otherwise you are out.

This kind of innovation takes more than 90 days to develop, implement, ship and market, therefore, it has no value.

Different everywhere

[Bert64]

The problem is that too many workplaces simply want to copy what's being done elsewhere, without actually considering what's appropriate given their own unique criteria (eg staff, line of business, available workspace, relationships between employees and between employees and upper management etc).

I've seen many ridiculous policies introduced by various businesses because "$othercompany does it" when it's a very poor fit...

Chief among these is the idea that simply working longer hours will increase productivity... This may work in extremely mundane roles, but in roles which are taxing either physically or mentally the employees will get tired and subsequently work more slowly, make more mistakes, or usually both.

Re:Google, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect the reason that it works for Google is that they actively seek the smartest and most creative individuals out there and hire them.

Most other companies "fill positions", otherwise known as keeping the correct number of chairs warm.

No I don't work for Google, and yes I would like to ...

Re:Google, eh?

[Dr_Barnowl]

Yup, they've made it very clear - as do many other successful tech companies - that they consider the hiring process to be the most important thing they do.

You hire a certain type of people and it's virtually certain that some innovation will occur under your roof, because that kind of person will be bored senseless if they don't. Combine that with a company mandate to spend 20% of your time doing whatever the hell you want to and that's Google's recipe for success - like good bread - fine ingredients, given space to grow, not forced like the Chorleywood white bread process that most companies want.

Valve also grok this. Their employee manual basically says "organize yourself into groups and do whatever the hell you want" (yes, really).

Meyer's problem is she doesn't understand this. Rather than doing what Google do - make the office so damn nice that people WANT to go there - she's just mandating that people HAVE to go there. Whether she argued for the carrot and the board told her that they couldn't afford it, so she had to use the stick, or whether she just thought that Google was too soft while she was there, doesn't make a difference.

Google understands - creative people dislike being told what to do, but more importantly LOATHE being told how to do it.

Re:Google, eh?

[TWiTfan]

While google do this and I'm sure are very good at it, it's not Google's invention and it's certainly not new.

To me Google sounds like a nightmarish place to work. It's my understanding that most of those perks they provide aren't designed to make you happier, they're designed to keep you at work 24/7. They want to make the campus a "home away from home" precisely so you'll never go home. Combine that with the idea of working out in the open, with no personal space to call your own, and it all sounds very Orwellian to me. I used to work at a place like that. Every morning, everyone had to get together and recite the company's mission statement. Groupthink and the echo chamber reigned supreme, and everyone was expected to be a glassy eyed member of the cult, with no disagreement or debate tolerated. Got out of there as fast as I could (lucky for me, because they folded not long after that). Life in an isolated bubble is no way to live, and no way to develop good product either (since the bubble can become a real reality distortion field too).

Re:Google, eh?

[Dr_Barnowl]

I think Steve's method wasn't to tell people how to do stuff, but tell people it wasn't good enough until he thought it was.

There's a story (which I can't find) which exemplifies this : back in the mists of time, Steve sent back the design for a particular piece of UI so often that the programmer wrote an application style toolkit, and the next meeting he had, when Steve didn't like something, he just reconfigured it until he did.

Asking creative people to excel doesn't put them off - forcing them to do things a particular way and complaining when it doesn't produce results does.

Re:Google, eh?

[DuckDodgers]

Google only gets away with operating this way due to their profitability. They can consider the 20% partly as a means to keep employees motivated and happy to stay with the company, and partly as a kind of investment into research and development. If the company's profitability decreases, you can bet there will be shareholders howling for the 20% to be axed - and I see that event, if it occurs, as the beginning of Google's transition into the next Microsoft.

It's difficult to make a logical argument for the 20% plan for a company that's not currently profitable. How would you present that to executives? "I know we're barely breaking even, but if you give the employees 20% of their time to work on independent projects, I think our long term prospects will improve." I suspect it would work in many cases - you would boost morale, have better employee retention, and some of the employees would use that 20% time to learn skills that make their performance improve in their primary jobs. But it's difficult to quantify, and I think most people would just view it as a 20% loss of productivity with less than equal gain in other areas. That's capitalism... and as much as I hate it, I'm not aware of anything better.

Re:Google, eh?

[nblender]

Some of my fondest work-related memories are the times where I flew on-site and worked into the wee hours of the morning with my co-workers (some of whom also flew in)... 2 weeks of intense productivity pulling off herculean tasks while at the same time, all going out for meals/drinks, laughing, joking around...

I don't think I could do it fulltime but in brief bursts, those are the days I remember having the greatest creativity and productivity...

Re:Google, eh?

[DuckDodgers]

That's what you get when capitalism works properly. But there are major problems on two sides. First, companies like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, etc... use intellectual property law to crush most of the bubbles forming down below. "If you can't beat them, sue them into oblivion for patent infringement." And every big company has a hand in lobbying legislators to get favorable legislation, from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) trying for SOPA and PIPA, to Comcast and Verizon trying to get township-funded broadband declared illegal in as many states as they can.

Second, capitalism places profits above morals. Illegal acts are only a problem if the chance of getting caught multiplied by the expected legal and penalty costs for being caught exceed the costs of complying with the law. And legal but immoral acts (like using child labor overseas, or using a loophole in banking rules to improperly value a subprime mortgage) are expected. If your company doesn't ignore right in wrong in favor of profitable versus unprofitable, it will be crushed by other companies that do. This is why Walmart has large numbers of its employees on food stamps and Medicaid, so that taxpayers effectively subsidize their business model. This is why General Electric uses every tax trick in the book to pay very little taxes. This is why most of the clothing we buy is made in third world facilities.

Again, I'm not saying socialism or communism or for that matter fuedalism or theocracy is better. Clearly they're all worse. But what we have now is still really bad.