Tag: google

Turning Insights Into Action: What One Culture Advocate Learned From Culture Summit

Written by MC Staff on June 4, 2018. Posted in Business Case, Company Culture, Interviews, The Basics.

Alicia Case began her advertising career as a copywriter on the client-facing creative side, working on branding, ad concepts and creative for large health and wellness brands including Procter & Gamble Global Oral Care and Pfizer Women’s Health. Over time, it became more and more clear that she wanted to help spread her team’s thriving team culture to the rest of the organization.

Case began to wonder, “How do we establish an ownable, differentiating culture across our the entire organization that makes people want to stay working here and attract outsiders to come here?”

With that question, Case cultivated a cultural overhaul to the entire agency setting the path directed to an employee-facing role that now made her “client” the agency she worked for. After more than a year of developing this robust culture program and showing positive results from annual surveys and increased employee satisfaction, Case proposed a new role and officially shifted her career path. She moved from the creative side to a role focused on a wider set of employee culture variables including internal communications, social media, events, recruiting, reward and recognition opportunities, and more.

Throughout all this change and growth, Case has used her background in creative advertising to think about building culture the same way you would build a good brand, and attending Culture Summit for the past two years has been an important milestone in Case’s development as a culture and employee experience professional. Each year has featured keynotes, speakers, and presentations that helped her shape her understanding of culture and build an intentional employee experience at Publicis Health.

“Our agencies want to emulate many of the characteristics of Facebook, Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, Spotify, etc.,” says Case. “And for me, it’s important to not just understand what they do outside of their organizations but also on the inside.”

“What are they doing to create cultures and employee experiences that get their people to put out the caliber of work that we admire and recognize as best in class?” Case continues. “How are they building an employee experience that’s directly linked to the company ROI? That’s why it’s imperative to attend conferences like Culture Summit because you get to go under the hood of companies you may not otherwise get to hear from.”

Here are some of the most important Culture Summit takeaways she’s collected over the years:

Turning Insights Into Action: What One Culture Advocate Learned From Culture Summit Photo Credit: Cathryn Lynne Photo

1. Culture is a combination of micro and macro experiences

From the application and interview process to onboarding, training, and working on day-to-day tasks, the employee experience is made up of a number of different large and small employee experiences. When you look at how your organization builds its culture, consider high-level macro, big things you do that affect the entire organization as well as the small micro-level individualized factors. Which brings us to the first point Case would like to emphasize: culture is not some distant concept developed by the higher-ups like a product to be passed down. It’s every single micro and macro interaction a company has with its employees…

It’s our competitive advantage for recruitment and retention
It’s why we want to work here and also stay working here
It’s what can drive engagement, which increases output and makes our clients happier as a result because more engaged people means a higher quality of work, which means happier clients, which means more money back into the business

Micro experiences look at what individual things are happening at a granular level for each employee, like learning and development, career mobility and development, rewards and recognition, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and thought leadership opportunities. Macro experiences include the things that impact every single employee at large, like the company mission, brand values, processes, benefits, physical space, technology and tools, communications, etc. A successful culture will intentionally establish and adjust both macro and micro experiences to the needs of its people. A culture that can be responsive to its people’s needs will thrive.

Key Takeaway: Give more personalized gifts instead of giving everyone the same gift card or spot bonus. If you know a team member loves music or they’re a foodie, why not give them a pair of concert tickets or a dinner at a Michelin Star rated restaurant? Those small details make the person feel like the organization “gets” them. It’s building on a total rewards philosophy and moving away from the thinking the same things work for everyone.

Turning Insights Into Action: What One Culture Advocate Learned From Culture Summit

Case (center) speaking on the “Power of Business Resource Groups” panel at Saatchi & Saatchi. Image Source: Kipp Jarecke-Cheng

2. If you want to emulate the pros, learn from them

According to Case, one of the best parts of the Culture Summit was learning from relevant, best-in-class brands like Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Many legacy companies that have been around for decades or over a century are looking to change their business models to meet today’s business demands, many of which are being driven by these tech titans. These company’s outputs are a reflection of what’s happening inside and the culture and talent that’s there, it offers a great learning opportunity for brands that want to achieve that kind of success on their own. Or a minimum, understand how they’ve created a culture that is writing the playbook on today vs chasing to keep up.

“One of the most memorable panels was one about diversity and inclusion, but how Airbnb put the emphasis on belonging versus inclusion was the real differentiator,” says Case. “When you’re a visitor staying in a host’s home on Airbnb, you want to feel like you belong there. It’s totally different from a hotel. Staying in someone’s home you truly need to create a sense of belonging. That the people hosting want you there, they make you feel at home, they make you feel comfortable with the city you’re visiting, you feel like a local vs just a tourist.”

“That’s what Airbnb wants to create and to bring this same notion of belonging into how they view inclusion feels so on brand,” continues Case. “They want people to feel like they are truly at home at Airbnb and are connected and really part of the neighborhood. I loved how that nuance came to life not just in what they are doing externally, but internally as well.”

Key Takeaway: So many companies get lost in thinking about what they want to be versus analyzing what they fundamentally already are. Case noted that the Facebook speakers have made excellent points that when you choose a value, you have to think about what you also give up since a value comes at a cost. If you value one thing, there’s something that you don’t value because it’s not possible to value everything: You can’t say you’re funny but also be serious. You can’t say you’re type-A but also be OK with failure. They aren’t mutually exclusive.

Case (far right) attending the Out & Equal Workplace Summit in Philadelphia with the LGBTQ business resource group she co-chairs. Photo Credit: Kipp Jarecke-Cheng

3. Culture needs to be original – not duplicated and not lip service

Another important speaker takeaway for Case was that you can’t say you believe in diversity and inclusion and not have your staff speak truth on its own or not have programs and initiatives that actually help move the needle. The speakers really modeled what they preached and didn’t just make it words. Speakers don’t just tell you they believe in something, they show you how the brand puts those values into practice.

One way Case’s company is following through on this takeaway is to adopt a philosophy to only use real photos from real events – not stock photos or pure type that anyone could use – for the work that their communications department creates. They know it’s important to show their people volunteering their time painting local high schools, dancing in drag pageants, speaking on panels, or leading a workshop to reinforce who we are and what we stand for.

Amir Diwane performing as Addy Rall in the Publicis Égalité Employee Charity Drag Pageant that Case organizes each year for PRIDE. Photo Credit: Kipp Jarecke-Cheng

Here are a few examples of year-round or ongoing culture initiatives at Publicis:

To improve presentation skills, one of the agencies selected employees for an offsite “Art of Improv” training. Employees were invited to an offsite event space with stimulating art and colors for a sensory experience in which they worked with an improv company to learn how to think on their feet and be able to change directions quickly if something happens in a presentation.

Agency members participate in an interaction workshop to learn improv techniques that they can apply to their presentation skills. Photo Credit: Alicia Case

When a team came back from SXSW, they put on a pop-up experience for those in the office who couldn’t attend. To mimic almost frenetic energy of SXSW, attendees needed to make decisions about which sessions to attend happening simultaneously. Additionally, large-scale keynotes were being held in large cafe space while other speakers were presenting in the other conference rooms. At the close of the learning session, there was had a big party with food trucks and a live band to create the same experience as if everyone had been able to head down to Austin, TX.

Agency attendees sit in the cafe and listen to the live band during the SXSW-inspired pop up. Photo Credit: Alicia Case

For Women’s History Month, employees were asked to nominate a woman in the organization who they thought rocked through Publicis Health’s #WMNLDRSRCK campaign. Nominated women from across the organization were featured on social channels, creating a positive social media footprint with just a bit of coordination and branding work.

Case featured in the WMNLDRSRCK campaign. Photo Credit: Kipp Jarecke-Cheng

Key Takeaway: If you’re doing it right, your company culture will not look like any other company’s culture. Your values, events, and initiatives will be unique and customized to the people who work there. Anything less runs the risk of feeling like lip service to employees who are hungry for a unique company culture that represents who they really are and what they really do.

How could Culture Summit inspire you to influence your company culture and be an agent for change? Find out by attending this year!

7 Employee Engagement Best Practices from the HR Experts at Google

Written by Mike on March 14, 2018. Posted in Company Culture.

This is a guest post by Mike Sonders, Head of Marketing at Spoke, a simpler, smarter way for HR and People teams to manage employee requests.

Fortune’s annual list of the “Best Companies to Work For” has featured Google every year since 2007. For the last six years, Google held the number-one position.

But Fortune isn’t the only one praising Google as a great place to work. Google’s Glassdoor rating is 4.4 stars—impressive on its own, but even more so considering its based on more than 6,000 employee reviews. Additionally, Glassdoor’s “Employees’ Choice” list of best places to work has featured Google every year since 2009.

Google is a leader in the employee engagement space, and it’s not just because of its high salaries, free chef-prepared lunches, and other quirky—and pricey—benefits. On Glassdoor, Google employees praise things like work-life balance, growth opportunities, and company culture just as frequently as their perks.

If you’re part of an HR team at a small or medium-sized business that’s looking for ways to boost engagement, discover new ideas and exciting opportunities by learning more about the employee engagement practices at Google.

How Google Measures Employee Engagement

Google’s entire approach to business—including how the company drives engagement—revolves around data.

During his tenure as Senior Vice President of People Operations (HR) at Google, Laszlo Bock instituted a long-term research study—named gDNA—focused on developing a scientific understanding of the work experience.

More than just Google’s employee engagement survey, gDNA measures how both the work environment and employees’ individual personalities shape the employee experience. Thousands of randomly selected Google employees complete the survey each year.

One of the earliest findings from gDNA results was that the idea of work-life balance is flawed.

They discovered that there are two types of people: “Segmentors” and “Integrators.” Segmentors are people who are able to go home at the end of the day and completely forget about work. Integrators, on the other hand, struggle to separate work and life.

Less than one-third (31%) of people are Segmentors. The rest are Integrators—people who want to achieve work-life balance but are incapable of making it happen on their own. This data helped Google identify an area with tremendous potential for improving engagement.

If work-life balance is important for keeping employees happy, motivated, and productive—but employees can’t achieve work-life balance on their own—there’s an opportunity to boost engagement by developing policies that enforce work-life balance.

For example, Google’s Dublin office ran a program called “Dublin Goes Dark” that required employees to drop off their devices before leaving the office.

With a team of psychologists, researchers, and data scientists, your HR team could recreate gDNA at your business. But since most SMBs don’t have access to those resources, the better approach is to look at what Google has learned and adopt those practices at your company.

Employee Engagement Practices at Google

In Google’s early days, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin focused on two things: creating a better way to find information on the internet, and making Google a great place to work.

To find out what makes a company a great place to work, they met with executives at SAS Institute. SAS Institute is one of Fortune’s “Best Companies to Work for Legends,” appearing on the “Best Companies to Work For” list every year since the list began.

What they learned from SAS Institute is that the foundation of building a great place to work is valuing your employees. Or as Jim Goodnight—SAS Institute’s founder and CEO—says: “If you treat people as if they make a difference, they will make a difference.”

The starting point for engagement is making employees feel valued. Here’s how Google shows its employees that they’re valued.

1. Google Keeps People Inspired

A 2017 study conducted by Future Workplace found that employee burnout is currently the largest threat to employee engagement.

One of the biggest causes of employee burnout is lack of control at work. Studies have shown that the most capable employees at a company are often overloaded with work. This leads to incomplete tasks, frequent overtime, and halted innovation—all of which reduce employee control and increase the likelihood of burnout.

Google’s approach to this problem is 20% time. Employees spend up to 20% of their time at work every week on projects that inspire them. With their 20% time, Google employees created Gmail, Google News, AdSense, and many other highly profitable products.

A perk like 20% time inspires employees because it allows them to focus on things they’re passionate about. That inspiration prevents burnout, increasing engagement and decreasing turnover.

Implement 20% time at your company by allowing employees to set an annual goal of their choice. Let them choose anything they’re excited or passionate about. Then, work with managers to give employees the freedom to dedicate one day a week—or one week a month—to working on that project.

Including 20% time in annual goals is important because it gives HR and managers the ability to measure progress and see the outcomes of the initiative.

2. Google Supports Flexibility

Another way to prevent burnout by giving employees more control is to allow for flexibility in work schedules.

Some of Google’s more exotic benefits—like on-site haircuts, massages, bowling alleys, gaming rooms, pools, and playgrounds—aren’t necessarily designed for after-work use. Googlers enjoy those amenities any time they want—even in the middle of the workday.

Photo Source: CNN

While most Googlers work some version of a Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule, they can vary it up whenever they need to. Work six hours one day and nine the next, go swimming after a morning meeting, or work from home with a sick child—no one cares.

According to Prasad Setty, VP of People Operations at Google, one of the company’s core tenants is “if you give people freedom, they will amaze you.”

But giving their employees freedom and flexibility isn’t a matter of blind trust. Google only hires ambitious people—the types of people who do their work whether someone’s watching or not. In fact, the company is well-known for its lengthy, detailed, and thorough hiring process.

There are plenty of ways to support flexibility at your company. Allow employees to work from home when needed, adopt flex schedules, increase the amount of personal time employees get each year, or allow employees to take their personal time in hours—not days.

And remember that people are most productive in the morning before lunch. If flex time means people take the afternoon off for appointments or errands, it’s probably not as much of a blow to productivity as leadership may imagine at first.

3. Google Promotes Diversity

In 2015, Google expanded its 20%-time perk to create Diversity Core—a program that allows employees to allocate their time to diversity projects and initiatives.

Employees who participate in Diversity Core work on projects that raise the visibility of women in technology jobs and encourage more Hispanics to apply to work at Google, among many others.

According to data from Google, in 2014—before implementing Diversity Core—the company’s gender split in technical roles was 17% female and 83% male. As of the beginning of 2017, the number of females in technical roles at Google was at 20%.

Additionally, Google locations in the U.S. employed 5% more Asians and 1% more Hispanics at the beginning of 2017 than in 2014. If these numbers seem small, remember that Google employs more than 70,000 people; even a mere 1% increase is more than 700 people.

Implement a program like Diversity Core at your company by allowing employees to set 20% time goals toward projects that promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace, and consider adopting some of Google’s other practices:

Require all employees and managers to attend training on unconscious bias.
Offer benefits that support the needs of people in nontraditional families.
Review salaries to make sure there are no discrepancies in pay between different genders and races.

Google Employee Engagement Case Study

When analyzing data from gDNA results, Google’s People Analytics team noticed that fewer female software engineers were getting promoted than males. The problem, they found, was with their self-nominating approach to promotions.

At Google, software engineers nominate themselves for promotion when they feel they’re ready to take on more responsibility. The problem wasn’t that managers were promoting more men; it was that fewer women were nominating themselves for promotions.

To fix the problem, a senior leader at Google shared the data with Google employees, and HR teams encouraged managers to look for employees who were ready for promotion. Over time, the promotion rates for men and women software engineers equalized.

4. Google Listens, Responds, and Adapts

The gDNA study is just one way that Google collects feedback from its employees:

Employees use a tool called Google Moderator—another outcome of 20% time—to ask questions and vote on others’ questions they want answered.

Every Friday, the company holds an all-hands meeting where company leaders respond to the most popular questions of the week.

Leaders use a charting tool called Google-O-Meter to measure the popularity of different employee suggestions.

Leaders also schedule “Fixits” to solve big, urgent problems. Fixits are 24-hour sprints where teams focus 100% on finding solutions to specific problems.

There are plenty of ways for HR teams at SMBs to solicit employee feedback: engagement surveys, pulse surveys, anonymous forms, or even just a basic pen-and-paper suggestion box.

But remember that the only way to benefit from giving employees a voice is to respond and react to their suggestions. If you don’t have leadership buy-in on making changes, it’s probably not worth asking for feedback. Doing so will make people less likely to make suggestions in the future.

Google Employee Engagement Case Study

In its early days, Google founders Page and Brin wondered if a flat structure—one without managers—was better than a traditional workplace hierarchy. Eventually, the company turned to data to answer that question, launching a study called Project Oxygen.

Project Oxygen researchers gathered feedback data from employee surveys. They used that feedback data to create a baseline for determining management quality, and then they used that baseline to identify managers of the highest and lowest quality.

Next, they looked at survey data specifically for their highest- and lowest-quality managers. What they discovered was that managers identified as the highest quality had the lowest turnover and happiest teams.

By collecting employee feedback, Google was able to determine that a flat hierarchy wasn’t the best way to improve engagement. Additionally, they discovered the specific behaviors that their highest-quality managers exhibited, using that information to create new management training programs.

5. Google Encourages Development

There are a lot of different ways for businesses to encourage professional development:

Offer a professional development stipend.
Form a mentorship program.
Provide PTO specifically for time-off related to learning and development.
Have an on-site library of books selected by employees and leaders.
Reimburse employees for tuition costs.

Google has its own unique way of encouraging professional development: CareerGuru. CareerGuru provides employees with access to company leaders who explain—in great detail—what it’s like to work in different roles within the company.

This level of career coaching helps employees find roles they might want to move into one day in the future and learn what education and experience they need to qualify.

To recreate CareerGuru at your company, find managers and executives interested in offering occasional career coaching, and set up sessions for employees to meet with leaders to learn more about different roles. If confidentiality is a concern, handle all scheduling within HR, and set up one on ones instead of group meetings.

6. Google Creates a Culture of Empathy

Data doesn’t always have the answers. That’s a lesson Google learned during Project Aristotle—the company’s quest to determine the composition of the perfect team.

Using a decade’s worth of data collected about Googlers—covering everything from their educational and career backgrounds to their interests and eating habits—researchers and data scientists attempted to find patterns among Google’s highest-performing teams.

They couldn’t.

The conclusion they ultimately came to was that the perfect team had nothing to do with any qualities of the people on that team. The statisticians couldn’t find patterns. The data just didn’t contain the answers they were looking for.

So the team took a different approach: they observed high- and low-performing teams to look for consistencies in how the teams interacted and ran meetings. The discovered that members of the highest-performing teams felt safe speaking up and sharing their ideas.

Great teams trust and respect each other, providing all members with not only a voice, but also the confidence to share that voice with others.

Here’s how Charles Duhigg summarizes Project Aristotle’s findings in his piece for The New York Times:

What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy.

Emotional intelligence training is one way for HR teams at SMBs to promote trust and respect in the office. It’s also important to remember that a company’s culture starts at the top. Encourage senior leaders to be more open and honest with employees—and to encourage their reports to do the same.

7. Google Offers Unique Benefits

An article about Google just wouldn’t be complete without covering the company’s unique benefits. But many discussions of Google’s benefits focus on the wrong thing—they focus on what the benefits are and not why Google offers them.

For example, in Google’s early days, Page and Brin noticed that young software engineers were really bad about washing their clothes. This led to the company’s on-site laundry perk. No one sat down to brainstorm benefits and thought, “I bet this perk will make people want to work here.” They were simply fulfilling a need.

When putting together the benefits package for SMBs, consider what you know about company employees, and use that information to design unique benefits:

If many employees have young children, consider offering childcare reimbursement instead of/in addition to tuition reimbursement.

If many employees are recent college graduates, consider offering student loan payment matching instead of/in addition to 401k matching.

If many employees are nearing retirement, consider allowing them to invest their professional development funds into their retirement accounts.

If you don’t know enough about employees to know what benefits they need, collect information from managers, or include demographic questions in engagement surveys.

Building Your Own Employee Engagement Practices

Laszlo Bock offers the following advice for HR teams looking to measure engagement and find innovative ways to improve it:

Determine your biggest issues. Ideally, you’ll get this information from your employees.
Use surveys to collect employee feedback on how to improve or resolve the issues.
Tell people what you learned and how you plan to resolve the issues.
Experiment with solutions.

When experimenting, Google recommends that you “treat HR interventions like a medical researcher treats a drug trial: have a treatment group and an equivalent control group, hypotheses, a data collection period, an analysis comparing groups, and quantifiable outcomes.”

Even if your plan is to simply recreate Google’s learnings at your company, it’s important to test the changes first and measure the outcomes. It’s a lot of work, but the engagement benefits will make the hard work well worth it in the end.

Advanced Lessons on Driving Big Change at Large Organizations

Written by MC Staff on February 27, 2018. Posted in Scaling Culture, The Basics.

Whether subbing out a CEO, troubleshooting a culture of bias, or reorganizing to pursue a new market opportunity, every organization will face a point in its development when it needs to change. And while we all know the basics of implementing any new initiative (get buy-in, craft a plan, follow through), there are nuances to driving big change within an organization that only those who have “been there, done that” can point out.

Today, Tatyana Mamut, General Manager and Director of Product Management, Design, & Engineering at Amazon Web Services, and Ellen Leanse, author, Stanford instructor, and former Apple executive, are going to walk us through five advanced (and sometimes counterintuitive) lessons on the best way to approach large organizational change to make it stick:

1. Ambiguity is what makes change hard

It’s natural to assume that the bigger a change is, the harder it will be to implement, and the smaller the change is, the easier it is to implement, but that’s not true. In fact, some very large, significant changes, like a CEO succession, can be fairly straightforward because there’s so much information around the topic. Organizational change is hard or easy not based on the size of the change, but on the ambiguity of the change process.

“Companies will often send out a press release about what a big change it is to replace a CEO, but most of the time it’s not a difficult change because it comes with a very well known playbook – we know what needs to be done and how to accomplish it,” says Mamut. “What makes a change hard is when there’s no playbook for it and it’s ambiguous, uncharted territory. You don’t know if you have a full commitment from other leaders to head down the same path, and the machinery and mechanisms aren’t there to support the change.”

2. Small changes can actually be more difficult to implement

Even with a clear playbook for change, small changes can often be more difficult to implement than large ones because we assume we can accomplish them under the radar, without looking at the big picture. But we can’t.

“If you try to change one or two small things at a time, the immune system of an organization will respond and show up to attack the changes,” says Mamut. “Small changes fail because people don’t take the time to design the larger holistic playbook and the context into which those changes will fit. If there’s a big goal you want to achieve, you may have to change everything all at once in an orchestrated and coordinated move rather than making small changes over a period of time.”

3. The most powerful change is changing how people spend their time

Whatever particular change you’re planning for your organization, try to focus on what impact it will have on how people spend their time at work. Not only will that give your team a definite example of how the change will affect their work but it will make it clear that the change is a holistic one, meant to impact everything about the way they do their job.

“The number one thing that makes a difference in creating sustainable culture change in companies is when they have certain agreements or encouragements about how time is spent,” says Leanse. “The most powerful change is getting your team out of their time rut of easy work and meaningless checklist items in favor of real, deep thinking. Companies that can change that can change everything.”

4. You can’t “Do it right and be done”

Implementing a big change within an organization requires a lot of planning, and that planning can be painstaking work. But no matter how much effort you put into the coordination and strategy behind the plan, the rollout of change is the beginning of the work, not the end. Going through the process with an open mind and a sense of persistence will yield insights, integration, and value.

“When change isn’t easy right away, people tend to want to say, ‘I did it right, and it didn’t work, so I give up,’ and the business world tries to reinforce that kind of thinking,” says Leanse. “But when you’re implementing a really big change, you’ll never get to a point when you can say, ‘My work here is done!’ Real, lasting change is built on asking hard questions and embracing and reacting to input, even when it disagrees with yours.”

5. Successful change is always top down

The first step in making any culture change within an organization is to get buy-in from the leadership team, but it’s even more important when it comes to driving big change in a large organization. The board of directors down must understand and commit to the plans for change (and why there’s a need for it) in order to give the change the support it needs to be truly transformative.

“Middle managers are always looking for stories of how a small team did something big in a bottom-up way, but it’s very rare,” says Mamut. “I’ve worked with CEOs on large transformation initiatives – including the transformations at Life Technologies and Procter & Gamble – and it’s always led by the top and coordinated with the support of the board of directors.”

How can you initiate this kind of support? Focus on getting an advocate on the board of directors: “Find at least one person on board who understands the change and can guide the conversation for the entire board around it, asking questions like, ‘Will we need to change our metrics of success, including our financial metrics?’” and ‘How are we going to assess the success of the C-suite for the next 2-3 years for the investment?’” says Mamut. “This person needs to not just be on board with the plan – no pun intended – but actually drive the strategy around it.”

If you’re on the verge of driving big change within your organization, we hope these tips will help get you in the right mindset to be successful. And of course if you have any experience to share, please let us know in the comments!