Enhance upward mobility
Google should work on plans to increase upward career mobility for its employees to minimize turnover. While the company is prided for the best employer status, fervent criticism has been directed at most employees’ expressions of difficulty earning promotions. Ideally, a good job is not always defined by the pay check alone, but also the roles and seniority (Matsangou, 2015). The reasoning is quite intuitive – Google hires only the smart of the smartest applicants, which typically means the vertical career progress competition is even tighter.
In effect, the problem backtracks Google’s commitment to an elaborate career path. That explains who more than a third of quitting Googlers cite limited career progression as the reason, with some software engineers working for as much as eight years without promotion (O’Donnell, 2018). Ideally, the challenge of having many high IQ workers competing for the same managerial spot forces the criteria to be even absurd to allow the smartest into leadership. But the smartness is not performance, and Google often gets it wrong exactly there. With the company having unmatched diversity in service and product provision, it should not find it too difficult to expand management positions to accommodate as many ‘maturing’ junior employees as it can.
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Reduce stringency in middle management
Still, on career progress, Google should consider reducing the complicated procedure of performance management and promotion. Google takes two fundamentally wrong approaches to performance assessment: That performance is solely based on tangible metrics – the number of bugs fixed, lines of code written, etc. With that ideology, customer reviews on the product might not quite matter – given that as long as no tangible metric is derived from solving the customer issue, the time was never worthwhile. Secondly, the Kafkaesque procedure of promoting an employee. That one has to make a case for promotion one year beforehand promptly demotivates hard work. Besides, a manager has limited chances of giving credit to his team members, considering the anomalous time it would take.
Recommendations to Google’s management team
On top of the complex strategies employed to ensure a successful hiring process, Google should increase the hiring manager and team’s weight in the hiring decision. At present, once the hiring manager and the team assess the applicant, their data is sent to an independent hiring committee, which will make most of the decisions. While the technique effectively solves problems with bias, it creates a bigger problem – lessening the weight of opinion the immediate supervisor has. The reverse works quite well, as in companies like Amazon. The increased consideration of Amazon’s hiring manager is linked to an improved sense of touch between the fresh employee and the manager (Roberson et al., 2020).
Arbitrary project cancellations at Google seem to be a mounting problem that Google’s management team can’t just seem to get around. Once again, the issue points back to the trouble of managing many high IQ employees, all trying to be noticed. To fix such employee demoralizing manoeuvres actions, the company might wish to embrace a collaborative approach to project development, as opposed to individualism, which will, besides, foster innovation (Dessler, 2017). With staff working on projects in groups, managers will have an easier time reviewing and approving the projects. More so, Google will obtain the convenience to channel and concentrate organizational resources to essential and strategic projects. The approach worked well for CBIZ, a financial consultancy firm in Cleveland. Mariana Davis, the firm’s chief executive, points out that pooling human capital has the automatic effect of churning out products positively impacting the organization (Hollister & Watkins, 2018). As a result, managers at CBIZ were relieved of hours of training and planning for individual project showcasing.
References
Dessler, G. (2017). Human Resource Management (15th ed.). Pearson.
Hollister, R. & Watkins, M. (2018, October). “Too Many Projects.” Harvard Business Review . 17(9), pp. 64-71.
Matsangou, E. (2015, June 5). “Secrets of Google’s Talent Retention Success.” European CEO. Retrieved https://www.europeanceo.com/business-and-management/secrets-of-googles-talent-retention-success/
O’Donnell, J. T. (2018). “6 Reasons Working at Google Isn't Right for Most People.” Inc . 8(3), pp.33-36.
Roberson, Q., King, E., & Hebl, M. (2020). “Designing More Effective Practices for Reducing Workplace Inequality.” Behavioural Science & Policy, 6(1), 39-49.
