Google's People Analytics Approach: HR Practices And Employee Engagement Essay.

Google's Background and HR practices

Question:

Discuss about the People Culture & Contemporary Leadership.

People are the most important elements for every organisation. These forces keep alive organisations values and purpose. They are the source of creativity, innovation and inspiration in an organisation. This is the reason while human resource is considered one of the important assets for every organisation. Today most of the leading organisations are developing high performance culture through creating an organisation culture that empowers employees. This report is basically based on organisation’s people’s practices and employee engagement. The company chosen for research is Google it is a big multinational company dealing in internet related products. The study is on Google and its HR practices. It clearly outlines and analyses the HR practices that are adopted by the company. It also determines the level of employee engagement in the organisation. The report also recommends some initiatives that could be taken by company to increase employee engagement.

Google is a multinational company having its headquarters in America. The company deals in internet related products and services. It was founded by Larry page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Sundar Pichai is the current CEO of Google. Google has shown a fast growth over the years. In the year 2004 Google made initial public offer and today the company stands amongst the most renounced companies of the world. Google summarises its journey from garage to Googleplex (Google 2017). Company’s vision statement is providing the world’s information at a single click. Google’s mission is to collect the world’s information and provide it to the user’s universally (Thompson 2017). Both vision and mission statements guide the company’s current practices. Both vision and mission statements run parallel to each other and guide the current practices of the company. It outlines four basic components namely world’s information, universal accessibility, one click and usefulness. Company maintains huge database as a collection to world’s information and provides universal accessibility at one click through its search engines world-wide.  Easy access ensures that information is available for utilisation. Google’s success can be credit to its effective organisation structure and culture. Google has matrix kind of organisation structure with some degree of flatness. It doesn’t have that old convectional style of organisational structure. It has cross- functional organisation structure. Google’s organisation structure is a blend of three characteristics function based, product based and flatness. Google has manpower strength of 75053 in the year 2016 (Statista 2017). Google effectively manages its huge and diverse workforce in the organisation. Google has its offices worldwide and headquarters in California, USA. The company has its operations around the globe.

People Analytics Approach and Its Impact on Employee Engagement

Google is amongst the companies that have the best HR policies and practices in the world. The HR approach that Google uses is known as people’s analytics. People analytics can be defined as the data driven approach to inform your people about programmes, practices and processes. At Google its employees are known as “Googlers”. This approach is the used to inform Googlers about everything that company does to find, grow and keep people. The company is having the best strategies and polices to attract exceptionally talented pool of technologists and business people. The recruitment strategies of Google are aimed at attracting innovative and talented people who are ready to spend long hours in office. It tries to appoint people who are comfortable with flat organisation structure and working in teams. Google works on the principal that little things have big impact it offers various small benefits to make itself the best company to work for. Google offers it employee’s healthy snacks and meals time to time. Google moms are allowed paid maternity leaves of 18 weeks. Company also allows its employees to bring pets to the office. Google clearly understands the theory of collectivism and individualism. In collectivism culture group performance is considered whereas in individualism the individual performance is taken into consideration (DeMooij 2015). Google appraises both team efforts and individual performance depending on the culture of country. Another HR strategy of Google is not having formal meetings; it has casual conversations in cafes or in lunch hours to increase employee participation.

Google has the pool of highly skilled and talented workforce. The company is able to maintain this workforce and keep its employees happy through its various HR practices (Bulygo 2013). Google has replaced subjective decision making approach in HR to data based decision making this is known as people’s analytics. People analytics team at Google analyse data to identify insights correlations and to provide recommended actions. This approach is the major HR practice or element for Google in achieving corporate greatness (Sullivan 2013). Employee training programmes at Google are also well designed and developed to maximise the benefits of training programme for both employee and the company. To make training programme more effective the company uses need analysis to identify different types of needs and design training programmes accordingly. The company tries to maximise the workforce efficiency with taking guidelines from Maslow’s need hierarchy theory. It has 5 categories of needs i.e. physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness needs, esteem needs and self-actualisation needs (Datta 2014). The company tries to increase the employee motivation by fulfilling the5 levels of need. The company tries to fulfil these needs by providing attractive perks, long term employment, free food in office, recognition for performance etc. The companies HR practices are designed in such a way to keep workforce happy so that they can better concentrate of work rather than other issues.  Google shows concern for its people, this helps to retain and attain premium quality workforce in the organisation.

Determinants and Outcomes of Employee Engagement

Employee engagement can be defined as the approach in which the workplace offers the employee an environment that keeps him or her motivated to work enthusiastically with full dedication and commitment to attain organisational goals. In other words the organisation should give the employee a sense of belongingness so that employee can work for the organisation in an enhanced way (Anitha 2014).  Google is the prime example of extraordinary employee engagement.  For employee engagement nothing can be taken as the best formula company needs to continuously analyse the environment and needs to develop new thinking and actions. Google maintains employee engagement in the organisation by empowering its employees by transparency.  Transparency increases employee engagement as employees want to part of something that has no hidden agendas.  Employees at Google spend 20 per cent of time in activities other than normal work this promotes a creative culture in the organisation. Google aims to leave no stone unturned when it comes to employee caring. The company creates employee engagement by creating a caring and welcoming work environment for employees. Google- O – Meter is a device used by Google that gives its employees an opportunity to air their views on various matters and potential cultural changes (Phelps 2016).All these measures help Google to maintain remarkable employee engagement in the organisation.

To form structured plan of initiatives that could increase employee engagement we need to identify determinants of employee engagement. Key determinants of employee engagement include job role, organisational support, rewards & recognition, training & development and organisational leadership and planning (Gujral and Jain 2013). The next step is to identify the possible outcomes of employee engagement. Possible outcomes include employee satisfaction, organisational commitment and organisational citizenship behaviour (Albrecht et al. 2015). After analysing the predictors and potential outcomes of employee engagement successful plan can be developed. One initiative could be developing employee’s strength. This could be done with the application of R2 strength profiler. R2 strength profiler is a scientific way to develop and measure various strengths of employees (Albdour and Altarawneh 2014). This initiative will enhance the training and development procedure at the company and increase employee satisfaction. Another initiative that could be taken is introduce engagement as service measure on score card. This plan can be implemented by having an agreed engagement target score for each business unit that employees are measured against. This will impact the rewards and recognition predictor of employee engagement and help to enhance employee engagement in the company. Both the initiatives will not only impact the employee engagement in the organisation but will also result into improved productivity, high level of customer satisfaction, improved financial growth, staff retention, high morale of employees and ensures employee well-being.

Recommendations to Increase Employee Engagement

Conclusion

It can be concluded that Google is an organisation that is working best for its employees. Google has adopted various HR practices such as free food, attractive perks, flat organisational structure, fun activities in the office, allowing pets in the office, paid maternity leaves and much more. The company has adopted these practices to ensure employee engagement in the organisation. The company works on Maslow’s theory of motivation and does it best to keep its workforce motived and enthusiastic to work. Google cultivates the culture of innovation and creativity in the organisations. The company believes in freeing the talent of the people and empowering its employees. The company effectively and efficiently manages its workforce to attain its mission and vision. The company is already a remarkable example for outstanding employee engagement but still two initiatives that could help the company are introducing engagement as a measure on score card and working to increase employee’s strengths.

References

Albdour, A.A. and Altarawneh, I.I., 2014. Employee engagement and organizational commitment: Evidence from Jordan. International Journal of Business, 19(2), p.192.

Albrecht, S.L., Bakker, A.B., Gruman, J.A., Macey, W.H. and Saks, A.M., 2015. Employee engagement, human resource management practices and competitive advantage: An integrated approach. Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, 2(1), pp.7-35.

Anitha, J., 2014. Determinants of employee engagement and their impact on employee performance. International journal of productivity and performance management.

Bulygo, Z. 2013. Inside Google’s Culture of Success and Employee Happiness, viewed on 12 August 2017 from https://blog.kissmetrics.com/googles-culture-of-success/

Datta, Y., 2014. Maslow’s hierarchy of basic needs: An ecological view. Oxford Journal: An International Journal of Business & Economics, 8(1).

De Mooij, M., 2015. Cross-cultural research in international marketing: clearing up some of the confusion. International Marketing Review, 32(6), pp.646-662.

Google, 2017. Our story, viewed on 12 August 2017 from https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/our-story/

Gujral, H.K. and Jain, I., 2013. Determinants and outcomes of employee engagement: A comparative study in information technology (IT) sector. International Journal of Advanced Research in Management and Social Sciences, 2(5), pp.207-220.

Phelps, S. 2016. Learning From Google: 15 Ways To Drive Employee Engagement, viewed on 12 August 2017 from https://www.purplegoldfish.com/learning-green-goldfish-google-15-ways-drive-employee-engagement/

Statista, 2017. Number of full-time Alphabet employees from 2007 to 2016, viewed on 12 August 2017 from https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-time-google-employees/

Sullivan, J. 2013. How Google Became the #3 Most Valuable Firm by Using People Analytics to Reinvent HR, viewed on 12 August 2017 from https://www.eremedia.com/ere/how-google-became-the-3-most-valuable-firm-by-using-people-analytics-to-reinvent-hr/

Thompson,  A.  2017. Google’s Vision Statement & Mission Statement, viewed on 12 August 2017 from https://panmore.com/google-vision-statement-mission-statement