The article addresses the unique corporate practices and policies at Google, which seamlessly merge with their corporate culture. Human resource policy can shape the way the employees work in the organization. It shapes how the people work in the organization and how the culture will be. A decentralized, flat hierarchical structure is practiced by many organizations, but the way the corporate culture and image is shaped, which accentuates this, is what is important to deliver the signal of equality among employees. At Google, employees are valued for the work they do, and they are treated as equals. They are given equal opportunity in every aspect and provided with additional benefits and perks to keep them happy outside the organization. In this article, Wright discusses the different methods used by Google, which help them to achieve an open culture and maintain a bureaucracy-free structure.
The article talks about Google’s hiring process. It states that a potential candidate is interviewed at least by four interviewees before he is hired. These four people who interview the candidate are not necessarily the seniors or represent the top management, but they are the supervisors and even colleagues of the potential candidate. Google’s logic behind following this rule is that the people who are at the job know best what the requirements for the positions are, and they are the best judge for it. Moreover, they believe that a group of people are wiser than a specialist. As Mellissa Karp, HR manager at Google, states that “wise, collaborative crowds that include a diversity of opinion, independence of members from one another, decentralization, a good method for aggregating opinions and return for contributors’ investment.” According to her, the employees of Google are content with this process as Google prefers to hire people who are opinionated and they are used to providing one due to the corporate culture. Google uses an employee tracker which is called ATS, which gets updated every time a candidate uploads a resume. If a match is found regarding the candidates’ school or past offices with any of the existing employees, the tracker immediately sends a mail to the employee for an internal reference. And when an email is sent by the employee, the tracker automatically gets updated. According to Karp, this process helps to build a community and tap the best fit for the job.
Participation is also a part of the employee evaluation process, and an employee up for an evaluation is asked to choose a peer reviewer from anywhere in the organization. Though this presents an interesting twist to the traditional 360-degree appraisal system, according to Wright, may cause some problem in terms of unbiased ratings by peers. But the article points out that such a widespread process of participation is possible in a company that is not so large. But in a large company, standardization of processes are necessary.
Google practices a participative management style. Participative management implies employees at all levels of hierarchy are engaged in the decision-making process. Google practices it to the core. It practices in its hiring, performance evaluation, and even employee development process. The writer believes that it has fitted with Google the culture of the company very well. But this is not possible to be implemented in large organizations. Though the article provides a good insight into the evolving HR practices being used by technology-oriented invention-based companies, it does not provide any solution as to what large companies can do to implement such policies and to what extent. Further, the Google culture that has been developed and is spoken of in the article cannot be an outcome of the participatory nature of the HR policies but rather through an environment that continuously encourages employees to be innovative and opinionated. So a large company, if it can imbibe an open culture that is as open as that of Google, can definitely implement this kind of strategy.