Good Example Of First Submission Case Study

Abstract

SergyBrin and Larry Page founded Google in 1998, and they both established the informal culture in the company from the beginning. Page and Brin made a vision to form a functional group for human resources that work beyond extend of administration and also involves reviewing employees’s performance. In 2006 this function was named as people operations. Then in 2007, another group within the people operations named as people analytics was made and the mission of this group was evolved by the time. Out of the team of the people analytics, People & Innovation Lab (PiLab) was fashioned that was designed to embark upon the questions that were related to wellbeing and to the productivity of the employees at Google. An extensive project was established to answer the question: whether the managers matters? And named: Project Oxygen. The team of Project Oxygen works with other members of the people operations to form a larger people management initiative in order to increase the awareness across the company about the effective behaviors of the managers, along with the tools and programs that were designed to enhance management quality. Prasad Setty, the vice president of the people analytics, was thinking ahead of Project Oxygen, he wanted to expand this project in order to divert the attention to the senior managers and their leadership skills as the senior leadership needs to be inspirational; however there is a need to find out ways how this inspiration could be trained. Settee thought that as they were pushing people in. however he considers the attributes of Oxygen to be significant, but not aspirational.

Sergy Brin and Larry Page founded Google in 1998, they were students of computer science and developed algorithm which ranked the results of the internet search that were based on the sites which had most of the links directed to them. Brin and page within the year raised approximately around 26 million dollars from the investors and turn this idea into a company. And they both established the informal culture in the company from the beginning i.e. dogs were allowed at the workplace, top chefs were hired for preparing the free meals for all the employees, hence such a culture was designed for the employees that condensed the barriers in rapid growth and the development of the ideas (Jarvis, Jeff, 2011).
Google started partnership with popular leading sites i.e. Yahoo! And AOL. It also introduces an advertising program AdWords that enables it to make large capital. It continued to magnetize the paid advertisements and hence leads to large net income i.e. 100 million dollars in 2002. Google has an engineer dominated culture where the decision making is done by the consensus rather than commands and it is very flat i.e. many titles have been given to the similar employees. Rapid growth in Goggle was done by a data-driven process of recruitment. The company ensures with the substantial resources that people they hired were having the top level talent; this was considered as the most critical feature of the success of Google. Furthermore its culture is extremely fluid, groups are created in accordance to the innovative products and the needs of the markets and the environment is highly unpredictable, as people moves all the time in it. It is not rare having three different mangers merely within two years. At Google many compensating packages i.e. perks and benefits, bonuses, including the base salary are offered to the employees. There were three functional groups at Google: engineering group, global business org. that is the sale group and the last was the general and administrative group (G&A).
Page and Brin had a vision to form a functional group for human resources that work beyond extend of administration and reviewing the employee’s performance. In 2006 the function was named as people operations that were designed to get the empirical data and certainty of each and every aspect of the lives of the employees working at the organization. It also helps in giving feedback to managers and facilitate in managing the process of reviewing performance. Then in 2007, another group within the people operations named as people analytics was made. Its mission was evolved by the time; initially the mission was to make data based decisions relating to people however by the time it evolves to be having the inclusion of the personal judgment to help them to make better decisions. Out of the team of people analytics, People & Innovation Lab (PiLab) was formed that was designed to embark upon the questions that were related to wellbeing and to the productivity of the employees at Google. There were many questions to be surveyed but the most important were chosen i.e. whether the managers matters? Or whether they have an impact on the team’s performance? Hence an extensive project was established to answer this question: whether the managers matters? And named: Project Oxygen. In this survey the team of this project reviewed data that was relating to the feedback of the employees that had left the company, and investigated that whether it was related to the management issues or not. There were certain connections found, but they were not enough to be generalized to whole Google population. Then team lead Pattel, examines the high and low scoring managers on the ratings by the Gogglegeist and their performance scores. It was evident by the survey that there exists a difference among the low and high scoring mangers (Ghemawat, et. al., 2003).
The data gathered, indicated that the high scored managers have better team performances, and they also scores high on all dimension i.e. innovations, career growth and development, balance between work-life etc. hence, it was important to consider that what their best managers do? The team after spending a lot of time in the coding of the information from the survey, they identified eight attributes that were to be the common attributes in all the managers with high scoring. These attributes included a good coach, one that expresses the concerns for his members success, the personal wellbeing, helping in the career development of his team members, one that is productive as well as result oriented, one who is an excellent communicator, one having a vision, and one using his technical skills for giving advices.
The team believed that they conduct the study not just for gathering the data rather they wanted to bring the change in the organization, hence in 2010 develops the action plan to help and to provide support to the managers in more and more comprehensive way. The team of Project Oxygen works with other members of the people operations to form a larger people management initiative to increase the awareness across the company about the effective behaviors of the managers, along with the tools and programs that were designed to enhance the manager’s quality.The problem that was faced by the Project Oxygen team was a culture, that was consensus-oriented. So making the commands of the findings of the Project Oxygen does not work, consequently they decided to socialize these findings (Jarvis, Jeff, 2011).
The other tribulations being faced by the team were the employees, hesitant to herd the members of the folks from the people operations. So they start making advises through the tech-engineers that were old ,well reputed and respected by the others as tech mangers are most likely to follow and listen to them rather than the members of the people operations, hence leads to positive feedback.
During the implementation of the plan, in order to measure the attributes that were identified by the research survey, they create two dissections. One was upward feedback (UFS) and second was (TMS) tech mangers surveys. The feedback of the survey was than conveyed to the managers indicating them the areas of improvements and were encouraged to share them with their employees. Then the members of the people operation developed the programs for training the mangers that were designed around the findings of the Project Oxygen (Ghemawat, et. al., 2003).
In 2009, Google established an award named as the Great Manager Award, it was nominated by the employees previously based on the general feedback but latter on they were asked to nominate them keeping in view the eight attributes of the Oxygen. The selected mangers were considered to be the role models at the workplace. Trips to different places were, than organized for the manger that won the award. The impact of this Project Oxygen was positive and leads to improvements. Furthermore, further closely work could be done with the mangers with the low scores. However career development and coaching were the two that have shown the greatest improvements (Jarvis, Jeff, 2011).
People operations team does believe that everyone valued this project but some questions were do rise. One was that these eight attributes are leading them to a recommended behavior rather than improving the management skills, but it was explained that the managers are told to follow these attributes to become a better manager. Second question was raised that they are been told with greater granularity how to behave, as the culture of the organization is the individualistic one. But however at the same time that they come to know the value of the managers as they are responsible for the career of their employees. And the third question that was raised was related to sustainability, the employees believed that they were very frequently evaluated for their own systems and considered this to be as overloaded but at the same time they think it as favorable to get the regular feedback (Ghemawat, et. al., 2003).
Prasad Setty, the vice president of the people analytics was thinking ahead of the success of the Project Oxygen. He wanted to expand this project to divert the attention to the senior managers, those requiring attention towards their leadership skills as the senior leadership has to encourage, but he was interested in looking out the ways how this inspiration could be taught. He also believed that it will going to be a lot helpful to see the complete lifecycle of the managers at Google from their hiring as candidates by asking them about the oxygen attributes to the courses that are targeted to improve their low scoring parts. He was also interested in relating the people analytics to learning about teams. Furthermore, he also believed that it is very necessary to follow further changes and improvements on the management facade. One of the fears of the Setty was that project Oxygen was constraining. He believes that they were boxing people in. However the attributes of the project oxygen were tremendously significant but not aspirational. He has doubts of how to form amazing leaders in true sense (Jarvis, Jeff, 2011).

Work Cited

Jarvis, Jeff. What would Google do?: Reverse-engineering the fastest growing company in the history of the world. Harper Business, 2011.
Ghemawat, Sanjay, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung. "The Google file system." ACM SIGOPS operating systems review. Vol. 37. No. 5. ACM, 2003.