Google

Abstract

This paper is about people management practices at Google. People management practices play a very important role in the organization. People management practices focus on how managers reward, discipline, motivate and train employees. People make the difference between the success and failure of a company. The effectiveness with which organization manage, develop, and motivate will predicted how well the organization perform and have a direct impact on business outcomes. Excellent management practices and styles lead to more motivated and productive employees. The author of this paper will discuss Google overall people management strategy, identified how the company rewards and motivate their employee, identified the company's culture, how the company attract and retain employees, and recommendation for strengthening the company' workforce strategy.

Introduction

Google Inc. is an American multination public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. The company was founded September 4, 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, while the two were attending Stanford University as Ph.D majors. The company current headquarter is in Mountain View, California and had more than 20,000 employees worldwide. In 2004 the company went public (Google history, 2011). Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world, processes over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day. Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engines. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail email software, and social networking tool, including Orkut, and Google Buzz (Google history, 2011). From the beginning, Google realize that people are the most valuable resource of an organization and management of people makes a difference to company performance.

Google's people management strategy

Google's people management strategy is management, with flexible work schedule and employee empowerment. They are not really using managers as such but mostly tech leads as they code themselves. Their tech leads themselves as different people have different skills and the "lead" part should be taken up by those with the most developed necessary skills of the moment. Management's task is to facilitate that and get out of the way. Google doesn't keep its HR people in HR silos. It makes sure they're a core part of business strategy. That's why only one-third of HR employees at Google have an HR education or background. The company moves business people into HR and vice versa. "Business strategy and HR strategy need to be the same thing, , in which employee have a clear understanding of what is expected of them. And the capabilities essential for delivering the strategy" Deegan said (HR for innovation/Google, 2008). This strategy seems to work well for Google. Employees at Google can't help but want to do their absolute best for the company; they feel like they owe it to them.

Rewards and Motivation

Line managers play a significant role in the reward and recognition of the workforce. How talented people are treated from a reward and recognition perspective is essential for their retention and motivation (Becker, Huselid, and Beatty, 2009). Google recognized how important it is to reward and motivate their employees that why they are one of the top 100 companies to work for. Google hire employees that are the best in their technological field and rewards their employee's hard work with an extremely relaxed workplace that encourages creativity through fun activities such as roller hockey and a casual dress code, a gym, messages, local expressions, a mural in Buenos Aires to ski gondolas in Zurich, bicycles or scooters for efficient travel between meetings; dogs, lava lamps; massage chairs; large inflatable balls, huddle rooms, laptops everywhere – standard issue for mobile coding, email on the go and note-taking, foosball, pool tables, volleyball courts, assorted video games, pianos, ping pong tables, and gyms that offer yoga and dance classes, grassroots employee groups for all interests, like meditation, film, wine tasting and salsa dancing, healthy lunches and dinners for all staff at a variety of cafés, and break rooms packed with a variety of snacks and drinks to keep Googlers going (The Google Culture, 2011). In addition Google are rewarding employees with perks like onsite swimming