7 BEST PRACTICES FOR ENGAGING EMPLOYEES BY GOOGLE
We are facing turbulent times, rapid spreading of pandemics, increasing competition, and growing multi-generational workforce. To survive and flourish, businesses are looking at innovative ways to engage their rapidly evolving workforce.
One key area to focus on is employee performance.
We all know (deep inside) that the annual, top-down, and ranking-focused approaches don’t often work. The next question is what are your options and the best practices that you can follow for effective methodologies, frequency, format, 360 feedback, manager empowerment, and effective employee recognition and reward programs.
We are showcasing employee engagement best practices from Google in this post.
1. Clear sense of purpose and the goals needed to achieve the vision.
“Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.” – Lou Holtz
If employees don’t understand their role, they are most likely to be disengaged and underperform. Having clear and meaningful goals allows employees to have a clear sense of purpose and deeply understand how they contribute to the success of the company.
What you can do
Formalize your goal-setting process, from the top down. If a business doesn’t have clearly defined objectives, how can its employees? Investing in tools like goal management software can help your employees tie their role to the greater business mission with accountability and clarity.
2. Mentor and Coach
"Coaching works because it's all about you. When you connect with what you really want and why - and take action - magical things can happen." Emma-Louise Elsey
Successful companies are enhancing their employee development programs to incorporate mentoring and coaching to develop talent.
What you can do
Make employee-manager meetings part of the culture of talent development. To drive effective employee performance, regular coaching is needed during 1-1s between managers, direct staff, and teams. Consider weekly cadence during the start or end of the week.
3. Listen, Respond, and Adapt
Google collects data from its employees and its managers. In project Oxygen, they used feedback data from employee surveys to determine a baseline for management quality, identify the characteristics of managers with the highest and lowest quality, and create a new management training program. A few other practices they use are:
- Employees use a tool called Google Moderator—another outcome of 20% time—to ask questions and vote on others’ questions they want answered.
- Every Friday, the company holds an all-hands meeting where company leaders respond to the most popular questions of the week.
- Leaders also schedule “Fixits” to solve big, urgent problems. Fixits are 24-hour sprints where teams focus 100% on finding solutions to specific problems.
What you can do
There are various ways to gather employee feedback: engagement surveys, pulse surveys, anonymous forms, or even just a basic pen-and-paper suggestion box.
4. Support Flexibility
According to Prasad Setty, VP of People Operations at Google, one of the company’s core tenants is “if you give people freedom, they will amaze you.”
Another way to prevent burnout by giving employees more control is to allow for flexibility in work schedules.
Some of Google’s more exotic benefits—like on-site haircuts, massages, bowling alleys, gaming rooms, pools, and playgrounds—aren’t necessarily designed for after-work use. Googlers enjoy those amenities any time they want—even in the middle of the workday.
What you can do
There are plenty of ways to support flexibility at your company. Allow employees to work from home when needed, adopt flex schedules, increase the amount of personal time employees get each year, or allow employees to take their personal time in hours—not days.
5. Encourage development
Google has its own unique way of encouraging professional development: CareerGuru. CareerGuru provides employees with access to company leaders who explain—in great detail—what it’s like to work in different roles within the company.
This example of career coaching helps employees find roles they might want in the future and learn what is needed to qualify (and build a development plan).
What you can do
To recreate CareerGuru at your company, find managers and executives interested in offering occasional career coaching, and set up sessions for employees to meet with leaders to learn more about different roles. If confidentiality is a concern, handle all scheduling within HR, and set up one on ones instead of group meetings.
6. Promote a culture of trust and empathy.
Google learned during Project Aristotle—the company’s quest to determine the composition of the perfect team that the perfect team had nothing to do with any qualities of the people on that team. Members of the highest-performing teams felt safe speaking up and sharing their ideas.
What you can do
Encourage senior leaders and managers to be more open and honest with employees (promote trust and respect). You may also need to include emotional intelligence training for new managers.
Consider a company-wide recognition program for sharing feedback and ideas. This will help create a more positive and open culture (the more frequent and more visible the better).
7. Offer unique employee programs.
Understand and meet the unique needs of your employees.
For example, in Google’s early days, Page and Brin noticed that young software engineers were really bad about washing their clothes. This led to the company’s on-site laundry perk. No one sat down to brainstorm benefits and thought, “I bet this perk will make people want to work here.” They were simply fulfilling a need.
What you can do
When putting together the benefits package for SMBs, consider what you know about company employees, and use that information to design unique benefits:
- If many employees have young children, consider offering childcare reimbursement instead of/in addition to tuition reimbursement.
- If many employees are recent college graduates, consider offering loan payment (negotiate with 3
rd party providers for the best loan packages).
- If you have many young managers, consider offering leadership trainings for new or young managers.
Laszlo Bock offers the following advice for HR teams looking to measure engagement and find innovative ways to improve it:
- Determine your biggest issues. Ideally, you’ll get this information from your employees.
- Use surveys to collect employee feedback on how to improve or resolve the issues.
- Tell people what you learned and how you plan to resolve the issues.
- Experiment with solutions.
“Aha” Moment: Technology will help you a lot
When asked what will most transform the way people work over the next 5-10 years, one in two respondents in a recent PwC study said “technology breakthroughs”. It comes as no surprise, then, that technology is the key to putting these seven truths into practice.
What you can do
Invest in Employee Experience technology. Tools like the CARROTS Employee Experience Platform act as a framework for better employee development and engagement, all while helping teams grow and collaborate to have successful employees and companies.
Here’s what CARROTS can offer:
- An employee development process that facilities continuous coaching, regular check-ins, and employee-driven goals.
- A modern recognition and rewards approach that is real-time, social, and tied to your company’s unique mission.
- An environment of trust and learning that is visible and open to all employees.
Try it out for FREE.
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