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How Does Google Measure Company Culture?

“Culture is probably at the heart of business success, especially during times of immense change or ambiguity,”

So says Brigette McInnis-Day, Head of HR at Google Cloud.

Brigette was one of three HR experts who formed a panel to discuss the Future of HR for the first episode of series 11 of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. In conversation with Dave Ulrich, and Rupert Morrison, CEO at orgvue, Brigette ruminated on the most common questions she gets from both customers, “What is Google doing from a people perspective with regards to organisational change and culture?” and candidates, “How is Google going to manage their culture during times of change?”

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at some of the insights Brigette shared around culture at Google:

  1. How do culture, value and behaviours interact?

  2. What role does leadership play in building and sustaining the right culture?

  3. How is Google measuring culture?

How do culture, value and behaviours interact?

Over the last year, HR has taken centre stage to keep employees healthy, maintain morale and oversee a rapid shift to remote working.  Some have even likened the CHRO in 2020-21 to the CFO in 2007-09 during the financial crisis. HR could make or break a company’s ability to navigate the pandemic – and the HR functions that are getting it right have made their value to the organisation abundantly clear.  

Brigette thinks that “HR is also too humble about the impact they deliver and struggle sometimes with the messaging, because they are just continuing to focus on the work.” In reality, it’s vital to showcase to business leaders how HR delivers business value. Linking culture to value is also worthwhile, as the organisational culture enables value to be delivered, according to Brigette.

Let’s take a moment to think about the difference between value and values. A company often has a set of values that they operate under, in order to create a culture that enables value to be delivered to customers. Google’s set of values is enshrined in a list of ten beliefs: “10 Things we Know to Be True”. The list includes: ‘Focus on the user and all else will follow’; ‘It’s best to do one thing really, really well’; and ‘You can be serious without a suit’.

Taking it one level deeper, it’s not just a set of values that drives the right culture, but also a set of behaviours. When the pandemic hit, Brigette’s team slowed down some of their culture work to focus on building customer empathy and the related behaviours required to do that. Rupert Morrison explains, “you need to understand each role in the context of what you are trying to achieve: the outcomes […]. Then it is the skills and also the behaviours that you expect from [your people] so you can execute the strategy and hit the goals that you are trying to achieve.” 

What role does leadership play in building and sustaining the right culture? 

“All of us probably changed our leadership style in 2020 and our thoughts about what the future holds and what those attributes look like. I think it is really about taking it to the next level and what it means to be able to handle whatever challenges come to us in the future through inclusion and agility.”

At Google, the focus is on inclusive and agile leadership. Those are the things, according to Brigette, that keep permeating to build a strong culture and environment.

As aforementioned, the focus when the pandemic struck was on customer empathy. People came together across Google to make quick decisions for the betterment of the people, for the community and for the customers. It was Brigette’s belief, based on insights from an employee pulse survey, that in order to focus on customer empathy, Googlers must have empathy for themselves and each other too.  This insight led Brigette’s team to focus on leadership that can build an environment that is inclusive, that can lead during times of change.

How is Google measuring culture?

What does it mean to measure culture? What exactly are you measuring? At Google, Brigette’s team breaks it down into the business drivers and then prioritises the key strategic drivers that must be impacted in terms of business outcomes and delivering value. This is key, because you simply can’t do it all. Focusing on key business drivers, the team uncovers where there is a mismatch and how to influence behaviour to correct this.

“I think this is one of the areas for us in HR to just really focus on what are the two or three that are going to be the biggest levers to pull and identify those. So, to get your lift in the organisation, to drive and shift or evolve a culture, especially during times of change or times of big, heavy growth.”

Brigette’s team assessed the key business drivers they identified with a pulse survey, which measured sentiment and moments that matter to their people. The pulse survey was made up of 10 questions and designed to be completed in 10 minutes. They ran the pulse survey every other month in an attempt to keep up with the rapid pace of change over the last year.

The team quickly shared the results globally with employees, remaining very transparent and bringing employees on the journey. They aimed to clearly articulate what culture meant. The team has been able to take a pulse, analyse the data and feed insights into actions and deliverables in the organisation, through executive committees on culture as well as change agents throughout the organisation. They also used this insight to help their customers from an overall culture perspective.

You can catch the whole panel conversation with Brigette, Dave Ulrich and Rupert Morrison below.

Are you Interested in learning more about Organisational Culture?

For more on culture, why not check out our two most popular articles on the topic:

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Caroline is the Research Director at Insight222. She is a thought-leader, researcher and writer on people analytics and the future of HR. Prior to joining Insight222, she worked at the Center for the Future of Work where she was an advisor and in-demand speaker on topics related to the future of work. She has also held roles in digital services and transformation consulting at Cognizant. Contact Caroline at caroline.styr@insight222.com