I'm Afraid I Can't Let You Do That Dave

[Steve Bennett]

When you've got a hammer the whole world is a nail - so goes the saying.

So I was wondering if this is the case at Google as they continue to grapple with a serious brain drain of their best staff.

The latest reports are that Google has developed an algorithm to predict which of their staff are most likely to quit. Details are very difficult to come by but here are the features of the algorithm that I have read about in various reports:

• it mines employee reviews, promotion and salary histories


• attempts to identify employees who feel 'underused' 


• inputs also include information from surveys and peer reviews

Google's algorithm helps the company "get inside people's heads even before they know they might leave," said Laszlo Bock, who runs human resources for the company. This data crunching supplements more traditional measures like employee training and leadership meetings to evaluate talent.

Is Google using this to categorise employees into other performance groups? Is this another take on the old six sigma (forced) ranking of the bottom 10 percent of employees?

You could easily argue that almost 5 years on from Google's IPO, this drain is normal and expected from a highly successful company. Way back in April 2007 it was reported that:

"Hundreds of the 2,300 Googlers hired before the Internet juggernaut's initial public offering in August 2004 are hitting their fourth anniversary. When they do, they'll be free to cash in the final portions of their pre-IPO options, collectively worth an estimated $2.6 billion before taxes."
San Jose Mercury News

Presumably the employees leaving were all wealthy from their stock grants and options as under Google's vesting rules, employees typically earn the right to cash in 25 percent of their options when they hit their first anniversary, then the rest in monthly chunks over the next three years. So August 2008 was the month many had earned full cash in rights and could leave with no penalty. Add to that the feeling that your personal contribution is diminishing as the company grows and matures. The desire the seek greener pastures in other companies or exciting start-ups is hardly unexpected.

All credit to Google for being proactive however. If you can retain even a handful from leaving then it must be a worthwhile effort. It should be no surprise that Google is a trend setter here. How many companies do you know with a Chief Culture Officer and the 10 Golden Rules for knowledge workers:

1. Hire by committee. Virtually every person who interviews at Google talks to at least half-a-dozen interviewers, drawn from both management and potential colleagues. Everyone's opinion counts, making the hiring process more fair and pushing standards higher. Yes, it takes longer, but we think it's worth it. If you hire great people and involve them intensively in the hiring process, you'll get more great people. We started building this positive feedback loop when the company was founded, and it has had a huge payoff.
2. Cater to their every need. As Drucker says, the goal is to "strip away everything that gets in their way." We provide a standard package of fringe benefits, but on top of that are first-class dining facilities, gyms, laundry rooms, massage rooms, haircuts, carwashes, dry cleaning, commuting buses—just about anything a hardworking engineer might want. Let's face it: programmers want to program, they don't want to do their laundry. So we make it easy for them to do both.
3. Pack them in. Almost every project at Google is a team project, and teams have to communicate. The best way to make communication easy is to put team members within a few feet of each other. The result is that virtually everyone at Google shares an office. This way, when a programmer needs to confer with a colleague, there is immediate access: no telephone tag, no e-mail delay, no waiting for a reply. Of course, there are many conference rooms that people can use for detailed discussion so that they don't disturb their office mates. Even the CEO shared an office at Google for several months after he arrived. Sitting next to a knowledgeable employee was an incredibly effective educational experience.
4. Make coordination easy. Because all members of a team are within a few feet of one another, it is relatively easy to coordinate projects. In addition to physical proximity, each Googler e-mails a snippet once a week to his work group describing what he has done in the last week. This gives everyone an easy way to track what everyone else is up to, making it much easier to monitor progress and synchronize work flow.
5. Eat your own dog food. Google workers use the company's tools intensively. The most obvious tool is the Web, with an internal Web page for virtually every project and every task. They are all indexed and available to project participants on an as-needed basis. We also make extensive use of other information-management tools, some of which are eventually rolled out as products. For example, one of the reasons for Gmail's success is that it was beta tested within the company for many months. The use of e-mail is critical within the organization, so Gmail had to be tuned to satisfy the needs of some of our most demanding customers—our knowledge workers.
6. Encourage creativity. Google engineers can spend up to 20 percent of their time on a project of their choice. There is, of course, an approval process and some oversight, but basically we want to allow creative people to be creative. One of our not-so-secret weapons is our ideas mailing list: a companywide suggestion box where people can post ideas ranging from parking procedures to the next killer app. The software allows for everyone to comment on and rate ideas, permitting the best ideas to percolate to the top.
7. Strive to reach consensus. Modern corporate mythology has the unique decision maker as hero. We adhere to the view that the "many are smarter than the few," and solicit a broad base of views before reaching any decision. At Google, the role of the manager is that of an aggregator of viewpoints, not the dictator of decisions. Building a consensus sometimes takes longer, but always produces a more committed team and better decisions
8. Don't be evil. Much has been written about Google's slogan, but we really try to live by it, particularly in the ranks of management. As in every organization, people are passionate about their views. But nobody throws chairs at Google, unlike management practices used at some other well-known technology companies. We foster to create an atmosphere of tolerance and respect, not a company full of yes men.
9. Data drive decisions. At Google, almost every decision is based on quantitative analysis. We've built systems to manage information, not only on the Internet at large, but also internally. We have dozens of analysts who plow through the data, analyze performance metrics and plot trends to keep us as up to date as possible. We have a raft of online "dashboards" for every business we work in that provide up-to-the-minute snapshots of where we are.
10. Communicate effectively. Every Friday we have an all-hands assembly with announcements, introductions and questions and answers. (Oh, yes, and some food and drink.) This allows management to stay in touch with what our knowledge workers are thinking and vice versa. Google has remarkably broad dissemination of information within the organization and remarkably few serious leaks. Contrary to what some might think, we believe it is the first fact that causes the second: a trusted work force is a loyal work force.

Don't Be Evil is the one that often gets the headline, but the next one down is just as radical in my view: Data Drive Decisions. Here is the whole article from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

What a pity that other companies are not turning to analytics for the same reasons.

Media reactions have been mixed. Some outright hostile. I may be biased but I don't think that using quantitative analysis of 'HR' data is a bad thing. If anything it should help to remove the bias of human interpretation when reviewing performance. We call it 'fact based decision making' everywhere else. What's so special about HR? I'm not saying that it is a universal panacea but used in conjunction with other things like encouraging supportive cultures and inspirational management styles.

It also struck me that Google should perhaps be concentrating more on those employees who are most under-used as an end in itself. Making better use of existing people must have a positive impact on the performance of the company.

A roll call of brain drainers is available here if you are interested. As recently as last week Tom Phillips, the head of Search and Analytics was rumoured to have left Google.

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