Google clearly hopes to recapture some of the nimbleness and innovative spirit of its early years.
But the key question is: Will Project Oxygen help a grown-up Google get its start-up mojo back?
They wanted to build better bosses. So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints. Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.
For much of its 13-year history, particularly the early years, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place.
But technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight.
What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.
PROJECT OXYGEN started with some basic assumptions.
People typically leave a company for one of three reasons, or a combination of them. The first is that they don’t feel a connection to the mission of the company, or sense that their work matters. The second is that they don’t really like or respect their co-workers. The third is they have a terrible boss — and this was the biggest variable. Google, where performance reviews are done quarterly, rather than annually, saw huge swings in the ratings that employees gave to their bosses.
Managers also had a much greater impact on employees’ performance and how they felt about their job than any other factor, Google found.
“The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier — they do everything better,” Laszlo Bock, Google's VP for "people operations" says. “So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen. The question we then asked was: What if every manager was that good? And then you start saying: Well, what makes them that good? And how do you do it?”
In Project Oxygen, the statisticians gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports. Then they spent time coding the comments in order to look for patterns.
Once they had some working theories, they figured out a system for interviewing managers to gather more data, and to look for evidence that supported their notions. The final step was to code and synthesize all those results — more than 400 pages of interview notes — and then they spent much of last year rolling out the results to employees and incorporating them into various training programs.
Source: The New York Times, March 13, 2011
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