I recently joined Project Wing in the organization formerly known as Google[x], and over the past month, I’ve had a couple of a-ha moments where I truly got to see Google’s notorious(ly good) corporate culture.
The first was a couple of weeks after starting, and I walking by the cafeteria about 30 minutes before lunch. I saw two of the cafe staff huddled around a table, and caught just enough words to understand what they were doing: critiquing the meal. Very directly: “the meat is a tad too salty,” “this presentation hides the main ingredient,” “the polenta came out really well.”
Google has such an open, self-improving performance culture that even the kitchen staff gives and receives criticism to make their product better.
My second observation has to do with bureaucracy–or lack thereof. Last Friday I noticed that our three big conference rooms’ signs were in a really inconvenient place, such that it’s a struggle to tell which room is which (I actually went to the wrong meeting last week and didn’t realize for 15 minutes). So, without asking for permission or having a meeting, I filed a work request through the Google system and asked for a common sense change–move the signs so they were visible in the hallway. Two work days later, I got an email that the signs had been changed. No red tape, no fanfare.
Google trusts its workforce to make common sense improvements like this–more than that, it relies on us to do so–and it does as much as possible to make those changes easy and quick as possible.
No wonder we are Fortune 500’s best place to work.
