Google’s 20/20 Vision for Engagement

Employee engagement is measured by how happy and involved an organization’s employees are with their work.2 In more recent years, employers have been looking for ways to ensure that their employees feel committed to the organization’s values, goals, and success. Many organizations have now taken varying approaches to achieve this motivation and contentment among their employees, and Google is staying ahead of the trend by using innovation to increase engagement.

Their office spaces are known for having open-concept floor layouts, free food, on-site yoga rooms, pools, and even slides instead of staircases at some locations. The hype surrounding their benefits and policies is astounding, especially when compared to a typical office environment. They even have an internal analytics team dedicated to measuring the effects of these perks among employees. Prasad Setty is the VP of People Analytics and Compensation at Google, and believes that finding what employees want and need is crucial to helping them thrive.1

Google’s 80/20 policy is one that highly encourages creativity among all staff. All employees from every level of the company are able to dedicate 80% of their time to their primary job, but are free to spend the other 20% working on what they call “passion projects”.3 It allows employees to contribute beneficial ideas to the organization and to grow as a team. Employees are bound to feel engaged and excited about the mission of a company if they have the ability to directly shape and reach those goals.

Google also has their own public intranet that shares each individual’s “OKRs” or Objectives and Key Results with the rest of the company.  This allows people to clearly see who is accountable for which parts of a project, and further, who is dependent on their work.4 Through the OKR network, there is a very clear and easy stream of communication between all employees among all departments.

Lessons for Others

Engaging with employees will not only create harder workers, but it will extend to positive commentary being spread through word of mouth and across social media platforms, as we have already seen with Google. Their Twitter account is followed by 14.9 million users, and their Facebook page has more than 20 million likes. Their happy and engaged employees stand behind and contribute to the company as it continues to grow beyond the wild success it has already achieved.

If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.

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