Free food, plenty of fun, clear lines of sight to people who run the place -- it sounds like a first-class family resort.
But this is life at Google, a tech giant that, in 14 short years, has changed the thinking about what goes into creating a progressive workplace. Gone are dense layers of management. Few people wear suits. Clock-watching is frowned upon.
“That’s not the way people want to work anymore,” Shannon Deegan said Wednesday at Communitech’s final Level Up event of the season. “We’ve created a culture at Google where (work and play personas) are the same people.’’
Born in Verdun, Que., Deegan came to Google through careers in government, the insurance business and professional hockey. He was drafted by the Los Angeles Kings in the mid 1980s.
Today, he is Google’s director of global security operations. For five years, he helped recruit talent as the company’s director of people operations.
From the start, he said, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin avoided a classical corporate structure, with its sluggish bureaucracy and sharp division between bosses and subordinates.
Instead, they established a looser creative culture that encourages a steady flow of ideas and regards failure as mark of honour in the risk-taking hall of fame.
Googlers, as the company’s 37,000 workers in Waterloo Region and around the world are known, enjoy lots of liberty to manage their own time, experiment with ideas, comment on projects and simply get together with colleagues over lunch or coffee.
“There’s a big emphasis on building communities around food,” Deegan said. “That’s where we believe innovation is going to happen.”
The formula appears to work. Google is the world’s top search engine.
Its user-friendly Gmail, Google Docs, Youtube and Google+ products help people manage their personal and professional lives. Google Glass -- basically smart eyewear -- promises to be another advance in portable computing.
Google’s culture of innovation also includes bonuses and rewards, and a short chain of command. The typical Googler stands only seven people away from top decision-makers.
Google has the advantage of size, Deegan acknowledged. It is the “shiny penny” that widely attracts job-seekers. It can be choosy about who it hires.
Still, he said, small companies doing simple things can build workplaces where employees feel valued.
“There is a lot you can do, like giving an employee the afternoon off,’’ Deegan said. “That doesn’t cost a lot of money.”
Communitech talked to Shannon Deegan after the Level Up presentation Wednesday morning:
What might you say to a startup that is accelerating quickly, and hiring like crazy?
“It’s a special kind of leader who steps back and goes, ‘Ok, we’re now hiring employee number 3. Let’s think about the culture we want to establish here’. . . At Communitech, what’s really impressive is that there seems to be a kind of support group around to actually raise those issues . . .What environment are you trying to create for the rest of your team? A lot of times that gets lost in the shuffle, especially when somebody’s so focused on product.
You gave the commencement speech in 2002 to grads at Yale School of Management. How would you update that today?
Not a ton. I have always been somebody who has enjoyed doing different things. I worked in Canadian politics. I worked for Manulife in Asia. My answer has always been to do interesting things and follow where that takes you.
In an organization such as Google’s, where creativity and collaboration are more important than who’s the boss, how do supervisors have difficult conversations with employees?
It’s never easy, and you’re in this environment where you, for the most part, are friends with people on the team. We spend a lot of time telling people (a tough conversation) needs to be very factual, it needs to be example-based . . .If it’s more fact-based, it becomes an easier conversation. There is no new way of doing it. We’ve had to work really hard to train Googlers to be comfortable having (those) conversations. Every quarter, when we get to performance reviews, we offer courses. One of the classes is on giving tough feedback, and we get a lot of people signing up for it.
I think we spend so much time in the hiring process, very rarely is it that somebody shows up at Google who is not successful, or the fit isn’t there. Usually we can see that in the first few months...We don’t have to turn over a lot people who aren’t successful. It’s not that common. It’s such a collaborative, supportive environment that if you get in there (and struggle) you are surrounded by people who want to you succeed. It’s very team-oriented.
What do you think about the space Google and Communitech have in the Tannery District in Kitchener?
I was blown away by how beautiful the space itself was . . .It’s always fun to see new Google offices because they have these quirks that are particular to the region or to that office, like table hockey with Kitchener Ranger jerseys on the wall. The Communitech space was just spectacular. You can feel the buzz . . .There are already a number of success stories coming out of there, because it’s such a collaborative idea space, a nurturing space for people who have an idea but don’t necessarily know where to go to make that idea happen. You can walk in there and (meet) a bunch of people who are willing to help you out and think it through.’’
