Management Toolkit

Working in a Google culture

Tags:
Flat Organisation,
Happiness Survey,
Commitment Level,
Perk

Elinor Mills CNET News

Published: 01 May 2007 12:20 BST

There's no question that Google is a trendsetter. The company made web search sexy, and lucrative. It established the foundation for an ecosystem that allows any old little website to make money from advertising.

With its lava lamps, simple doodle design, pampered employees and millionaires in its rank and file, it has become a cultural icon and an emblem of the gold-rush promise of the web.

Google was ranked by Fortune magazine as the best place in the US to work, and it has reached another zenith by becoming the most popular website. It's even become a verb in the dictionary.

And it may even have started a new trend by creating a job that carries the title "chief culture officer". Stacy Savides Sullivan is that person at Google.

Sullivan's mission is simple: retain the company's unique culture and keep the Googlers happy. She explains how she does just that.

Q: How long have you had that title?
A: I've had that role since last summer and, in addition to being chief culture officer, I'm also director of human resources.

What do you do as chief culture officer?
I work with employees around the world to figure out ways to maintain and enhance and develop our culture, and how to keep the core values we had in the very beginning — a flat organisation, a lack of hierarchy, a collaborative environment — to keep these as we continue to grow, and spread them and filtrate them into our new offices around the world.

We want all of our employees to play a part in being involved in keeping our culture the way it is today, but also growing and developing it. So some of it is coming up with different programmes or processes, and just being there to talk with people when they have issues, setting up websites where people can report bugs in their culture and ideas on how to improve it, and those types of thing.

When I'm doing the interview myself I always start by telling them that we will try to assess how successful they are going to be at the company and how much they are going to enjoy it and how much they are going to thrive

Stacy Savides Sullivan, chief culture officer, Google

It's hard to imagine how you can keep a flat organisation with 12,000 employees. But what are the characteristics of the Google culture in general?
I would characterise the culture as one that is team-oriented, very collaborative and encouraging people to think non-traditionally, different from where they ever worked before — working with integrity and for the good of the company and for the good of the world, which is tied to our overall mission of making information accessible to the world.

Who came up with the idea of having a Google chief culture officer?
It was something that [Google co-founders] Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with last summer.

Do you know of any other chief culture officers?
No.

What are some of the challenges you are finding in your role, maybe related to the hypergrowth of the company?
I think one of the hardest things to do is ensure that we are hiring people who possess the kind of traits that we're looking for in a Google-y employee. Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, adaptable and not focusing on titles and hierarchy, and just gets stuff done.

So, we put a lot of focus in our hiring processes when we are interviewing to try to determine first and foremost: does the person have the skill-set and experience-potential to do the job, from a background standpoint, in addition to academics and credentials? But also: are they going to be good culture or team fits?

Can you give me an example of a question that might be posed to someone during an interview to determine whether they are Google-y enough?
You know, there are no standard questions that I know of. But we might ask a question. This is just hypothetical, but it could be: "How many bread boxes could you fit in an airplane?" or something like that. That's certainly not going to show if somebody...