Tag Archives: HR

The Noogler

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nooglerIt’s been weeks since I officially joined Google, and the fact that it’s taken me this long to write this is testament to how busy things have been. What’s my job? I’m covering the Regional Marketing for Google Enterprise in the UK, Ireland and Benelux (Google Enterprise = Google Apps, Google Search Appliance, Google Earth & Maps,  Postini)

New Googlers are called Nooglers (New Googler) – and so far this has been a pretty good experience. There is definitely a rapidly emerging “Frequently Asked Questions” with some common themes:

  • What’s it like to work at Google?
  • How does it compare to Microsoft?
  • Do you have to go on a course to perfect your Barista skills?
  • How do I get a job at Google?
  • Tell me about the Google culture

Too much to answer in one post… so I’ll cover some of these over time… however here are the headline answers…

  • What’s it like to work at Google? It’s great – they look after their employees unlike anything I’ve ever seen! Further specifics to come in later posts
  • How does it compare to Microsoft? This is the question I get asked MOST. There is lots different and lots in common – could write a book on this but will start with a few blog posts.
  • Do you have to go on a course to perfect your Barista skills? Yes – along with  lots of other stuff in the “Noogler training” – there are some great onboarding ideas that can be learned from G
  • How do I get a job at Google? With difficulty and patience – this could be another book in itself.
  • Google culture: there is something called “Googliness” that defines the Google culture… it just is what it is and there is no actual definition. I will try to provide some examples of Googliness to give an idea of what it is. By the way one of the most important things in getting a job at Google is to be quite Googly… as per other points above will require some dedicated blog posts on the subject.

Anyway – so far so good – it feels very much like a startup (a well funded one that is)

How to get people to work for free…

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Yesterday I went to visit some of my ex colleagues at Microsoft, and I found out that one of my employment practices had been replicated:  recruiting internal people to work for free. I had forgotten about this, but thought I’d write a quick post in case you want to try it out…

My problem when working at MS was that I had significant overload. I had to be active in many areas of the business including marketing, sales, customer service, support, finance and HR, so it was impossible to do everything that needed to be done:  I had to prioritize the most important 60% and just focus on that.

At one point, we were receiving a huge number of support calls around a particular product area, which required significant time in order to ensure that customer satisfaction was managed effectively. I had to manage input from multiple team managers and make sure that our MD was regularly informed on the status of the UK situation. I would have had to drop almost everything else in my day job in order to manage this well, so instead I decided to outsource this new activity…

I advertised the role, basically saying that it would be a difficult, time-consuming job, with an almost impossible goal to achieve, with no additional pay. The selected candidate would need to do this in addition to their current job, with possibly a large proportion using up their own personal time, and not be paid to do it. However, the fact that they had to report to the exec team meant exposure.

To my surprise, the response was pretty much overwhelming… it appealed to people’s competitiveness, the belief that they could make a difference to customer satisfaction, and their desire for recognition from senior management.  I had always assumed that people’s primary goal was financially oriented, but this really interested me because it showed that people can be even more motivated by recognition, by contributing, and by stepping up to achieve big, bold goals.

We ended up selecting a few people to run with this initiative as a virtual team. They got exposure to the senior execs, worked hard together to achieve a goal, while I got to carry on with my primary job responsibilities.

I decided to leave a few months later in order to take on my own big challenge, but this week I was pleased to see that this practice has since been replicated in different parts of the company… if I had stayed on I would have tried to outsource my WHOLE job… now that would have been something to write home about ;-)

Building more effective teams could save you £15K per new hire?

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Something that organisations often overlook is the by-product of people’s interactions with each other.  As people interact in a transparent way, this naturally leaves a wealth of knowledge that is reusable by the organisation. They key is being able to access this knowledge. This is my number 1 argument against using consumer tools such as Facebook in a corporate environment… yes it may be interesting for employees to connect with one another, but the organisation derives little value from it. With an enterprise social networking suite, you can tap into all of that useful information that is left behind.

How do you derive value from it? Well, we were working with a customer who calculated the payback on their investment based on the benefits of this ‘tacit knowledge’. New sales people joining the organisaion typically took a minimum of 3 months to become effective and at least start selling something. During this period they were becoming familiar with the value proposition, sales materials, marketing activity, team members, and undergoing training. They were also obviously a cost to the business during this time, while generating no revenue. This cost works out to be about £7.5K per month, per new hire.

Their Enterprise Social Networking solution faciliates peer learning, so that new hires can learn from best practices of the successful current employees. It’s a bit like mentoring but on steroids, with no effort duplicated for each additonal new person. This is real world learning, based on real successes, not just the “official” training curriculum (which of course is also important). The new starter ramp up time has reduced from 3 months to 1 month, effectively saving £15K (2 months of £7.5K) per new hire.

They invested a total of £150K in their solution, including services, hosting, hardware, software, licensing, support and maintenance, so the factor to break even is 10 new hires (10 x £15K = £150K).

This scenario is not specific to sales teams – it could be applied to technical, marketing, research, customer service, just about anything.