Alycia has a new ambition now. It is an ambition that is not too difficult to achieve, considering that she is addicted to the computer and she likes to loiter at Google during her free time. All she needs to do now is to study hard, ace in school, college and university. That’s what I told her. And she is all geared up to achieve her ambition of working in the best company to work for! At GOOGLE! She read this article from yesterday’s newspapers and has since been awe inspired by GOOGLE. She has been telling me, her Mandarin tutor, her grandma and her dad that she is now determined to work at GOOGLE when she grows up.
For the fourth consecutive year, Google was named the best company to work for by Fortune magazine. Why? Something tells us that the job perks have something to do with it — free gourmet food (note – GOURMET!), on-site laundry (WOW!), commuting shuttles with Wi-Fi (can save on monthly WiFi plan!), even five months of maternity leave at full pay (REALLY? Unbelievable!) and a host of other benefits. I don’t mind being a tea-lady at GOOGLE lidat!
Read on the article extracted from Reader’s Digest…
But how does Google pull it off? In the past couple of years, the company has hired social scientists to study the organization. The scientists—part of a group known as the PiLab, short for People & Innovation Lab—run dozens of experiments with employees in an effort to scientifically answer questions about the best way to manage a large firm. “What we try to do is bring the same level of rigor to people decisions as we do to engineering decisions,” says Prasad Setty, who heads Google HR’s “people analytics” group.
Major HR findings include how to give employees more money and help them contribute to their 401(k)’s. To learn more about how Googlers wanted their cash, HR ran a survey in which it asked employees to choose the best among many competing pay options. For instance, would Google’s workers rather have $1,000 more in salary or $2,000 as a bonus? After finding that Googlers wanted their extra cash in base pay, the company announced that all Google employees would get a 10 percent salary increase. Rejoice! And how should the company nudge someone to contribute to his or her 401(k)? HR found that it’s best to send employees many reminders and call for “aggressive” savings goals. If you implore an employee to contribute $8,000 to his retirement rather than, say, $2,000, he’ll tend to save more, even if he can’t afford $8,000.
Then there are the smaller findings: For the cafeterias, researchers determined that the ideal lunch line should be about three or four minutes long—that’s short enough that employees won’t waste time but long enough that they can meet new people. The tables should be long so that workers who don’t know each other are forced to chat. And, after running an experiment, Google found that stocking cafeterias with eight-inch plates alongside 12-inch ones encouraged people to eat smaller, healthier portions.
In time, Google’s findings, which the company often shares with other HR professionals, may improve all our jobs. “You spend more time working than doing anything else,” says Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of People Operations, who joined Google six years ago. “You like your job, but it should be—and it could be—something more. So why isn’t it?”
And my new resolution now is to help my daughter achieve her dream of working in Google. And I hope that some head hunters at Google lands on this page, reads this and offers Alycia a full scholarship and future job at GOOGLE!! 😀
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