What Should We Know About Google Company

According to Jeanette D. Francis in her book Fundamentals of Management and Leadership, “A company’s mission statement, vision statement, and values statement are written, formal declarations of the purpose and guiding principles of the company; they set the stage for the organization’s strategies, and are the foundations upon which the company’s culture and structure are built”. (Francis, 2018) The reason I chose Google as the company I wanted work for is because their company purpose, as explained in their mission, vision, and value statements, provide a concise explanation as to what Google is trying to achieve with their company. It’s respectable how Google, unlike many other companies, is considerate of the whole community and not only its specific target base. Google is unique that rather than targeting a set of consumers, they aim to make the whole community their consumers.

Google’s mission statement “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” is one that is selfless and aims to provide a better system for the community (“Our company | Google,” 2018). Google, a company started by an ambitious Larry Page, was a company that wished to put all the books that were ever written on the Internet, that wished to organize all the jumble of information that was on the Internet, and Page envisioned a dream where “he somewhere managed to download the entire Web and by examining the links between the pages he saw the world’s information in an entirely new way.” (Carlson, 2014). As is noticeable by all today, Page made that dream come alive through Google.

Google’s espoused values and beliefs consist of providing a platform for anyone and everyone to find uncensored and reliable information. Google is so transparent and determinant in their values and beliefs that when China decided to censor out some information in their country, even within Google, the company responded by shutting down its Internet search services: “the company chose to exit the world’s largest market rather than to yield to China’s censorship rules” (Francis, 2018) Although the company could’ve lost a lot of profit in short-term due to pulling themselves out of a large market like that of China’s, they ultimately win in the long-run because they don’t cheat themselves by turning on their own values and they build an even stronger community by doing so. Due to Google’s espoused values and beliefs, the company has a keen sense of community with no tolerance for things that go against their values. Moreover, Google has a vision statement of creating opportunity for everyone where they “believe everyone deserves the chance to learn, succeed, and be heard.” (Our company | Google,” 2018) As a lover of education and learning, and being in the realization that there are way too many people that don’t have the beautiful opportunity of education, I revere this vision statement of Google. It’s great that they realize the potential they could improve the community with.

Google is a very culturally-aware and a detail-oriented company. Although I have done additional research to see what other areas they have high attention to detail, one can see Google’s attention to detail as soon as they’re on their website. Everyday, the Google logo is written in a distinctive design, representing a celebration or a meaning for that day. These logos can represent anything from a national holiday such as Veteran’s Day, to the accomplishments of individuals, such as scientists, notable women, astronauts, etc. Many times, Google’s attention to detail empowers others, especially minorities. However, in his article Google’s attention to detail – down to a single pixel, Chad Johnson explains the many ways Google pays attention to small, but vital details. For example, in Google Maps, a sophisticated GPS application by Google, one can utilize the 3D option which casts shadows from the buildings and tall monuments within the map. Not only did this make the maps look more realistic, but it gave people a better sense of direction when trying to find out where to go and how to get there, and also, although corporate logos don’t alter too often, Google changed their corporate logo from a 3D one to a flat one, and the tiny change they made from their old logo to their new one shows how they care about small details (Johnson, 2014).

Google fits the OCP framework’s definition of an outcome oriented company. Not only does Google center on overall achievements the company reaches, the results they obtain, and the actions involved in these acts, but they also are concerned with how these outcomes effect their community, including the consumers, and the employees. Jihoon Kim’s article 7 Secrets of Google’s Epic Organizational Culture discusses the ways Google has stayed on top of its game, and has succeeded in maintaining a perfect organizational culture, and as will be noted, all of the points Kim makes directs at how Google is an outcome oriented company. For example, Kim explains Google’s position of being the best by stating that they achieve this partly “through hiring process for the brightest and the best.” (Kim, 2013) Google wanting the best engineers and the brightest workers for their company is ultimately due to their desire of reaching the best results that can be reached. Google doesn’t discriminate and aims to find people that fit their company values while being able to contribute enough to the company to improve it. Kim also states that Google has been so successful due to “making HR into a science” (Kim, 2013). Human resources, which is the go-to location for most employees in an organization, and the department that takes care of most employee-based things, is a critical part of a company. Google, by emphasizing the importance of HR and ensuring it runs smoothly, is making its best to have the most promising outcomes. For example, when Google found out the outcome of women leaving the company “at twice the rate, their HR department identified the main issue to be the maternity leave plan for new mothers”; and to approach this outcome and fix it, “they changed the plan so new mothers could get 5 months paid time off instead of 12 weeks, Google’s attrition rate for women dropped by 50%!”. As can be seen, Google cares about outcomes, analyzes their outcomes and if negative, does everything they can to fix it. Even if Google is at the top, the industry it’s in is very competitive and tough, so Google being outcome-oriented is significant since their outcomes can make them or break them.

Google is unique that it’s not a company that is strictly employee-oriented or customer-oriented, but rather it is overall people-oriented. This beautiful simplicity of Google’s people-oriented culture is implicated in its mission and vision statements. As aforementioned, Google aims to provide a platform that allows all to have access to the information they need for learning, succeeding, and being heard. This selfless vision statement of Google shows that they care about the community, care about its people, and most importantly, care about generating more people who realize their full potential and who can possible contribute to the vision Google is trying to accomplish. Besides their care for their consumers, Google does everything it can to have a professional, but a welcoming work environment. However large Google is, it incorporates small-company values and ethics, and sets out to make its employees comfortable. It does by giving them unique and special perks such as “free breakfast, lunch, and dinner, free haircuts, subsidized messages, hybrid car subsidies, nap pods, on-site physicians, video games, foosball, ping pong”, among other things (Bulygo, 2013). But the employees at Google don’t feel rewarded and acknowledged only for the perks they receive; Google is also one of the companies that allows its employees to be able to innovate by allowing them to brainstorm and come up with their own ideas. This is highly important, because a recurring problem within society is that people are doing work that is meaningless to them, and is thus losing touch with not only the work they are doing, but also with themselves. Google, allowing people to innovate and allowing to put something of themselves in what they’re doing, is ensuring that the work community is one that is involved in their work.

Google is extremely team-oriented. I said extremely, because Google went out of their way to discover what makes a perfect team within the workplace by spending 2 years examining over 180 teams within their company. “One of the company’s most interesting initiatives, Project Aristotle, gathered several of Google’s best and brightest to help the organization codify the secrets to team effectiveness” (Schneider, 2017). As previously mentioned, Google has a very extensive and thorough interviewing process, and after this interviewing process, an orientation for new employees takes place so they completely comprehend what Google expects of them, and what Google’s values are all about. By attempting to find what makes a perfect team effective and successful, Google could train the rest of their employees in these effective skills. According to their findings, a perfect team within Google has the following characteristics: “dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, impact, and psychological safety” (Schneider, 2017). It can be easily said that Google will most likely now look strictly for these qualities in their new prospective employees.

Francis states that “companies with an aggressive culture place a high value on quality, being distinctive, and outperforming the competition” (Francis, 2018). Google fits Francis’ description of a company with an aggressive culture. Google’s services primarily focus on providing an online search platform that organizes the information available on the internet in a way that is most convenient for the user. Besides their online search platform, Google provides numerous other services such as a GPS service, an email service, a file storage service, an online book reading service, among many others. Google is one of the only companies with such a variety, and despite their variety, upmost quality in every service they offer. They ensure this high quality by never rejecting the values that help found them, and by carefully selecting who will join their family. Although an innumerable amount of search engines and email services exist besides Google, such as Bing, Yahoo, and Outlook, Google still maintains its leadership on top of the search engine and email industry. Moreover, Google started new projects in the past few years that sets foot in other industries as well such as the artificial intelligence and virtual reality industry, and as soon as they offered their products, Google made breaking news. Wherever they set their foot, Google remains as a challenging force within the industry with its aggressive organizational culture.

Google is not only excellent when it comes to being people-oriented and outcome-oriented, but it also avoids losing any credibility amid any false rumors through providing complete transparency to its consumers. Consumers, investors, and stockholders alike can access Google’s performance stability files on their website, and through these files they can see that Google is a company that has little to no internal conflict, and although the happenings in the company can’t be necessarily called predictable, the environment is rule-oriented (Linthicum, 2014). However, rather than recycling learned material and approaching already found methods such as other stabile companies might do, Google pushes their employees to innovate and find new ways of thinking, and to be a step ahead of the competition.

The topic of innovation being emphasized by Google has already been mentioned numerous times by me in this assignment, however, it’s never unbeneficial to explore other ways Google takes on risks and shows its love for innovation. In his article Organizational Culture in Google Inc., Tri Noviantoro explains an instance in Google’s history “when a vice president in charge of the company’s advertising system made a mistake costing the company millions of dollars and apologized for the mistake,” and Page, who was in charge at the time, made the statement that Google rather be a company who is doing more in a little time with a few mistakes rather than a company who is doing little in an extended period of time with no mistakes (Noviantoro, 2014). Google makes the clear point that being too careful and cautious in an era where technology is moving at an unimaginable pace might prove more harmful than one may think. Also, the author further points out Google’s emphasis on innovation by stating that managers of Google let their employees know that they should spend 20% of their work time in generating and perfecting their own ideas. Google’s nonchalant demeanor with their employees provides a comfortable work place that allows for them to be creative.

The economy always should have a positive impact on Google, unless there is a state of emergency, or a state of depression within the country. This is because Google is an online platform that makes its profit off of providing a search engine for others off of the information that’s already available on the internet. As more companies and organizations are bringing their businesses online, and as more and more people are creating businesses out of their personal hobbies, Google has more resources and information to work. As long as the economy is good, Google is always improving. Even if the economy dwindles, Google still has a platform to work on through news stories and crisis stories.

Google has its own set of strict values that it adheres by, and most of these values are humane ones, such as being against censorship, being against discrimination of any type, being accepting of all, and others. Additionally, since the Internet is available all across the world, Google aims to provide an international service as well. However, countries where there are laws that directly challenge the values Google has, the company takes themselves out of the picture as they don’t agree with the ways things are being done. For example, with the rumors of censorship in China, Google removed themselves from their market, not caring for the insane amount of profits they could’ve obtained from them. This again proves to show that Google has a strong organizational culture that stands by its mission, vision, and values statements which goes on to show the company’s credibility and trustworthiness.

Google is a leader in its industry, but as with any other company, it still has its competitors to be aware of. What’s clever of Google is that it never underestimates its competition, and regardless of what position their competition is in, they don’t stop with trying to improve and better themselves. One of the most prominent competitors of Google is currently the Bing search engine. Google always keeps up with the changing eras, and as virtual intelligence, virtual reality, and things that are similar to these became popular, Google began to adopt new systems, such as the Google Voice option available on all their apps. Bing, a search engine that has remained number 2 on the tail of Google for many years, it’s finally showing some promise of being a worthy competition to Google by implementing its virtual assistant, Cortana, to all of its applications. Although the move isn’t too original, it does show that they can do what Google is accomplishing. “Most other companies would have killed off the side project a long time, in retrospect though, Microsoft was wise to keep it up and running, tweaking it over and over again” (Brumley, 2017). It is true that it was a smart move by Microsoft, because perhaps if it wasn’t for this side project of theirs, they could’ve been in the same position as Yahoo, another competitor of Google who has officially been kicked out of the game.

Google is an exceptional company, and this is a fact knowing widely by many; “Google receives over one million resumes per year (The Muse Editor, n.d.). After receiving resumes of prospective employees, there’s a lengthy process that Google goes through to hire someone. Out of the millions of resumes they receive, they hire a small fraction of it, in particular, 01% to 0.04% (The Muse Editor, n.d.). Thus, Google doesn’t necessarily seek out future employees since they receive millions of resumes regardless. But to ensure that they don’t miss out on a potentially strong employee for their company, they have a lengthy hiring process that consists of “recruiter screening, phone screening, on site interviewing, interview feedback, being interview by the hiring committee, having an executive review done on them, being interview by the compensation committee, having a final executive review done on them, and being offered the job” (The Muse Editor, n.d.). From the steps of Google’s hiring process, it happens in a consecutive order, and one step doesn’t start before the other one finishes. The number of different people who interview a prospective employee are incredibly high, but it allows different opinions to be made and different things to be noticed.

Google is a company that’s completely based off of technology, namely the Internet. Without the Internet, Google doesn’t prove to be useful. Since there are still underdeveloped countries without internet, and people within developed countries but have no means of accessing the Internet, than there are a good portion of people who can’t access what Google is trying to offer. Also there are those who have internet at home, but no on their mobile devices, and see their GPS as useless as soon as they leave their home, and thus, the internet. Therefore, Google being a strictly online company definitely poses some limitations as to how far it can reach and who it can impact. One approach they can take is offering offline versions of things. Of course, it’s not as easy as it sounds, but it can surely be accomplished. It can provide a clearer pathway for those who are fully trying to integrate Google into their lives.

Google is an international company, and it makes sure the hire the brightest and the best of the employees it can find. As international as Google is, so is its employees. One of the qualities Google promises to have in their company is diversity, and they accomplish this by the various cultures and traditions they take in through their employees. The globalization of Google allowed Google to have a varying and diverse set of values, beliefs, and ethnic origin.

The largest challenge facing Google is the contradiction their vision statement and mission statement present. Although Google wishes to make information available to all who want to learn and succeed, not everyone has access to Internet, and this creates an obstacle for their vision statement. Google can make their vision statement more tangible by participating in ways they can make Internet more tangible for those who don’t have the means.