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Organizational Enviroment

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Organizational Environment
By: Lucinda Richmond
BUS-322
Keith A. Graves

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University. The company was officially launched in September, 1998 in a friend’s garage. In one of the most anticipated Initial Public Offerings (IPO) Google raised $1.67 billion in August of 2004. Today, Google has over 12,000 employees in offices throughout the world.
Google’s mission statement and corporate culture reflect a philosophy that you can “make money without doing evil” and that “work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun”. These beliefs dominate life at Google. The official mission statement of the company is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
In 2006, Google was selected by MBA students as the ideal place to work. In 2007 and 2008 Fortune Magazine named Google the Number 1 employer in their annual 100 Best Companies to Work For.

* Google Company Culture
Google is a high-energy, fast paced work environment. While the dress code might be “casual” the company attracts and retains some of the brightest minds in the technology industry. There is a work hard, play hard atmosphere. The Google Mountain View, CA headquarters (aka “the Googleplex”) is a campus-like environment. There are workout facilities, a café, well stocked snack rooms, and a dorm like environment. View the Google Office Descriptions for more details.
In my opinion, one of the coolest programs at Google is the 20% time program. All Engineers at Google are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them. Not only does this keep Engineers happy and challenged, it’s also good business: some estimates put half of all new product launches can be directly attributed to projects that came from the 20% time program.

* Jobs at Google

In the United States, Google has offices in several states, including California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Arizona, Michigan, New York, Texas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington (Seattle) and Washington, DC. They currently have hundreds of openings in Engineering, IT, Operations and Support functions. Some of the current openings at Google:
Current job postings in Engineering include openings for Software Engineers with extensive experience in C++ programming and in java programming. There are also a lot of openings for Testing Engineers and a few for Web Designers.
The current postings for Operations and IT include openings you would find in many Information Technology departments, including System Administrators and Help Desk Technicians. There were dozens of openings in their Data Center as of this writing.
Google actively recruits college graduates, with a special website section specifically for students. Google offers both internship and full time employment opportunities on their student recruitment pages.
Google also has offices internationally. While much of the information presented here refers to Google’s US offices, they currently have hundreds of Google Openings Worldwide in areas such as Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. I counted openings in 57 worldwide locations, not including those in the United States.

* Google Compensation and Benefits

Most workers at Google have base salaries that are on the lower end of normal for the markets they operate in. The base salaries are supplemented by stock options, challenging work and extensive benefits. In addition to the normal health and welfare benefits that larger companies offer, Google provides its employees with the following cutting-edge benefits: 1. Health care for you and your family, plus on-site physician and dental care at our headquarters in Mountain View, California and our engineering center in Seattle, Washington 2. Vacation days and holidays, and flexible work hours 3. Maternity and parental leave, plus new moms and dads are able to expense up to $500 for take-out meals during the first four weeks that they are home with their new baby 4. Adoption assistance
5. Google Child Care Center, just five minutes from Google headquarters in Mountain View
6. Back-up child care helps California parents when their regularly scheduled child care falls through
7. Free shuttle service to several San Francisco, East Bay, and South Bay locations
8. Fuel Efficiency Vehicle Incentive Program
9. Employee discounts
10. Onsite dry cleaning, plus a coin-free laundry room in the Mountain View office

* More Google Information

The Official Google Blog is a look at life inside Google, written by staff members from different departments in various Google locations around the world.
Google has a philanthropic organization now, as seen at Google.org aimed at finding solutions to some of the global problems facing the world today. Google.org has a grant dissemination program that provides free advertising to select charities. Google’s organizational design is an important part of the innovative culture within the company. By investing certain amounts of time and money for innovation growth, Google is able to encourage their employees to create new products and ideas. For example, “technical employees are required to spend 80% of their time on the core search and advertising businesses, and 20% on technical projects of their own choosing.” One might think that working on a creative technical project is a waste of time and money. However, the small investment has gone a long way, “accounting for half of all new products and features developed during that [six month period].” The Pareto principle is especially true for Google since 20%, or smaller chunks of time and money, have resulted in a culture that expresses their need for innovation.
Essentially, Google’s human resource department is where its innovation is born. Since the company encourages freedom of thought, anyone has the autonomy to make changes to a current project or start their very own. Rather than being bureaucratic and structured, the culture at Google encourages its employees to concentrate a portion of their time towards anything they deem innovative or value added for the company. Some may say that giving workers the opportunity to work on whatever they want is a waste of time. However, the key ingredient to Google’s success is just that: creating innovative products in an open, free environment. Here is video with real Google employees who express their happiness with Google’s culture and work environment:
We think what makes Google so unique is how they allow their employees to not feel obligated finishing a task or project. Yes, Google must have a little structure and organization to be able to delegate roles. However, most of Google’s famous products have been created through this unstructured environment. One of Google’s products that exemplify their free yet autonomous work environment is YouTube. YouTube acts as a network of video freedom for anyone with access to a computer and the internet. YouTube is like a snapshot into the work environment at Google.
References

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