Google’s Management Style

The successful company that will be that you has been benchmarked for management best practices is Google. The company is an American international technology company that specializes in Internet-related products and services founded in the year 1996 by Page and his friend Sergey Brin. The goods and services offered by the Google are hardware, software, cloud computing, search and online advertising technologies. The mission of the organization calls for the development of new products that meet the consumer’s needs. The company’s vision is to achieve new heights through the best organizational structure (Panmore Institute, 2017). The victory of Google can be attributed to its adherence to the fundamentals of management. The company has become the best company functioning all over the world and has become an integral part of the globe. The management has the best functional management style (P-O-LC). The employees are allowed to evaluate their goals. In Google, the managers act as supervisors. The employees view the managers as leaders. The employees have the freedom to do their assignment their way. The company believes that their clear policies result in a unique corporate structure. The controlling is majorly through shared vision. Google leadership organizational structure uses unique leadership positions referred to as The 70/20/10 Rule (Steiber & Alänge, 2013). Eric Schmidt’s Best leadership techniques require the managers to know the employees through the creation of new ways and let the employees own the problems. Google managers have different habits of effectivity.

Google communicates its mission and vision to the employees through three main ways. The company ensures that in all its offices, although the vision and mission are framed documents hanging on the wall, the employees apt to take the necessary actions based on the report and what they see fit. The Google’s vision is not a compelling vision so that to ensure clear communication to the employees to bring the vision to life. The employees are encouraged to have a clear destination and are given a map to get to their destination and a tour guide communicating all the way. The employees are expected to support their expedition and enjoy the trip. Google places a huge value on the two-way communication. The management always seeks the employees’ opinions and thoughts, especially before making important decisions that impact on their work (Advise America, 2017).

The company ensures productivity by consistently encouraging the employees to think as well as provide their input to help the company make the best decisions. Google over-communicates during the periods of rapid change as it offers high priority to provide the timely updates when there are variations in the plans. The company prepares visual aids to inform of power point presentations, use of slide shows and includes other methods of communication. Use of many colors and various slogans enforces the company’s solidarity throughout all the offices. Google schedules employee meetings for corporate headquarters. The company sends out numerous mass emails to each of the employees that include slide presentations, power points, and video blogs. The Mission and Vision statements of Google play three essential roles which include; communicating the company’s purpose to the stakeholders, inform strategy development and develop the measurable objectives and goals by which the organization’s strategy is gauged. The mission and vision of the company give the vehicle for communicating the values and purpose to the stakeholders. These are passed to the stakeholders during the annual general meetings (Libraries, n.d).

Communication Strategy

Google has a unique organizational culture as it is not a typical corporate culture. The Google success can be attributed to the corporate culture in which the employees are allowed to determine their destination. The company has persons whose job is to keep the employees happy to maintain productivity. The company has a casual democratic atmosphere and employee recognition. There are various perks for Google employee to motivate them for example free food, haircuts, health, massages, gyms, video games and death benefits. The culture is built on quantitative and qualitative data as they are always trying to optimize their employees regarding performance and happiness through an open environment (Kissmetrics, 2017).

The Google’s decision-making culture makes it one of the most admired companies. The company encourages employee’s innovation and risk taking. Decisions at Google are made in teams.  A triad leads the company as Larry Page, and Sergey Brin employed Eric Schmidt who is the CEO, and consensus makes the decisions.  For example, teams and individuals attack each problem and influence each other via the use of rational persuasion and data. The managers support their decision-making with facts. The decisions are all based on scientific experimentation, data, and analytics. This style of decision making has made Google the best global computer service providing company and has been awarded for its highly ethical behavior. The level of the company’s effective, ethical decision making is linked to the recurrence on the Ethisphere Institute’s list of the ethical businesses in the year 2014 (Ferrell & Fraedrich, 2015).

The success of Google can be attributed to the high-quality human resources. Google stresses excellence and smartness among the employees. The human resource management includes very carefully selected methods, strategies, and techniques in the recruitment, selection, and retention of the highly qualified employees (Jackson, Schuler & Werner, 2011). These processes ensure adequate workforce. These programs are designed to attract employees to the firm. There is employee training available at Google that is aimed at equipping the workers with the appropriate skills.

Conclusion

The fundamental principles of management that Google uses to ensure that there is optimal performance is usually done by those persons selected to various leadership positions while involving everybody in the decision making. The decisions made at Google is looked at carefully by all the employees from top to bottom. The strategy for decision making at the company aligns with the various systems thinking method of creative decision making. The company outsources for professional assistance if the optimal performance is not met as well as motivating the current employees to work more. The company allows the employees to actively be involved in the decision-making process since the company is an interrelated system between the management and the employees. This strategy ensures application of efficient systems of thinking approach.

Corporate Culture

Motorola’s management planning activities have significantly interfered with the organization’s capacity to function optimally. The company is famous for the invention of its cellular network in the 1980s. The company has not made many advances since those early years. The company has had no clear vision, the management of the company has lost direction, and its employees lack motivation and slow pace of innovation. Lack of implementation of the fundamental principles of management has set back the company which has ever been struggling to catch up to the fast-paced Asian tech companies like Apple and Samsung as well as the Silicon Valley. Motorola has had a flawed decision-making process. The company neglected the pace of innovation that was being used by other cellular network providers and stuck to their old 2G network. After realizing they had been left behind, Motorola tried to enter into a partnership with other companies, but the results were not favorable as it only ended up benefiting the partner company. Lack of employee involvement into decision making as well as the lack of employee motivation led to many employees leaving the company and seeking employment in other businesses and lack of interests of new employees as the human resource department did not utilize the required measures (Hallam, Muesel & Flannery, 2010).

Poor management’s performance has impacted Motorola’s employees’ perception and the organizational culture (Eversole, Venneberg & Crowder, 2012). The company lacks proper management that creates a healthy business culture. Motorola was not able to create an effective corporate culture as it missed the movement from 2G to 3G. The company was among many different competitive Midwest businesses in the fast paced Silicon Valley. The company lacked proper management hence got out of the right business at a wrong time as it sold lots of its spectrum and turned the offer to buy Nokia and Qualcomm. Motorola failed as it stopped innovating while other companies were inventing different improved products. Motorola was unable to create consumer trust as it was not able to deliver what it had promised. Motorola did not grow hence unhappy stakeholders just sold their stock.

In the world today, communication has become a critical component of the organization’s activity. The global world is now widespread, and organizations are supposed to lower the resource moral through communication. Ineffective organizational communication leads to management’s inability to increase the employee performance (Shockley-Zalabak, 2011). Motorola was not able to effectively communicate with the workers hence the decreased productivity. Communication within the organization ensures increased workers’ performance, commitment, motivation, and productivity. Motorola managers were not able to pass down the mission and vision of the company down to the workers hence reduced performance and lack of commitment which resulted in the failure of the enterprise. The barriers that led to lack of proper communication within the company include; lack of a healthy relationship between the managers and the employees, poor decision-making processes and lack of involvement of the workers in the decision-making processes (Shockley-Zalabak, 2011).

Decision-Making Culture

Motorola should implement the fundamental principles of management to improve the management process within the company. The company should build an effective organizational culture through the creation of an enabling environment. The employees should be acutely aware of the norms of the corporate culture. The company should devolve the role of management since it’s hard to supervise everyone hence employees who can motivate others can be given those different functions (Evans, Sie, Hopper, Glass, Hing & Cunningham, 2011). This will also ensure effective communication and passing of information within the organization. Motorola should change the management by eliminating the behavior pattern that was not working. Employee motivation should be prioritized as it enhances productivity and performance. Employee training programs should be put in place to enable them fully understand the mission and the vision of the company to ensure implementation of the enterprise’s policies and enhance communication to all personnel. The employment of the fundamental principles of management will result in improved worker performance as there will be improved performance and productivity if the working conditions of the workers are met, health issues and salaries. Application of ethical principles to the fundamental principles of management would be sustained and monitored through the use of the rational decision-making model to guarantee long-term success as the employees’ rights will be catered for hence increased motivation (Dombrowski & Mielke, 2013).

Conclusion

The management changes discussed above the organizational success. Involving the employees in decision making will make them more productive as they will feel like an integral part of the organization. Effective communication will ensure that the vision and mission of the company are passed down to the workers. Creation of a favorable organizational culture will ensure all the stakeholders’ needs are catered for hence improving the organization’s performance.

References

Advise America, (2017). Google Management Style. Available Online At:

https://www.adviseamerica.com/google-management-style/ Retrieved 16 May 2017

Dombrowski, U., & Mielke, T. (2013). Lean leadership–fundamental principles and their application. Procedia CIRP, 7, 569-574.

Evans, K. N., Sie, K. C., Hopper, R. A., Glass, R. P., Hing, A. V., & Cunningham, M. L. (2011). Robin sequence: from diagnosis to development of an effective management plan. Pediatrics, 127(5), 936-948.

Eversole, B. A., Venneberg, D. L., & Crowder, C. L. (2012). Creating a flexible organizational culture to attract and retain talented workers across generations. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 14(4), 607-625.

Ferrell, O. C., & Fraedrich, J. (2015). Business ethics: Ethical decision making & cases. Nelson Education.

Hallam, C. R., Muesel, J., & Flannery, W. (2010, July). Analysis of the Toyota Production System and the genesis of Six Sigma programs: An imperative for understanding failures in technology management culture transformation in traditional manufacturing companies. In Technology Management for Global Economic Growth (PICMET), 2010 Proceedings of PICMET’10: (pp. 1-11). IEEE.

Jackson, S., Schuler, R., & Werner, S. (2011). Managing human resources. Cengage Learning.

Kissmetrics, (2017). Inside Google’s Culture of Success and Employee Happiness. Available Online At:

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/googles-culture-of-success/ Retrieved 16 May 2017

Libraries, (n.d). Principles of Management. Available Online At:

https://open.lib.umn.edu/principlesmanagement/chapter/4-3-the-roles-of-mission-vision-and-values/ Retrieved 16 May 16, 2017

Panmore Institute, (2017). Google’s Vision and Mission Statement. Available Online At:

https://panmore.com/google-vision-statement-mission-statement/ Retrieved 16, May 2017.

Shockley-Zalabak, P. (2011). Fundamentals of organizational communication. Allyn & Bacon.

Steiber, A., & Alänge, S. (2013). A corporate system for continuous innovation: the case of Google Inc. European Journal of Innovation Management, 16(2), 243-264.