ALPHABET CFO EXPLAINS HOW GOOGLE FIXED A DIP IN PRODUCTIVITY
DURING THE EARLY DAYS OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC PUBLISHED Wednesday
18 November • Alphabet’s CFO Ruth Porat said the company’s seeing
pre-Covid-19 productivity levels from its employees again, speaking
at the New York Times DealBook conference Wednesday. • Porat said
the company experienced a dip in employee productivity in the early
days but returned with the help of coaching and surveys. • Porat
said planning employees’ return to offices has been “substantially
more complicated” than was moving everyone to work from home.
Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said the company is
seeing pre-pandemic productivity levels from employees again —
thanks to leadership coaching and employee surveys. “What we saw in
the early days of Covid -we saw a bit of productivity dip, in
particular at junior levels.” Porat said at the New York Times
DealBook conference Wednesday. “That said to us, what we really
needed was to double down on: What coaching do our senior leaders
need to help their more junior people along? We had a real surge in
G2G training, what we call Google-to-Google training. We think
we’re pretty much back to pre-Covid levels.” Porat said the company
has done a lot of “pulse surveys” to see what’s important to
employees, and allowing them to assess their own productivity.
Porat added that the company has added more granular team meetings
and more frequent check-ins with employees, as well as working more
with employee resource groups. She said executives “marry that with
data on what’s going on with coding” to see how people are being
productive. “We feel more closely connected now and the feedback
feels like we’ve been on this long journey at Google and we’re in a
really good spot where Googlers’ sentiment is strong.” Early on in
the pandemic and before other tech companies, Porat led the
company’s crisis response to the pandemic and called on Google
employees to prepare to mobilize during a “big moment.” The company
was one of the first to order employees to work from home, first
moving its people out from Asia offices in February and then from
the U.S. in March. Porat leaned on her experience with economic
crisis management in her prior roles on Wall Street, she said at
Wednesday’s conference. Page 3 of 4 “In a crisis, you’re dealing
with the least worst choice,” she said. “For Google, that was a new
muscle because Google really had had the best of the best options
for so much of its life.” During the summer, Google extended its
voluntary work-from-home option through the summer of 2021, but
executives have since said it’s working on a “Hybrid” return model
after surveys showed employees want to return to the office at some
point, but not every day. Planning that return to offices has been
“substantially more complicated” than was moving everyone to work
from home, Porat said Wednesday. She noted it will have safety
measures as well as try to retain the same quirk, serendipity, fun
and collaborative culture. “We’re thinking about how we layer in
these technology and tools so you can live in this hybrid world,”
Porat said at the conference. “We will continue to experiment and
we’re looking at a lot of different formats.” Source: CNBC,
2020
QUESTION FOUR
Given the change and disruption experienced by Google
due to COVID-19, suggest the methods Google can implement in order
to boost motivational levels of staff.
