Freedom to Surprise You

I recently attended the Pan European HR Forum in Brussels and had an opportunity to sit in on a presentation by Stephan Thoma, Google’s Global Head of Talent and Development. 

It was a fascinating talk because Google really does some creative and cost effective stuff when it comes to employee engagement, mostly driven by employees themselves! 

Here are just a couple of examples of employee led professional development:

• Learning on the Loo (my personal favorite): Employees create short write ups on various topics of interest and an employee committee has them printed and distributed in Google bathrooms all over the world.

• Online peer ratings: Employees can show appreciation and give recognition as well as constructive feedback to each other.

• On demand learning: Employees have complete freedom to generate online content on any topic.  Viewers rate the quality of the content so the best rises to the top and the worst falls harmlessly by the wayside.

• The Hang Out: Basically an online live chat/collaboration environment with video where employees around the world can literally ‘hang out’ and do anything from cooking to coding.

• Freedom to work on your own projects: Employees can spend one day of the week doing whatever they are most passionate about.

Yep, pretty typical.

Now let me just say here that everything isn’t perfect and innovation fails, even at Google.  Also worth noting is that some innovative applications that shall remain nameless look like a bunch of technical geniuses built them in their free time and miss the wide adoption boat.

But acceptance of failure is the entry criteria for true innovation.  And ask yourself the following questions in light of the workforce development processes - or lack of processes - Google has in place:

1. Do you these employees are engaged?
2. Do you think Google is able to attract high quality candidates and hire selectively?
3. How much do you think it costs to let employees create development tools?
4. How much value do you think is created by the innovation that occurs in this environment?

Answers: 1) Yes; 2) Yes; 3) Not much; 4) A lot.

So, here we have a highly engaged and skilled workforce doing their own career development in their free time and creating lots of value for little cost.

Mind you, these sorts of ideas arguably work better in a highly creative environment.  Inviting employees to create content for learning on loo or create their own training videos might not be embraced with the same enthusiasm in, say, an accounting firm. 

(Although who says accounting isn't creative?)

But one comment stood out from the others: If you give people freedom, they'll surprise you. 

Can it really be that simple? 

Food for thought.

Laura Schroeder is a global talent specialist at Workday, headquartered in Pleasanton, CA.  She has nearly fifteen years of experience envisioning, designing, developing, implementing and evangelizing global Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions and holds a certificate in Strategic Human Resources Practices from Cornell University.  Her articles and interviews on HCM topics have been published in the US, Europe and Asia.  She lives in Munich, Germany and enjoys cooking, reading, writing, kick boxing (well, kicking things) and spending time with friends and family. If you want to read more from Laura, check out her talent management blog Working Girl or follow her on Twitter @WorkGal.

Picture courtesy of a site with Google office pictures.