Google’s Organizational Culture for Competitive Innovation – Panmore Institute

Google organizational culture, corporate culture characteristics, online advertising, consumer electronics business management case study and analysisA multi-site videoconference meeting through Google Hangouts. Google’s organizational culture or corporate culture motivates employees to focus on innovation for the online advertising, information technology, Internet services, and consumer electronics business. (Photo: Public Domain)

Google’s organizational culture reinforces the business as one of the leading companies in the online technology and digital advertising industries. The organizational culture or corporate culture is the set of traditions, customs, and behavioral ideals that influence the technology company’s employees’ behaviors in the workplace. The corporate culture motivates Google’s employees to share information within the organization to support innovation. Innovation is a factor that enables the company to maintain its competitiveness against other technology businesses, such as Apple, Facebook, Samsung, IBM, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Intel, Twitter, and Snap Inc. (Snapchat). Through its company culture, Google ensures workforce competence in addressing business needs linked to the external forces involving competitors. The technology business actively develops its corporate cultural strengths through institutional measures, such as employee training, and through informal approaches, such as personalized leadership and management support. Efforts to continuously improve the characteristics of Google’s organizational culture are applied to maintain creativity and innovation.

The features of Google’s company culture focus on enhancing employee performance. The company uses this organizational culture to effectively motivate its human resources. For example, in developing solutions to target customers’ everyday problems, Google’s corporate culture motivates workers to think outside the box and to aim for novel ideas. In this way, the organizational culture facilitates human resource support for various strategies, such as Google’s generic strategy for competitive advantage and intensive growth strategies. This strategic support coming from the company culture is a success factor in the international market for Internet services, digital advertising, cloud computing services, hardware and software, and consumer electronics.

Google’s Organizational Culture Type and Its Characteristics

Google has an organizational culture for innovation, especially technological innovation. The company also emphasizes the importance of openness among employees, as a way of promoting an innovative mindset suited to the technological nature of the business. The company culture leads to innovation that applies to Google’s approaches in competing in various industries. For instance, the culture helps the company innovate its technological assets and the services it provides to customers in the online advertising industry. The following characteristics define Google’s corporate culture:

  1. Openness
  2. Innovation, especially technological innovation
  3. Smartness with excellence
  4. Hands-on approach
  5. Small-company-family rapport

Openness. This cultural characteristic refers to open-mindedness and information sharing among Google’s employees. The company’s objective in promoting openness through its organizational culture is to encourage the dissemination of valuable knowledge that can support further technological innovation. For example, the corporate culture motivates individual employees to share new knowledge and work-related learning about technological solutions to customers’ needs identified in the market. In relation, Google’s operations management strategy supports this cultural trait through workplace layouts that facilitate knowledge sharing and human resource enhancement. Also, the design of Google’s organizational structure supports the organizational culture by encouraging workers to communicate and share their ideas.

Innovation. Innovation is a critical success factor in Google’s business. The company’s organizational culture motivates employees to contribute to the innovation of the business and its products, such as online software. This characteristic of the corporate culture motivates employees’ out-of-the-box thinking to discover or invent new technological solutions to current and emerging needs in the multinational market. Innovation contributes to business effectiveness in addressing the trends enumerated in the PESTEL/PESTLE analysis of Google LLC. This business condition means that the organizational culture helps ensure that innovation processes adjust according to relevant business needs identified in the information technology and online services market.

Smartness with Excellence. This characteristic of the corporate culture focuses on achieving excellent results in all areas of Google’s business organization. Such an organizational culture characteristic is integrated in human resource development programs to inculcate an appreciation for excellence among the technology company’s employees. For example, training programs are designed to motivate workers to continually improve their output, and to not settle for mediocre technological ideas and solutions. Thus, Google’s corporate culture promotes smartness in the workforce, and pushes employees to strive for excellent results in their work.

Hands-on Approach. Through its corporate culture, Google applies a hands-on approach to human resource development. This cultural characteristic focuses on using experiential learning to improve employees’ knowledge, skills, and abilities, in support of excellence in technological innovation. Theoretical knowledge is not enough at Google LLC. The company culture creates the expectation that workers learn new technical knowledge and skills as they continue their journey as members of the company’s organization. This feature of Google’s organizational culture is implemented through policies that support employees’ involvement in projects and experiments. Such experiments test new ideas in support of product development and innovation, which affect Google’s marketing mix or 4P. In this way, the information technology company’s corporate culture enhances employees’ experience, including on-the-job learning and training, which contribute to human resource competencies.

Small-Company-Family Rapport. Google LLC is known for its support for small-company-family rapport in its workspaces. This characteristic of the organizational culture focuses on the social interactions among workers in the technology business. For example, Google maintains a warm work environment where employees can easily talk and share ideas with each other. The objective is to use the corporate culture to help optimize internal communications and idea generation for technological innovation. This characteristic of the organizational culture also positively contributes to employee morale at Google. Warm social relations in the workplace facilitate employees’ satisfaction in their jobs, and enhance the results of the technology company’s human resource management strategies.

Insights and Some Recommendations for Google’s Corporate Culture

Google’s organizational culture is specific to addressing the needs of the information technology and online services business. For example, through the cultural trait of innovation, the company ensures that its products satisfy industry standards and are at the leading edge of technological development. In this condition, the corporate culture contributes to the strengths enumerated in the SWOT analysis of Google LLC. As one of the biggest technology businesses in the global market, the company is an example of effective organizational design and human resource development manifested in the corporate culture.

A possible improvement to Google’s organizational culture is the further intensification of information sharing. Currently, even though the characteristics of the business culture support communications and information sharing, such sharing occurs in a highly controlled manner. Google can adjust its organizational culture to increase employees’ degree of freedom to maximize the speed and efficiency of knowledge transfer. This recommendation aims to increase the rate of technological innovation in the company’s product development processes. In addition, Google can improve its corporate culture through additional human resource programs that are designed to support specialized innovation-focused functions among individual employees. This second recommendation aims to use the corporate culture to increase employees’ knowledge, skills, and abilities for additional competencies in technological innovation.

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