Breath of Fresh Air: How Project Oxygen Changed Google's Perspective on Managers

Google, an icon of the modern corporate world, was officially launched in 1998 by its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin as a worldwide search engine. Both its founders were students at Stanford University in California. Their first product, a search algorithm, was identified as "BackRub" and was developed in 1996. Today, Google is owned by the holding company, Alphabet Inc. After its launch, the company was a massive success and continues to be a trailblazer in its industry. Google continues to be hailed as one of the greatest places to work (do we have a reference here?). The company holds its employees in high regard and perceives them as assets it cannot run without. This paper will review the history of Google and showcase how a simple survey of management performance has transformed the company through a focus on an employee first mentality that helped to nurture a culture of innovation and achievement.

History of Google

In the early 2000s. Google was quietly making inroads with the market and it was slowly edging out its competition. The company was succeeding where its rivals, such as Hotbot, Excite.com, Lycos, Netscape, and go.com were finding it difficult to survive. The company was monetizing its services through developing ads that were text-based through selling keywords that were sold on the basis of price bids and click-throughs. The approach was controversial and led to a number of suits as it was a contested business model. Due to Google's ability to generate revenue, remain ahead of competition, offer high end business solutions, and have online content that was friendly to the user, the company was preferred by the financial markets. The company made a debut in the stock market with its IPO in 2004 after refusing a buy-out from Bill Gates and Microsoft, and a year later the company was valued at almost $52 billion, the biggest in its class. All the while, Google's executives promoted the company on the basis of the company's focus on the long term initiatives and the intention to forego short term gain. The company was able to develop its own distinctiveness which is epitomized by the promotion of the word "google" to mean "to perform a web search". Google has become a verb! The adoption of this standardized slang marked the beginning of Google's dominance in the online world.

In an article that appeared onCNBC, Elias (2020) provided a chart that showed the trend in employee hiring in the company. From the chart, it is clear that the company continues to add on its employee numbers since it was started. At inception, the company started out with seven employees, and by 2008, the company almost had 25,000 employees. That was in 10 years only. Today, the number is approaching the upwards of 140,000. In the first quarter of 1999, the company moved to Palo Alto in the Silicon Valley that was home to other technology startups. As a result of employee increase, the company overgrew this site and two others until it relocated to its current location in 2003 where it remains. The company developed a magnificent campus complex that has become known as Googleplex. Over the years, the company has consistently ranked among the best places to work in as expressed by Eisenberger, Malone, and Presson (2016). These assertions have prevailed over time given the insistence of Google on its culture.

The organizational culture that has consistently won over time in the company was visualized by the company founders in the early days of the company. In his analysis and commentary, Vice (2007) explains that the two founders of the company had a university-oriented organizational style that created a positive, creative, and incubator type environment that has continuously been nurtured. One of the earliest beliefs was their belief that the company needed to implement the academic 20 percent rule. That is, employees should spend at least 20% of their time (one day per week) working on activities that they were interested in and believed had merit (Vice, 2007). The result of this early policy was the creation of a workplace characterized by flexibility and a creative environment. One prominent product that resulted from this style of leadership was Gmail. The company was able to realize the benefit of important new products that were a result of employees engaging in side-work activities that they believed in (Sousa, 2007). The attitude that has been sustained by Google towards its employees has been supported by a plethora of studies. For instance, Avey, Wernsing, and Luthans (2008) explained that positive employee emotions mediated a positive relationship between psychological capital and attitudes and behaviors. Google has been at the forefront of sustaining positive employee emotions for the overall benefit.

One employee of Google that epitomizes the treatment of employees at Google is Susan Diane Wojcicki. Susan and the founders of Google met through Susan's provision of office space to the founders just after Google had been incorporated. The space was a garage in Susan's house. Susan would later be hired by Google as a marketing manager in 1999. She was responsible for finding ways of generating revenues for the company. Through ingenuity and support provided by the company, Susan was able to achieve a breakthrough in 2000 after the debut of AdWords. She would later organize for the acquisition of start-ups that were engaged in internet advertising. Some of the early acquisitions included AdSense and Applied Semantcs. In 2008, Susan midwifed the acquisition of DoubleClick that came up with the idea of the use of cookies to track the preferences of internet users for the benefit of advertisers. Susan would later target other companies such as AdMob and eventually YouTube which advertised in video format. She is currently the CEO of YouTube, a company now owned by Google and a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Susan shows how Google appreciates the ingenuity of its employees and supports them in their pursuit of what is best for the company. As a result of Susan's involvement in the company, Google has been able to achieve multiple means of earning revenue, including YouTube which is its premier revenue generator.

Google began as a humble company with a great vision that was positioned for support by its employees. From its onset, the company managed to stage a corporate culture that would appreciate its employees and allow them the space to be innovative, creative, and resourceful. This sort of innovation in company culture has had its fair share of growing pains, however, and Google execs were inclined to pursue new, innovative ways to combat them.

Project Oxygen Background

Like most fledgling companies that suddenly face exponential growth in a short period of time, Google was soon confronted with disgruntled engineers that felt stifled by what they perceived as overbearing managers. Combine that with a culture that prides itself on employee autonomy and individual creativity and you may soon have a significant issue to address. This confrontation led founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to consider a more "flat" organizational structure in which managers were few, if at all, and employees worked autonomously on individual projects on their own initiative. This worked for a time, but as the company continued to grow, Page found that more and more issues that a manager could typically mediate were finding their way onto his desk instead. As a founder and senior member of Google's board of directors, this caused a separate issue entirely. In an organization this large, one man does not have the bandwidth (pun intended) to moderate everyone else's quarrels and necessities. But how could the "founding fathers" solve the governance issue while simultaneously appeasing the individualistic engineer class that preferred to be left to work privately? Enter Project Oxygen!

In discussing the issue of too many or too few managers, Page and Brin determined that if you want to convince data-driven individuals that managers are a necessary evil, if not all around helpful, you do so by showing them the proof in the numbers. Thus, Project Oxygen was launched in 2008 to do just that.

A couple of years earlier, in 2006, Google hired Laszlo Bock, a human resources expert, to head up what the company called People Operations, or "People Ops". Similar to most human resource departments, People Ops was responsible for ensuring timely and accurate reviews of employee performance, peer-to-peer assessments, and general career development. Project Oxygen, however, would be different. Over the course of several years, Bock and his team would research thousands of data points collected from employee exit interviews and semi-annual surveys that all focused on one pointed question: "Do managers matter?" What the team discovered was not only do managers matter, but even small improvements in managerial skill can lead to significant improvements in employee job satisfaction and performance, and lead to steep gains in a company's bottom line. (For example, after conducting a similar study upon reviewing the success of Project Oxygen, Best Buy found that a 0.1 increase in "management grade" can lead to a $100,000 increase in annual sales.) In the words of Neal Patel, Bock's co-lead on the project, "even the smallest incremental increases in manager quality were quite powerful". Furthermore, and most importantly, Project Oxygen researchers were able to define eight principles that the best managers exhibited, giving context to what makes a good manager and allowing the company to develop leadership training based on these data-driven results. The principles that Project Oxygen researchers defined are: "is a good coach; empowers the team and does not micromanage; expresses interest in and concern for teams members' success and well-being; is productive and results-oriented; is a good communicator; helps with career development; has a clear vision and strategy for the team; and has key technical skills that help advise team members".

These principles have acted as a measurement stick when evaluating manager performance and have been the nucleus of Google's leadership development programs, which will be discussed later. First, let us discuss each principle in further detail to better understand what types of leadership and managerial practices are being employed and why they are effective, and how the use of these guiding principles has spelled success for both the manager and the managed.

Project Oxygen Principles

The principles of Project Oxygen are often listed in the order in which researchers found their importance, as they are above. However, we believe that it is tough to delineate any one principle as more important that another. Rather, one principle may be of better use for a given scenario, or more helpful in leading a specific personality, but it is likely that all of Project Oxygen's principles are equally important wholistically. However, in the spirit of simplicity, we will discuss each principle in the commonly recognized order.

It comes as no surprise that being "a good coach" should top the list of most effective management principles in a company like Google. As the most vocal dissidents of management prior to the Project Oxygen, Google engineers showed such disdain for management because the typical engineer would rather spend time designing and creating, not sitting in meetings with management or drafting email updates. Engineers are, however, very career focused, which is where a good coach becomes invaluable. Eric Clayberg, a senior software-engineering manager with Google for over two decades, described it like this: "Engineers hate being micromanaged on the technical side, but they love being closely managed on the career side". Having the ability to provide advice and guidance on career paths and professional development is a vital part of any managerial position; your employees expect it! "Great managers share best practices [learned throughout their careers] so that their teams can grow" and develop professionally as well.

The second principle defined by Project Oxygen focuses on the practice of employee empowerment versus micromanaging. In an attempt to create the best environment to stimulate innovation and creativity, empowerment is key. Successful people, especially the type that Google hires, need the proverbial space to exercise creative domain. They need to know that they are not only allowed butexpected to take ownership of their projects and bear the responsibility of all successes and failures. Micromanagement, on the other hand, stifles empowerment by creating required methods of thinking and action.

The third principle says that a manager should "express interest in, and concern for, team members' success and their well-being". In a word, a manager must showcompassion. The ability to empathize with subordinates is crucial, especially when leading across generations. Many of the new hires employed by Google today are considered millennials or "Gen Z". Their experiences and perceptions of those experiences can be quite different than a manager that has been with the organization for two decades or more. Honing the ability to understand these generations' thought processes will help make a more formidable manager. Likewise, working to find common interests will help build tighter bonds within a team, and an honest effort here will show the team that a manager truly cares about each member.

Google's research has also found that a good manager is generally productive and results-oriented. While this isn't necessarily surprising, it is revealing to reflect on any managers you may have had in the past that werenot productive. What was the consensus perception of that manager? It's likely that he or she was not popular among the team, who likely felt as if they were doing the bulk of the work, while an unproductive manager reaped the credit and accolades. Being a productive manager helps to build trust and credibility between you and the team, creating a sum that is much larger than its parts.

A good manager or leader is also a skilled communicator. Communication, however, doesn't only require the ability to articulate your message well in the conference room, or draft a Nobel Prize-winning email. Good communication is rooted in the ability to be a good listener, understanding what your employee is trying to accomplish and helping to facilitate their success with clear, concise guidance. Successful communicators are also adept at selling the overall vision of the larger institution and explaining the intent of the executives. With this accomplished, and regardless of the decentralized, creativity-inspired work place of Google, each independent team can tie their goals and vision into those of the larger organization.

Project Oxygen's sixth principle focuses on the manager and their role in the career development of subordinate personnel. In our opinion, this can be summed up with the termmentorship. Having a reliable mentor to help shed light on a recommended career path and to assist in those difficult, and sometimes terrifying, career decisions can be invaluable. As you begin to understand this as a manager, you can begin to develop an arsenal of advice on specialized training to attend, crucial positions to hold, and how to maximize experiences at different levels of a career. You become a mentor, something that every budding professional desires and requires to reach the pinnacle of success in their field.

The last two principles named are arguably the most important, despite their place at the bottom of Google's list. The first requires that managers maintain a clear vision and strategy for their respective team. Without a clear vision, the team cannot know what they are working towards. They will not understand the "why" behind any task assigned to them, because they cannot see how it fits into the larger picture, namely because the larger picture hasn't been defined. Sitting down with your team, explaining to them your managerial vision, and allowing them to participate in how the team realizes this vision creates immediate buy-in from the team members. They begin to see the vision as their own, because they are writing the formula on how to reach it. Creating this shared vision also bolsters the principle of empowerment discussed earlier, and builds even more trust between manager and subordinate, a crucial ingredient to any recipe of success.

Finally, Google and their Project Oxygen team have found that a manager must possess key technical skills that can assist the team in their tasks, and advise them when necessary. Simply put, to manage a team of engineers, you must first be a good engineer. Being good at your jobbefore becoming a manager helps to build credibility between the leader and the led. Employees want to know that you know what you're talking about. Notice the principle does not say that a manager must be the best engineer (administrator, logistician, marketer, etc.) on the team, but simply requires that you possess a prerequisite skill set in order to lead and manage in your field.

All said, the list of guiding management principles assembled by Project Oxygen is pretty standard when compared to results of other similar studies on leadership traits and principles. However, it's not the defining of what makes a manager great that makes the research so powerful. Instead, it's what Google has done with the information it garnered from the results!

Post-Project Oxygen

While none of the managerial principles listed above may be considered "ground-breaking", the results of the Project Oxygen experiment nonetheless are. The project is largely considered one of the first realmanagement studies, where older studies were more focused onleadership and what personality traits make the best leaders. According to Garvin (2013), "compared with leadership, managing remains understudied and undertaught". That is not the case with Google, who has developed an extensive management training program available for all employees.

The results of Project Oxygen have proven effective because of theactions Google has taken to ensure that these principles are taught to all employees. Google requires all employees to train toward a management position if they intend to be at the company long-term. To help facilitate this training, Google started a training program for new managers called Start Right, "a two-hour workshop for new managers", eventually adding the Manager Flagship course which is "offered in three two-day modules over six months" and focuses on topics such as "managing change". Of course, the company leverages its own technology by using Google Hangout to allow managers from all over the world to participate. Adding the education and development opportunities has helped shape Google's future leaders but is only one way the company is employing these learned managerial practices.

In addition to its development programs, Google has begun to use its guiding principles to score managers based on performance evaluations and 360-degree feedback received through employee surveys that are conducted semi-annually between the regular evaluations. In true Google fashion, these management scores are data driven and analysed by sophisticated algorithms. The scores supply the cold truth of what employees think of their manager and, more importantly, highlight weaker areas that the manager can focus on improving over the next period. Thisactionable feedback is the keystone in Googles attempt to not only create the rightamount of managers but to also develop the righttype of manager that can continue to progress the organization down the road of innovation.

Conclusion

What began as a hobby and morphed into an obsession for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google remains the dominant player in the online search engine field, and a top contender in areas such as data analytics, personal email services, and providing global business teams the ability to create and communicate with each other across time zones. The company has risen to become a hegemony with innovative products and revenue generation that has not been easily rivaled. The company continues to attract talent that earns it sustained momentum for growth and dominance. When confronted with the significant internal issue of too many managers and too little creativity, Google relied on its innovative values to launch Project Oxygen, forever changing the way the business world looks at management skills. Fifteen years after its launch, the results of Project Oxygen remain very relevant; its guiding principles facilitate the development of managers at every level within the organization. Furthermore, the results of the ground-breaking study emphasize the importance of management in enabling effective teamwork, as well as management and leadership practices that have made Google successful.