After reading Cymbie Kwok’s blog on the Google culture, I thought to myself, “Surely there must be some issues with working at a place like Google”. Sure enough, with a little more research, I found an Entrepreneur article that compiled various confessions from Google employees.
An interesting confession was that more often than not, Google employees were over-qualified for their jobs. Google appears to be caught up in the idea that they must always hire “the best of the best”, resulting in some graduate level employees doing mundane tasks such as removing YouTube content. After going through a month-long hiring process, this simply does not make sense for employees. This could cause high job dissatisfaction, which would increase the turnover rate and training costs. Another issue for employees in Google is the sheer size of the company. For the majority of workers, their tasks have a minimal effect on how customers use the services. As a by-product of this issue, internal competition would start to rise.
Similar to Cymbie, I would definitely enjoy working at Google. However, it is important to understand why some employee would choose to leave this company. As a business owner, I would want to acknowledge these issues and try to fix them to lower turnover rates.
Check out this 2013 report where Google tied for 3rd among companies with the shortest tenure:
http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-ranked-by-turnover-rates-2013-7
References:
https://blogs.ubc.ca/cymbiekwok/2013/11/11/the-google-culture/
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/229950
Picture:
http://www.designyourway.net/blog/inspiration/interior-design-inspiration/best-38-id-like-to-work-in-that-place-offices/