Google is one of the top destinations for college students to work after they graduate and they are consistently ranked one of the top places to work at. According to Fortune Magazine, “Google/Alphabet is the No. 1 place to work for the seventh time in 10 years”, and for good reason. They seem to have found the perfect balance between employee satisfaction and productivity.
Google employees are spoiled. Their head office boasts a free gourmet cafeteria for their employees, free gym membership and intramural sports, and a 3-month leave for employees to give time for them to travel. It is extraordinary how Google is able to offer these services while being able to get their employees to consistently extrapolate new ideas and products.
Google is able to hire the best and brightest minds due to their brand name and their unrivaled work culture. Google receives over 3 million applications and they only hire 7000 employees which gives them an accepting rate of only 0.2 %. Google is able to offer all of these perks to their employees because they hire candidates that are passionate intrinsically motivated. In Google’s terms, they look for employees that embody the quality of “Googelyness”. Bock, a former Google employee, explains what Googleyness is in his book “Work Rules”. An employee embodies Googleyness if he/she enjoys having fun, is intellectually humble, are conscientious and comfortable with ambiguity, and having evidence that courageous risks have been taken in the past.
These employees who have Googleyness are intrinsically motivated. They want to add value to Google by offering creative ideas. Yes, money is important, but it may not be the primary motivator for these people. Theory Y suggests that employees have an internal desire to do something that interests or challenges them and they look for personal satisfaction in their work.
The best way to get intrinsically motivated people to work productively is to provide an environment for them where they can get their work done happily and stress-free as possible. Because Google recruits the best minds who are intrinsically motivated, they provide all these perks to keep them at the office so they can work longer hours without burning out.
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Resources:
http://fortune.com/best-companies/
Organizational behaviour: Concepts, Controversies, Applications (4th ed.)
https://www.cleverism.com/google-way-motivating-employees/