In “Inside Google\u2019s culture of relentless self-surveying”, Tim Ferholtz talks about one of the most famous surveys at Google – the \u201cGooglegeist\u201d. This company-wide survey is conducted annually, and, despite an estimated completion time of 30 minutes, the survey boosts an exceptionally high response rate of 88% or higher. The survey allows employees to evaluate issues they find most important, ranging from compensation and management to business conduct and strategic vision. The article highlights several key benefits of Googlegeist, such as helping the company focus on retaining top 5% of employees, improving the bottom 5% to improve, and assigning people the wrong roles the fit them the best. The then CEO, Eric Schmidt, is even quoted saying that the company decided to move a portion of bonus into base salary as a result of the feedback he had received from Googlegeist.<\/p>\n
While actionable feedback is critical to the development and the culture of Google (or any company really for that matter), I see two potential issues with Googlegeist: (1) the source of the feedback, and (2) the actions that follow the feedback. Firstly, Googlegeist, like the vast majority of other 360-degree feedback systems, is subject to the risk of people gaming the system. In my experience, the ideal environment for 360-degree feedback to work is big, global consulting firms because of two factors: Firstly, there is a lot of data because consultants work with several different people on every project globally. Secondly, this data gets refreshed very frequently, as people are less likely to be staffed with the exact same team members across different clients in various regions. These two factors make it particularly challenging for people to game the system. The way Google is organized is the opposite: Googlers do not move from one team to another; managers, teams, and the reporting structure do not change every 3 months. Therefore, it is relatively easy for people, especially “smart people”, to start experimenting and manipulating the system to their own benefits (especially if they didn’t take LCA at HBS… or took it and got a “3” …like me). This survey brings to the surface many inconvenient truths, due to its anonymous and extensive nature, but how many of these truths are actually true, if it is so easy to game it?<\/p>\n