Yvonne Agyei, Head of Benefits, Google

Host: I'm going to go to our next wonderful speaker. So I have Yvonne waiting in the wings. Another Googler. So if you did miss the lunchtime workshop, then this is your opportunity hear this. First of all, I do want to again thank Google for the use of their space. They have been absolutely fantastic, haven't they?

So can we just give them all a round of applause for that?

But it's also appropriate that we're here. They regularly top the best workplace lists across the globe. And Yvonne is the Vice President of Google, Head of Benefits, and she's going to tell us all about how to create happy, healthy Googlers. So welcome to her. Thank you.

Yvonne Agyei: Can you guys hear me okay? Great, okay.

I should say I am one of many vice presidents. Not a ... I would Yeah, exactly. I don't know if my managers heard that. Okay. So, first let me introduce myself a little bit more. Again, my name is Yvonne Agyei . I will say when I met Henry and was learned about this conference, I was really thrilled to help to host it because so many of the concepts resonate at Google.

I won't say we have it all perfect. I've been in and out actually throughout the day and have picked up some things that I'd like to do within my team and to do at Google, but so much of what I've heard has really resonated, whether by design or by accident, we've happened upon it, including some of the words that Dom just shared with you.

What I'm gonna do is talk a little bit about Google culture, and then hopefully have time for questions, right? I heard Emma's talk, and I know there were some really good questions that I'm gonna go through. Again, before I dive in, I will mention that I joined Google back in 2003. So it's been nearly ten years, so I definitely count myself as a happy Googler, as a happy employee.

Driven by the fact that I'm still here. So, let me start off with Google culture. How many people have heard articles or read articles or seen videos or anything about Google, right? What's the first thing that sort of comes to everybody? What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Google culture?

Just shout it out. Scootering. Colorful. Fun. Okay, we're not going to go there. Moving right along. Let's stick to the fun and the scootering.

But a lot of what you see in the press and the media about Google is our fun, creative workplaces. Right? The, the lots of colors the slides that we have in some offices, the pub that I'm told we have in some, and it all sort of adds to our culture, and I'll talk about that in a minute, but I'm sure you've all heard about that, right?

That kind of resonates with you. The food? How many of you enjoyed the Google food today, as I did? That we have every day, three times a day, a little too much of the food? Again, this is what you hear about is the perks. and the benefits but as many people have talked about today and in the first session, it's not about the perks and the benefits, right?

In terms of what makes, I'm looking at Alex, I heard his talk this morning, it's not about that, it's about results and relationships, and I'm gonna go through how we create happy and healthy Googlers. So the first, I'm gonna leave it on this for a second and just run through. The first thing, so what I did was I randomly sort of picked five areas that I thought contribute to...

so this is just mine, right? I'm sure there's a lot more that contribute to happy, healthy Googlers. And how do we create that culture and that atmosphere? The first that Emma alluded to and that Dom talked about is hire great people. So we have an extremely rigorous recruitment process. I will be honest about that.

It continues to be, we've over the years refined it and tried not to make it so painful for candidates. But it's rigorous by design. It's a centralized process. Our CEO Larry Page, actually still reviews to this day all the candidates before an offer is given. And the reason for that is that we're an environment that provides people, so the second point I would say is we give them lots of autonomy, right?

So hire great people, number one, and give, number two, give them autonomy. So we put intentionally a lot of emphasis into the hiring process, and we don't just, someone asked earlier today about aren't you hiring people who are good at school and are already successful? Yes, but part of what we look for in the hiring process is what we call googlyness.

Essentially, it refers to a cultural fit. What does that mean? It's one of those things, you sort of know it when you see it. It's very broad. It's not necessarily cookie cutter, right? It's not necessarily sort of one definition and everybody fits into that. But it's very broad and it encompasses things like do you have passion for what you do?

Do you have other interests? Right? Or are you just sort of singularly minded? We like people who have a breadth of interest. We like people who travel. We like people who speak more than one language, ideally, which I know many of you Europeans or American, obviously, so we're a little bit disadvantaged there.

What do you do outside of work, right? Do you engage with your community? All of those Googliness. And we don't hire people if we don't think they're Googly. Before my current role, I'll give you an example. Before my current role, I used to work in university recruiting. And there were times when we would go out to campuses and you would have an expert in a certain area, in a certain computer lot science area, or in a certain language.

And they were fantastic and they would come through in terms of their skills. But if they mistreated the receptionist, or if they came across as arrogant, even though they would have the skills that we think would make the difference. In an area or a product that we were working on, we would not hire them.

Right? Because they were not considered googly. We did veer from this a little bit. I'll mention again, so I joined in 2003. And at that time we had about a thousand people globally. We now have thirty five thousand. We have more than 35,000 Googlers in more than 70 offices worldwide.

And in that period of extreme growth, a lot of our international expansion actually happened between 2005 to 2008. And in 2007 we started recognizing and seeing that we were having challenges with some of the new people we brought in. And so we took some time to try and figure out what was going on.

And how did we know this? Actually because of one thing that Emma mentioned, which is that we do surveys and through Google Geist, which is what we call our employee satisfaction surveys, and input from employees about their managers, and we recognized that we had veered off of our hiring practices and really protecting the culture because we had brought in senior people and managers who have more of a command and control approach, which doesn't necessarily work at Google.

Or I should say, doesn't really work at Google at all. At Google, as I mentioned, we hire great people, give them a lot of autonomy. Which means that people set their own goals. We have a process we call OKRs setting your quarterly objectives and key results. It's set at the company, corporate level. And then each team and each individual is meant to write their own objectives and key results.

Which means that they determine what they are going to be working on for the quarter. And as a manager, it is not your role to tell your team what they should be doing. Rather, it's a bottoms up process. Now, you are meant to, as a Googler, Understand what the corporate objectives are and then figure out how you contribute to that, right?

So there is that sort of check and balance and that's what the manager is supposed to do, but the manager is not telling you what you should be working on. And when we had gone through that period of extreme growth, fast growth, and brought in senior managers who had more of that approach of telling people what to do, we discovered that they didn't fit into the culture very well. And so we had to take, to look at that and took some steps to correct it. One was we dramatically improved our induction and orientation process. My colleagues and people that work in people development is what we call a learning and development team.

Have created a fantastic induction process that starts off with helping people understand the culture and how to get things done and what organisation they've joined. We also included that, obviously, in our recruitment process and weeding out people who have that orientation because, in the end, they were not successful in our environment.

So it's been great to see that even as we've grown, we're, I think in the last earnings report, we're close to 38, 000 employees. That we've really done a good job, I feel, in terms of retaining that culture across our offices. So the third thing, I wanted to talk about, actually, this phrase, I love this.

This comes from our IPO letter, and this gives you a sense, this is from our founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Who basically said, we're not a conventional company. So they sort of put it out there, right? We are a public company, publicly traded. But they've stated from the front that we're not going to be like everybody else.

And that's something that we take very seriously. So one of the things that we really prize is creating a culture of transparency, openness and trust. And those are themes that I've heard people talk about today. What does that mean and how do we demonstrate that? So first of all, I've never worked in a company that's shared as much information with employees as Google does. And even ten years into it, I'm still surprised how much we share. And we have had instances where people haven't necessarily adhered to that in the sense that, you know, we, we are very strict about maintaining confidentiality. When people don't or they abuse that, they do get tracked and they are dealt with.

They will be fired. If they're sharing and leaking information outside the company. But that's really rare, right? So we have every week our founders Larry and Sergey hold what we call TGIF. So thank God it's Friday. This year, actually last year after not, I, no, after, they've been doing this for about 12, 13 years.

The company's gonna be 15 years old this year. So they've been doing this for a long time. Somebody finally figured out that it would actually work better if we did it on Thursday so our international offices could join. So that's been the one, the single biggest change we've made in TGIF, which actually allows more offices to participate real time, which is really fun.

It's also recorded and shown at other offices that ,for time zone differences, are not able to participate. But this is a meeting where they talk about product, product launches they'll give Information about not necessarily revenue numbers. We're not allowed to share that, but upcoming launches that are coming up and share a lot of detail around what the company is doing with employees.

It's a really high level of transparency. One of my favorite parts of TGIF actually is that the Q& A and so employees can either send in their questions or go live to the meeting and ask questions and pretty much nothing is off limit. They can ask any sort of questions. You might not get the answer you want, but you have that open forum.

Our Chairman Eric Schmidt also does a quarterly board letter where he shares with the company what we've shared with the board. And then you've heard from Emma that we also, so the communication is not just one way, we also get a lot of input from Googlers. through Google Guides, the annual employee survey, through the Upward Feedback Survey for managers.

Lots of different types of surveys. My team has a survey going on right now about well being, where we're trying to get a better sense of how we can help employees with their health. The fourth one I wanted to touch on is Googlers are encouraged to think big. Right? What we call have a healthy disregard for the impossible.

So this is the idea that if you come up against something and it's either never been done before or it's been tried and failed, to not take that as an obstacle, right? Take it as, as a challenge. How do you say yes? How do you actually make this happen? Think really big. One example of this happened in my team.

I've been in this role as a Head of Benefits now for about four years with no previous background at all in benefits, right? So this gives you a sense of career development at Google. We take people from one area and put them into another and, you know, you just sort of go with it. But about nine months into my tenure, we had to present to our executive team, right?

So the CEO and senior vice presidents and this was primarily focused on U. S. healthcare, which within benefits is our single biggest expense, as you can imagine, right? Healthcare in the U. S., which is just astronomical. So we came in with our presentation we'd been working on for months and months.

We had all of the numbers in there and essentially we're coming in and asking for approval for the inflation increase in healthcare costs, which is about 7 or 8%. So it wasn't a huge amount relative to what we were already spending, but it was pretty significant. So we came in and kind of went through the whole thing, and they didn't really engage with us on the cost.

And I'm thinking, is it, I'm making up numbers now, I can't remember exactly what it was, but let's say it was about 8 million. Is that not significant enough to talk about? Do they think we're wasting their time? Like, this isn't going well, and I couldn't figure out why. And finally, our CEO sort of gets up in the middle of the room and he's talking to Larry Page, who's now our current CEO.

This was about four years ago. They both come back and they said, The problem we have with this is every year you guys come in and ask for incremental increases. And every year we approve it. Of course, this was my first time, so I'm thinking, I've never come in here before. That was beside the point.

What they said was, what I don't see, is any type of solution around how you're going to fix healthcare. And I'm thinking, fix healthcare? Do you mean for Googlers? We are trying to provide them health coverage. And they said, no. We don't care about health coverage, health insurance, I don't care how you provide this, but you need to fix the healthcare system, not just for Googlers, but for the world.

And I'm thinking, this was during Barack Obama's first year in office, and he was working on healthcare reform. And I'm thinking, if Barack Obama can't figure this out, how can we do that? But what was really interesting about that and my takeaway from that experience isn't, I didn't take it literally in the sense that they weren't necessarily asking us to go out and fix U. S. healthcare. But it did change the way in that we were thinking, which is that rather than coming in and saying, okay, this is the inflationary increase, we actually took a step back. We took the next year and actually looked through all of our data to try and figure out and understand our demographics, what was happening with our population. And then what we did, which we'd never done before, is we modeled out what would happen if we did nothing. So if we kept coming in with these increases, what happens over the next 10 years? What does that look like in terms of cost? What does that look like in terms of the health of our population?

So the next year when we came in with our our proposal, it was a completely different ask, right? A completely different shift in that we didn't even actually talk about the increase in healthcare costs at all. It was sort of somewhere in the appendix. We actually came in and asked for a hundred billion dollars so that we could make Googlers healthier and help them adopt healthy behaviors, looking at everything from the food we serve in the cafes and our micro kitchens.

to our gyms and, you know, putting in smoking cessation campaigns. And that actually was the beginning of what we call Optimize Your Life, our health and wellness program that we've been running now for the past three years. And that they were excited about. So, this is an example of where we were encouraged to think bigger and it shifted the way that we think.

Not thinking literally, but changing our approach. The last thing, and then I will let you guys ask questions. Oh, I don't have actually a slide on that. The last thing I want to share is within Google, we work to create a sense of community and think of Googlers and Google as a family. And you can see this in the way that people interact with each other.

I've talked a little bit about some of the values we look for in Googlers in our hiring process. All of our, you know, being Head of Benefits a lot of what we offer is to take care of each other, right? We really think of Googlers as family. When someone's ill, we will go through sort of extraordinary measures to try and do everything that we can to help them.

Googlers will rally around if they know that somebody is in need. We have incredible stories of people donating their vacation time, their holiday time, to help someone who's looking after a sick family member so that they can continue to get paid while they're out on leave. A lot of the perks that we offer, actually things like the food, the free food, isn't meant, some people think it's meant to keep people in the office, right, so you're not running out for lunch.

It's actually designed to create a sense of community. Right, when you think about your social interactions, it's typically around food, right? And so the idea is to have Googlers sit down for a meal, have, you know, share ideas, communicate with each other. Maybe they're, they're talking about work, maybe not, maybe they're just building relationships, but it's really to foster that sense of community.

And that's frankly why we offer the food. We also encourage Googlers to show appreciation for each other. We have a budget, I don't know exactly how much it is. What that we call the pure bonus budget and it's one where managers don't do it. You colleagues use that to recognize each other and it's, it's not a huge amount of money.

It's maybe about a hundred pounds. 100 Euro, depending, you know depending on the, the currency. And it's just a way to say thank you, right? Thank you for going the extra mile to help me on this project. Or thank you for staying late, or thank you for pitching in on this. Googlers are very good at using that to recognize each other.

Then the last, and then we also have teams have a fun budget. That you use to go out and, you know, have a meal or do whatever, go play games. We also extend the sense of community out to the communities in which we operate. And so we do a lot in terms of social action and giving back to charity.

We have Google Serve, which is one day a year where all of the global offices, they can select and they go out and do community projects. Then the last example I'll give you of the Google family, actually is something I just learned about just today. That someone sent over to me. That happened in our London office earlier this week.

There is a Googler who's based in the US who's gay and I guess he met somebody online who's based in the UK, and they've been seeing each other now for two years, and because of US laws, they're not allowed to get married in the US, and so he couldn't sponsor his partner to move to the US.

It's been a very trying time for them. And regardless of how you feel about the gay marriage issue he decided, so this week, he decided to come and work over here. He probably had some some business to do here in London. So he's coming over to London office. He sends an email out to, we have these aliases that someone mentioned earlier today to, I think, UK Miss.

So it's anybody who's in the UK, who works in the UK office. Basically saying, I'd like to propose to my partner. This, you know during the, the visit. He's coming for lunch and I want to get some ideas on the best way to do this. I've got a singing group made of Googlers who are going to be singing in the cafeteria, in the canteen.

As many people as they want. There's a video of this. I just watched it. I'd like to have as many people as I can to come and, and support us and, and help out. And it was packed from what I could see in there. The room was packed. The partner didn't know what was going on. So he comes in as a visitor.

He's coming for lunch. We're allowed to have two visitors per month in our cafes. The Google is visiting. There's a performance of the singing group going on. He gets up there and starts singing and proposes to his partner. And everybody is, you know, clapping and, and joining in. What was really touching about this, is the response he got to the email that he received. People forwarded it to their team members in India, in Poland, in Russia. He had all sorts of suggestions. Somebody told him where to go to get drinks afterwards. And somebody offered to connect him to an immigration lawyer. And just watching that, and I'm not a real sentimental person, but watching the video really brought tears to my eyes and was just such a great example of the way that Googlers act as a family and come together.

So I wanted to leave you with that and what I'll say with that is that, you know, the reason that I've been at Google for so long and the number one reason that we get 97 percent of Googlers respond to this is we're here because of our co workers, because of our colleagues. We work with great people and I think that makes Google a happy workplace.

So with that, I'm going to stop

Host: there is about five minutes to ask questions. So if anybody would like to ask, let's start over at the back there.

Audience Member 1: So the question is, there are so many other companies in the tech space and many of them have a culture where they say, well, we don't sell a product. We are the product or the company is the product, what we sell is the company and everyone is trying now to attract employees with similar so how do you differentiate from those companies?

Yvonne: Yeah, that's a great question and you're absolutely right. A lot of companies are essentially copying some of the elements of what they see at Google. Many of those companies have started by former Googlers. So it's not entirely a surprise. What I would say to that is it's, as we talked about earlier, it's not about the perks and the benefits, right?

It's not, that's not at the you know, at the bottom of it, that's not the reason that Googlers come to work here. It's all of those other things. They are working here because they have great projects, because they work with great colleagues, and because they feel connected to our mission. They're working on what we call cool, doing cool things that matter.

If companies can provide that, that's great but I think all of the other things that you see are fairly superficial. And you can provide those, but if your workplace doesn't, and your values don't really encourage that, I don't think you can actually replicate that.

Host: Next door, I think there was a question.

Audience Member 2: Thank you very much. It was really insightful. What advice would you give for changing culture? So if we've got something that doesn't look anything like that, what would you put in place? I was told yesterday on a course that sort of people culture change can take 10 years. Is there any advice to sort of some short term things and then some longer term aspirations to work towards?

Yvonne: I don't know if I can give you a list of ten things. I would say thank you for the question by the way, I would say that it needs to start from the top. Right. It really needs to be embodied from the top. The thing that we notice every week when you see our founders who started this company, you know, essentially in their dorm room 15 years ago is they still very much act that way, right?

So they said, they do, they said, good or bad, they set that example and act as role models. And so that's the first thing I would say is that you need to get your senior most people to embody and act as role models for the culture you want to create. Then, you have to have it through everything that you do.

Include your hiring processes, your performance management your reward system. Right? And that's something else that we, we think about a lot is when we're doing our bonuses or equity distribution, we don't just look at what did this person produce? We look at how did they do that?

Are they collaborative? Right? Do they hold on to information or do they share information? And so you have to have that in sort of all of the systems that you do and then let sort of the culture kind of be self maintaining. And that's something that I think we've been really lucky to be able to do, is that it's sort of self perpetuating at this point.

Host: Question here.

Audience Member 3: I hope this question makes sense, but the, the atmosphere here and the culture that seems to be here with the bean bags and the free food and everything, is that geared towards promoting the generation of the kind of infrequent, amazing idea, or is it generally to help everybody on a more basic level?

Yvonne: Yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's a good question. I think it's I think it's meant to foster an environment of fun and creativity. Where people can relax and sort of be themselves. We talk a lot about bringing your whole self to work. If we get a great idea out of it, fantastic. But I don't think that's the purpose of it, right?

I think the purpose is to be in an environment where, frankly, you're happy. And we know happy people are more productive. And a lot of the things that we offer are to make people's lives easier so that they can be relaxed and sort of enjoy the work that they do. And then the productivity comes as a result of that.

Audience Member 4: Thank you, I just wondered, you mentioned TGIF phonecall. Does everyone participate and watch it? And also, what sort of staff survey do you do?

Yvonne: Yeah, I'll take that one first because it's easier to track the staff survey. We get incredibly high participation this year. We had about 90%. When you think about, you know, 35, 000 employees. Well, now we make it fun, right? We have games and we pitch, you know, directors and vice presidents against each other.

Part of what we do is we're very transparent as well. So we'll put it up there, you know, my team will see that we're, you know, 50%. And so they better participate to get those numbers up in a fun way, right? Nobody is penalized if they don't do it. The company meeting is a little trickier.

Because we don't have the space that can hold everybody in one office, right, because our offices, you know, our office sizes vary. You do get really great participation at headquarters. It's always packed, always filled. We offer beer as well, so people come for that. And snacks. And then as we've been videotaping and showing that more, I think it's broadening the reach.

But moving the day actually made a big difference in terms of increasing the participation because When it was Friday afternoon in California, you know, everybody in Europe has already gone home. It's, you know, Saturday in Asia, right? So that didn't make a lot of sense, but moving it up has increased the participation.

Host: Thank you so much. Can I have a warm round of applause?