Design your Engagement Survey so that it creates Engagement.

Although many companies has understood that having high scores in satisfaction surveys does not correlate strongly with customer satisfaction and financial results anymore, they are struggling to understand why and what to do about it. Some companies have found that having high employee engagement impacts customer engagement which in return does create positive financial returns for the corporation, but don’t understand how to increases employee engagement. The increasing importance of employee engagement and the resulting lower importance of employee satisfaction have its roots in the generational mixture of the corporation in question.

The new generation is very different from Baby boomers (born 1940-60) that was motivated by duty to the corporation they served and  generation X (1960-80) with a focus on individual return versus the sacrifice of serving the corporation. Generation Y (1980-2000) is only loyal to the corporation if it serves a higher purpose, listens to them and invests in them.

This is very important to understand when designing an engagement survey for a given corporation. The questions themselves can create or destroy engagement – make sure you ask the right questions.

To create additional engagement you should think about including questions about the future direction of the corporation – get the employees opinion of what is important. The fact that you ask will increase employee engagement and if you ask questions about the future purpose of the corporation it will go even higher. GenY is motivated by purpose in opposition to Baby boomers acceptance of a focus on shareholder and the more personal gain/sacrifice view of GenX  motivated through profit sharing .

If you accept that pay itself does not motivate (too little can demotivate however) this is an overview of what motivated the different generations:

	Motivated by	Willing to	Activity should   benefit	Employee measurement
Baby Boomers	Duty	Sacrifice	Shareholders	Retention
Gen X	Balance	Sacrifice for personal gain.	Shareholders, Management and Employees	Satisfaction Survey
Gen Y	Purpose	Engage in return for benefits to society	Society and environment before corporation	Engagement Survey

Conclusion – Imagine the unimaginable. Chapter 7 of "How Google Works"

Technology driven change is outpacing the ability to train people in new skills putting unprecedented pressure on companies and societies. The technology is disrupting most known mature industries. In the preindustrial era the upper-class household was the centre of economic activity replaced by the corporation after the industrial revolution. In the 21^st century the corporation is being replaced with The Platform. A platform does not have a one way relationship with is customers and suppliers. There is a lot more of give and take – a place to connect like amazon.

Companies have a choice. They can operate the way they have always operated and only use technology to optimise their current operations or they can view it as the powerful force of disruption that it really is. Technology and innovation should be high on the CEO’s agenda.

Innovation means change and for many companies status quo is a much more comfortable place to be. At a corporate level most innovation initially looks like very small opportunities to a large company – not worth the time and effort. At the individual level people within big companies aren’t rewarded for taking risks but are penalised for failure. The payoff is asymmetrical so the rational person opts for safety.

The very nature of big companies is to be risk adverse and attack big change like the body attacks an infection. Google itself did well in Web 1.0 that was based on viewing text and images and basic transactions. It also thrived in Web 2.0 where is became a gigantic shopping mall and a place where people could do all sorts of things including complex transactions but was itself disrupted by Web 3.0 - the social and mobile web.

The solution is to always ask yourself the hardest question. Understand what to do about the future, what you see for the business others may not see or sees and choose to ignore.

“I keep my attention on the questions I need to ask so that I can catch the issues of the future” Clayton Christensen.

CEO´s should not only focus on the core business but also on the future. Companies rarely fold because of operational issues but more often because of a technological disruption of their industry. The question is not to ask what will be true but what could be true.

Do customers love your products or are they locked in by other factors that might evaporate in the future? Do your decision making processes lead to the best decision or the most acceptable?

Governments would benefit of including support for the disruptive elements of business, but tend to do the opposite and defend the incumbents as they have power, money and many workers. Tesla did not only fight the incumbent automakers but also the government that tried to prevent Tesla to sell directly to consumers.

Google believe in the power of technology and its ability to make the world a better place. Most big problems are information problems that can be solved with enough data and the ability to crunch it.

Google believe the technological disruption is a gift even if it means that somebody someday would create a technology that eventually renders Google irrelevant. Some might find this chilling but Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg finds it inspiring.

Innovation - Create the primordial ooze. Chapter 6 of "How Google Works"

Google’s approach to innovation is different from that of Apple – focus is on being open and collaborating like the android ecosystem versus Apples closed IOS infrastructure. Even though there are competition and legal battles, Apple is not seen as the arch enemy and there are possibilities of cooperation.

Innovation is not giving people what they want – that is being responsive. An innovation has to offer both new functionality and surprise. An innovative product should not only be useful, it should be radically useful. It could also be many small incremental improvement steps that together makes a product like the search engine of Google radically better every year.

The Google [x] approach can be seen in diagram below

Google looks for the right context for innovation and prefers high growth areas with plenty of competitors – they are not looking for empty spaces.

Innovation is not something you can organise yourself into. You cannot tell people to be innovative – you can allow them to be innovative. It is not a process rather it is a lack of process. Google has a view of ideas that each compete for survival in a Darwinistic innovative environment.

Not only are people allowed to innovate – they are also encourage to be followers of innovative ideas as all successful ideas needs followership.

“Focus on the user and all else will follow” is also an important guidance in innovation. Many projects do not have a formal financial analysis as part of the decision process – if it benefits the user it will eventually turn into revenue. Some of the innovations Google has implemented has actually hurt revenue short term but the belief is that it benefits long term.

Google differentiate between users and customers and contrary to most companies they side with the user when there is a conflict between the two.

“You aren’t thinking big enough” or “think 10x” are classical Google statements trying to encourage engineers not to limit themselves when thinking and innovating. Google are trying to improve things 10x not 10%. This creates huge ambitious projects that attracts great people and is too important to fail. Interestingly that increases it success rate versus small projects that does not affect the corporation’s survival. Apple is a classic example – they could not afford to have the iPhone fail as they only had few very important product lines – any problems affect survival and that gets maximum attention.

Although Google funds and protects risky projects they also limit resources available as they believe this limitation actually increases creativity. In Marissa Meyer’s words: “Creativity loves constraints”.

Not stigmatising failure in Google is important – to innovate you need to fail well . Many quotes exemplify this philosophy:

“If you are thinking big enough, it is difficult to fail completely” Larry Page

“It helps to see failure as a road, not a wall” Scott Adams

"If everybody has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing" M. Gladwell

“Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement” Mulla Nasrudin

At the same time Google does not believe in sunk cost and are ready and willing to kill projects without killing the participants – also failed projects are a path to promotion.

“When achieving success requires multiple miracles in a row, it is probably time to call it a day." Regina Dugan & Kaigham Gabriel

Communications - Be a damn good router. Chapter 5 of "How Google Works"

Google does not limit information based on seniority, it believes in sharing information on all levels. A quarterly briefing of the board was initiated by Eric Schmidt involving all areas of Google and containing a lot of proprietary information. This gets shared with all employees in a presentation after the board briefing. Everything is shared except if it is prohibited by law – which is not the same as the red marker of death lawyers use for anything containing a risk. As the material is not only share with the board but with the entire company, people work hard to make the material great.

So far leaking has not been a problem – “We trust our employees with all sorts of vital information and they honor that trust”.

People post their personal strategic goals in a document called OKR – Objectives and Key Results.  This is not a description of role or title, but what a person cares about and is working on. The top level shares and reviews their own performance against the OKRs and discusses the ambitious goals they did not achieve. Employees are expected to create their own OKRs in light of this with the company’s best interest in mind.

Google’s leadership style is question based: “The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them” John Seely Brown Xerox. Rather than managing, Eric Schmidt would regularly ask questions of the executives and expect them to be on top of the details. People are also expected to understand the big picture – not just the details.

It is important to get bad news out in the open. Google does not punish the miner that brings the dead canary up into the light. Googlers are expected to ask tough questions and a voting system ensures the toughest questions climb to the top of the list and gets answered. When bad news is delivered it is important that it is not sugar coated and that you don’t have all of the answers yet. "If everything seems under control, you are just not going fast enough" Mario Andretti.

Google’s transparency approach: Climb Confess and Comply. This is an analogy for Pilot errors. The first thing a pilot need to do is to climb to get out of danger. Then tell the tower about the mistake and lastly comply with the towers advice on how to do better.

Instead of staff meetings that reinforces the functional boxing of people Google encourages people to present in a more holistic and interesting way – like trip reports or what I learned in my vacation. These kinds of presentations often are more relevant to the business issues at hand than the functional update.

Communication should reinforce, be effective, be fun, be inspirational, authentic, directed at the right people use the right media and finally be true.

In 1:1 meetings it is important that both the leader and the employee bring their top 5 issues to discuss. Hopefully there is an overlap - if not there is a bigger issue at hand. 4 main topics should be discussed: Performance, Relationships Leadership and innovation (Best practices).

Communication with partners has to be handled diplomatic. Many of Google’s partnerships are also competitive in other areas and needs a diplomatic approach. Differences in objectives are fine and should be acknowledged. The communication should be pragmatic rather than ideological and the relationship should be based on the partner’s actions.

If you lose the Millennials – you lose!

Corporations with long tenure in mature industries often operate based on a number of principles that is reasonably stable. The most important one is that the future success of the corporation is based on the same principles as the historic success. The leads to an operating principle focusing on continuous improvement: Evolution over revolution or small incremental changes to what was done last year. The model is also based on a view of the market as a place with stable boundaries and actors that are quite similar and unchanging - a place of competition.With the rise of first the internet and later the revolution of social networks, unlimited power of the cloud and the rapid move to mobile technologies, no industry is immune to disruptive changes.It is well known that the disruption can come from a change in product offerings, like the iPhone changed the mobile industry. It can also come from outside the market boundaries like Google’s absorption of advertising budgets or it can be a disruption of the supply chain the way Blockbuster died from Netflix competition. Most mature companies are aware that they need to keep an eye on changes in the market structure, customer preferences.
There is however a significant change underway that will fundamentally change the way corporations has to operate in order to succeed independent of what industry or market they operate in. The rise of the Millennials or generation Y as people born in the 1980 -2000 time span has been categorised. This is not a surprise to the marketing departments of consumer based corporations – they know Millennials are different customers to the prior generations (generation x and baby boomers) and work hard to position offerings attractive to them.
What seems to come as a surprise is that Millennials are also becoming a significant factor as employees. 

Before 2020 Millenials and younger generations  will become the dominant part of the labour market everywhere, and most of them will work in an environment designed by generation X for generation X. This is likely to fail, just ask your marketing department.

Beyond.com survey, 2013

A survey done by beyond.com shows that the gap between Millennials perception of themselves and that of HR professionals are very different, This indicates the expectations of the corporations based on Gen X thinking and that of Millennial employees are very different – a recipe for disaster.

The problem has still not become visible as very few corporations has been in talent acquisition mode since the financial crisis but as Gen X moves towards retirement it will become an issue

It is easy to point fingers at HR and HR policies and blame them for not adapting to attract and retain the new employees but the problem goes a lot deeper. Millenials don’t see work as a chore like the baby boomers and they don’t see it as means to an enjoyable life outside work like generation x. They are hard workers but not motivated the same way as earlier generations.  Millennials want freedom, trust, support, fun and they need a higher level purpose to really engage. Corporations need to develop a purpose above and beyond profit and revenue. To attract and keep Millenials, it is imperative to create an environment of personal growth, equality, Social/Environmental responsibility, freedom and team spirit.

Are your company’s policies designed to enable employees or limit them?

This might sound alien to companies firmly based in command and control thinking but it is already being implemented by successful companies in the new economy. Google, Amazon, Netflix, Tesla and similar companies are ahead and design their people policies very different.

You are not only competing with these companies for the consumer

 You are also competing with them for the employees.

Decisions – The true meaning of consensus. Chapter 4 of "How Google works"

Google’s decision to enter China was easy from a business perspective but much more difficult when using the “Don’t be evil” indicators. When present in China Google sometimes experienced that their traffic where completely rerouted to Baidu – their filtered search competitor in china. Even though Sergey Brin was against entering China, the decision was made. The idea was to work inside China to change the system of censorship so Google informed the user when censorship happened. Surprisingly many censorship requests from the government was made against sites that where not illegal according to Chinese law. When Google later came under a very serious hacker attack from China that targeted Gmail accounts – especially from dissidents, the decision was reviewed. Google decided to leave. For leaders, decisions are when the hard work begins. Google’s approach to decisions is that it is not sufficient to take the right decision. The process of decision making, the timing and the way it is implemented is just as important as the decision itself. Even though the decision in reality has been taken, it is important to hear people out and respect their opinions.

Decision that used to be made based on opinions and anecdotal evidence could now be made based on data. Google’s don’t seek to convince – they seek “ let me show you” with data. Those closest to the data are normally best equipped to make decisions and management should let them.

Google don’t believe in supporting decisions with a myriad of financial KPIs , Eric Schmidt is known for stating “Revenue solves all known problems.” Google are against what they call “Booblehead yes” or the “Novell Nod” which is agreeing in public but undermining afterwards. It is not about getting to consensus or yes – it is about getting to the best solution that everybody wants to rally around.

Decisions should be inclusive, cooperative, equal and solution orientated. “Be interested in finding the best way, not in having your own way” Coach Wooden. Deadlines are important – especially with incomplete information. In a deadlock it is the responsibility of the most senior person to make the decisions – a bias for action. Eric Schmidt uses the PIA rule: Patience, Information, Alternatives to help make decisions.

In Google it is know that smart arguments do not convince people – to convince people you need to touch their hearts. This they call the Oprah Winfrey rule. In Google this is done by ending arguments or discussion with “You are both right” to acknowledge the input and value from everybody. Once a decision is made it is important that people are able to “Disagree and commit”. If this is not possible people have to escalate the issue in public and state why. This removes a lot of dissent.

Well run meetings can be very effective. Google has a number of rules to ensure effectiveness: An owner with hands-on experience of the topic, not a matter of being important, easy to kill, manageable in size, time kept and participants involved.

Google needs lawyers like all other companies – but they do not need lawyers like most US corporations are employing: Backward looking and risk adverse.  Instead they are using what they call “horseback law” where lawyers are expected to ride in like a cowboy in a western movie, access the situation and do something or leave. Most of the time simple advice is needed rather than a full 50 page legal brief.

Talent – Hiring is the most important thing you do. Chapter 3 of "How Google Works"

The most important thing you do is to hire talent – every sports coach knows this is more important than strategy. Scouting is like shaving – if you don’t do it every day it shows. Every leader in Google spends a lot of time with in the hiring process, not just for senior positions, at all levels.

Sergey Brin’s favorite interview question is: “Could you teach me something complicated I don’t know?” To be hired in Google it was not enough to be able to teach or simplify –you also had to be interesting. Explained dating instead of economic theory was one way of getting hired.

Hierarchical hiring does not work in Google. Despite intentions to hire people smarter than them self, managers most often surrender to human nature and hires people that will not threaten them. Google’s hiring practices originates from academia rather than corporate. As most academics rarely leave, the academic hiring process has to work and is elaborate. Peer based committee’s works better for ensuring high quality candidates enter Google – even if there is no specific job at the time. The right people will create their own jobs.

As Google grew and senior managers were not able to control what everybody did but they made a conscious decision about deciding to control whom they hired. As Google managers are expected to find the right people and not be “fighting for headcount”, the hiring manager is not the one making the final decision.

Hiring great people not only creates great work – it also attracts other great people like a herd. “You are brilliant, we are hiring” was the advert which attracted Marissa Meyer to Google. The objective is to create a hiring culture that can resist the siren song of compromise, a song that only grows louder amidst the whirlwind of chaotic hyper growth.

Google wants passionate people, but not people that wear passion on their sleeve – people that live it.  They are also looking for people able to learn – what they call having a growth mind-set. People that decide to set themselves learning goals rather than performance goals. Everybody is a recruiter, Google expects all employees to bring at least one great candidate. The most important skill for a leader is interviewing skills: Prepare, push the limits of the candidate

Google don’t hide that they are elitist – they want the best because they believe there is a big difference between good and great people. Equal hiring is not seen as only the right thing to do but also the most effective: Homogeneity in an organisation breeds failure. It is seen as important how the candidate treat other people in all situations. The interview process is long enough to judge and involves dinner and other activities. In the exponential internet world knowledge and specialisation deteriorate fast and learning becomes increasingly important – much more important than knowledge.

Apart from Passion, Intelligence and the ability to learn, Google is also looking for Googleyness. Integrated in to the word Googleyness are: Knowledge, leadership, ambition, drive, team orientation, service orientation, listening and communication skills, bias to action, effectiveness, interpersonal skills and integrity. You don’t need to like the people you hire, but they do have to be interesting.