Five things charities can learn from Google’s workplace culture
At Google, we’re often asked what is our recipe for success. The answer is - our people. While I don’t claim to be an expert on organisational change or innovation tactics, I wanted to share my top five tips for creating a great workplace environment based on my experience at Google.
Embrace failure and let your employees figure it out
It is important to empower staff to work on the problems they care most about. As a leader, give broad guidelines and directions, but give those working on outreach, community engagement or website development, the creative freedom to figure things out.
If you want to foster innovation, your employees need to be able to experiment, fail, iterate and try once again. To start changing your organisational culture, think about: how are decisions being made? What behaviour is being rewarded? How do you structure and organise meetings? All of these together will eventually determine the potential of your organisation.
One person with good ideas should be allowed to break through
An innovative organisation needs to ensure that decision-making processes are based on good ideas that are backed up by sound information. So, if a manager or employee encounter internal barriers to change, but can back themselves up, they should be listened to and allowed to start shaking things up.
Think 10x
At Google, 10x stands for doing things ten times better instead of focusing on incremental change. This approach helped us improve our technology and deliver great products for our users.
At the NGO level, 10x could mean coming up with an innovative way of reaching supporters, fundraising or implementing projects. Most importantly, it can be an important mental tool that gives employees permission to think big and not be afraid to come up with new solutions. To do this, try to encourage a yes culture where new ideas are not immediately shut down because of risk, but encouraged and nurtured instead.
Hire smart creatives
Innovation starts and ends with the people you hire. Ideally, you want to hire someone who has diverse experiences, is digitally savvy, ready to experiment and passionate about your cause. It won’t be easy but you can find people that care about the same thing as you because shared values matter a lot. Those charities that can attract smart creatives will be much better equipped to tackle digital challenges so you should make this a primary objective of organisational change even if it might take some time.
Build creative work spaces
When it comes to creativity and innovation, one important parameter you can directly shape is your work environment. We have created a notoriously quirky environment. For instance, offices are designed in a way that help people bump into each other and floors don’t look alike so people actually start exploring the areas. So it’s less about decoration and more about creating an open space where everyone - managers and employees, can sit together which helps to exchange ideas more frequently.
Manuel Schaeffer is a direct partner operations associate at Google
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