5 Google Engineering Management Mistakes: Employee Rewards and Training Part 1

With all the kerfuffle around the interwebz of late around Googlers running away to Facebook and more recently the 10% payrise story I found this presentation, 5 Google Engineering Management Mistakes, informative and timely.

I was actually going to write about it before the 10% payrise story broke but didn't get around to it, actually the payrise bit just makes the whole presentation more interesting, basically it is about how Google trains and rewards its Tech Leads/Managers and the reward structure that they use across the company.

Things like 20% time and free soda etc have long been talked about as good reasons to work at Google, but this presentation actually focussed more on the negative issues surrounding employee rewards. Employee rewards and renumeration are a tricky area, simultaneously they are among the biggest cost a business faces and the most powerful tool for capturing and retaining quality staff. (If you pay peanuts you get Monkeys).


I want go through the whole presentation here, but I did want to highlight a few pertinent points.

1. Managers need good training.
2. Team Leaders should meet with staff 1:1 every couple of weeks.
3. Team Leaders where rewarded more for individual work than for getting the team to do good work, not enough recognition of managing team as good work.
4. Recognition is at least as important than monetary rewards.
5. Promotions system could be gamed and lack of promotion for some people lead them to leave.

Managerial training had never really entered my mind until my old  boss got to the personal development part of his MBA that he was studying part time. Suddenly our coaching sessions became more frequent and more meaningful, suddenly I was getting asked hard questions about career direction and training and a whole bunch of stuff that I never thought about as a recent graduate. It was annoying sometimes but it was also very good. This flows straight into the second point above about team leader meetings, a good manager can't coach you and provide good feedback if you never meet with them.

I've got some more stuff I want to post about training and staff incentives that I'll do in a later post (that I am yet to write), however I thought that the Google presentation was a good introduction. I've also got some thoughts about a disappointing phase that I went through at work, that is directly related to training and reward and how I ended up feeling very short changed.