A culture that works

by Sarah Manners

I’ve always thought Google sounded like a pretty cool place to work and the link Riaan sent around to this article; “Meet Google’s culture czar” yesterday only reinforced these thoughts.

In the article Elinor Mills, from CNETNews.com interviews Google’s "Chief Culture Officer" and Director of Human Resources, Stacy Savides Sullivan. Her job is essentially to maintain, enhance and develop the Google culture and to ensure that the core values that they had at the very beginning, “a flat organisation, a lack of hierarchy, a collaborative environment” are still as important as ever. Now this has got to be pretty difficult seeings as there are 12, 000 Google employees.

While Google may seem to be an all conquering entity in an exceptionally cut throat industry, what sets them apart from the rest is that they truly seem to care about their employees. The annual happiness survey ensures that management are aware of every problem as well as to what they can do to make their employees happier, the perks include ski trips, the ability to work from home, the great food prepared by the Google chefs, by all accounts the offices are pretty cool and of course being able to say you work for the search giant, must be a thrill.

When a company explodes the way Google has done it is exceptionally easy to lose the kind of culture the organisation was built on. When I read this article I immediately thought of Quirk. While we’re by no means as huge as Google we have grown exponentially since I arrived at the cool warehouse type space in 2005. New QuirkStars are joining all the time and we’re always on the lookout for more. With three offices now in Jo’burg, Cape Town and London it’s got to be hard to maintain the corporate culture around which Quirk eMarketing was built. Fortunately Rob, Janine and Craig seem to have views very similar to that of Google. We even have our own Chief Culture Officer in the form of the one and only Andrew Bayley!

Right – If you’re lucky enough to have the day off – go out and enjoy yourself. No more work talk!

2007/05/01 | permalink | comments (3) | trackbacks (0)
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dont leave us yahoos out....

Posted by Smith on 2007/05/01

Been quiet for a while Smith. We've missed you!

Posted by Sarah M on 2007/05/01

Ditto,

Have had to put up with Rob telling me about the Caribbean, as well as a sneaky side trip home..

_www.ruminthesun.com_

Posted by Smith on 2007/05/02

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