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My Opinion on "Google Execs Have Ideas on How to Run Your Business"

 

 

I see merit in allocating 20% of employee time on anything they want. As it might lead to optimization, innovation. We often get busy following existing defined processes that we do not consider optimizing it or changing it. I think, having 20% time allocated to do whatever employees want will provide employees to think over processes they follow. Or design something new and come up with some concepts which might work better.

Saying that I also think to give 20% time to every employee in the company will increase costs. And might not be effective. There are some positions such as customer service representatives, if they get 20% to do whatever they like, that time will have to be covered by a different person that might increase the employee expense for the organization without adding much value.

Likewise, in factories also, I think it might increase the employee cost, as management needs to hire more people who will work to cover the people who chose not to work during their 20% off the time. It is not really off time, but the time when they can do something else.

For the engineer working in the projects, who usually have deadlines to meet, they usually get a lot of work was done near the deadline, I am not sure if giving them 20% time to do whatever they like would result in anything other than their project work. Otherwise, there will be a cost involved, as it would take 20% more time than it would have to take otherwise. There is one way of handling the impact on time while estimating the manager could factor in the 20% time employees would get when they can do whatever they would like to do. Or if the cannot take the extra 20% time, then they can hire more people.  That way, there will not be any impact on the delivery timeline, but there is no way to avoid additional costs. Otherwise, the quality of the project might get impacted negatively due to lack of time.

 


I completely understand the water cooler effect and I think personal rapport is great (Bergstein,2014). And being physically near each other helps with that rapport building. But if an organization demands to be at work every day regardless of whether then that might be a problem. In blue-collar jobs or customer-facing jobs that might be the only way. But considering the snow and other weather situations, organizations should allow employees to work remotely.

I work in IT services company. And we have onshore and offshore teams. In my current project, we have people all over. Some are in different time zones in the USA, some are in Europe and some are in Asia. We have a big chunk of the team in Boston. I feel the rapport is far better when we are collocated. And if there are cultural differences physical differences can magnify those differences. That way the water cooler effect helps to understand each other. And I have some experience of working remote. Last year in 2018 I spent a major part of it working from home. And it has some downsides, while I had regular meetings with the team but I definitely dealt with loneliness and lack of human interaction (Pinola,2017).

 

References –

Bergstein, B. (2014). Google Execs Have Ideas on How to Run Your Business.  MIT Technology Review. Retrieved from: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531056/google-execs-have-ideas-on-how-to-run-your-business/

Pinola, M ( March,2017). The 7 Biggest Remote Work Challenges (and How to Overcome Them). Retrieved from https://zapier.com/blog/remote-work-challenges/

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