Google Companys Current Performance Management System - Case Study Example

Running Head: Reward management Name Lecturer Task Date Executive Summary This research report provides a situational analysis of a company and its current performance management system. In addition to this, it will also provide a link between the company's strategy and performance management system. The information obtained from the company will aid in this analysis. A range of analytic tools such as the cost benefit analysis will be used in this analysis. The analysis will involve an overview of its performance after the implementation of performance management system. This analysis indicated a greater improvement in its performance with the implementation of reward program for high performers and innovative employees. Despite, being costly to the company, the project is worth the investment. Introduction Since the time it was founded in 1998, Google company has had tremendous improvement and has developed to a level of being one of the best performing companies in the world. Initially, it was called Backrub and like today, it is the top search engine. Currently, the company has employed over twenty thousand personnel working across different sections including; engineering, marketing and operations (Savoia & Copeland, 2011, p. 56). Its success can be attributed to a number of undertakings. One of these is embracing innovation and enhancement of employee performance through rewards. Cook (2012) highlights the fact that Google, Inc has risen to the top five in ranking for embracing innovation and believes on the effectiveness of reward strategy. The company's mission statement is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful (Google Inc, 2013). Besides its mission statement, the company believes in a number of things. They include focus on the user and other things will follow later, doing one thing to the best, value of time, democracy of the user, open access to information wherever and whenever needed. They also believe in making money without evil, innovation to make all the information accessible, cross border information access, making challenges to be fun and use of innovation to make the current better. Theoretical Background Different scholars using different wordings but all centering on the same idea have defined performance management. According to Caldwell (2002), performance management is the active cooperation between the management and employees that aligns the employees towards the goals and initiatives of the organization. Performance management comprises of all activities adopted by any establishment to improve the performance of their employees (Selden & Sowa, 2011, p. 253). Situational analysis of Google Google’s head office is in California. Google offers wide and diversified products to countries worldwide. Some os its products includes Earth: Chrome; Visigami; SketchUp; Talk; Picasa; Gmail; Google News; Google Mobilizer; Google Sync, Mini, Mobilizer, Double click, Feed Burner, Gadgets, Profiles among many other products. Its products have made much impact in communication, accessing information and locating things easily. A research on its official website shows that it continuously made a profit of over $ 21 billion from the year 2008. It has acquired many companies like You Tube, Key Hole, Double Click, Grand Central among others in order to diversify its areas of operations. Google has more than 20,000 employees worldwide. Its culture enables attractive, convenient and conducive place to work for people from different spheres of life. The driving force of the employees is the ambition of the company to remain competitive in the economy. According to Chaffey (2007), Google business model is in the SEC filing statement, “organizing world’s information and making it accessible and useful”. They business models mainly are acquiring competitive firms, entering into alliances and mergers with other firms. It also relies in expanding into different marketing offerings to serve its large customer population. Their main model is to advertise and provide services to all online users. Google strengths include its innovativeness in provision of resources to its customers, good marketing strategy, and availability of quality personnel in its human resource, high capital and revenue streams. Google faces high competition from other companies like Microsoft, Mooter, Amazon, Gmail and Yahoo among many other companies. It also faces poaching of its employees by such companies. It also faces threats of not motivating its employees spread all over the world. Google current performance management system (PMS) Google has adopted a set of activities to enhance the performance of its employees. Google has managed to present a combination of financially successful company and offers a highly sought after work environment (Lashinsky & Vogelstein, 2004). The social culture among the employees enables good performance management system. Their social conduct enable employees to adhere to concern internal business practices (protecting confidentiality, respecting each other, protecting Google assets), good external relationships with clients and partners and good society image . The company’s human resource comprises a team of general HR business partners, executive human resource, line managers, internal consultants, recruitment teams, and training and development teams among others. Google has adopted standard best practice tools for the recruitment functions. It uses people operations system to keep account of resumes posted to their website, screen them and shortlist them. It has efficient selection processes. It uses “pay-for-performance” compensation program. This program focuses on provision of reward for strong performance and training for overcoming weaknesses for underperformance. This enables increase in compensation in accordance with the levels of leadership and responsibility. Google emphasizes increase in performance productivity by its employees through promotion of employee development. This is achieved through on-the-job training, frequent departmental meetings, class training conducted by higher officials and lectures by famous personnel. Such training equips the employees with skills, knowledge and promotes their talents that increasing their productivity in job performance. This company performs different kinds of performance appraisals to help in understanding the performance of its employees. It performs peer appraisals, self-appraisals, customer appraisals, use of balance scorecards to measure performance of employees, supervisor appraisals and team appraisals. They mainly relay on management by objective means whereby the employees are appraised on set standards depending on their areas of operations. Appraisal information is usually used in setting salaries, promotions, demotions, lay-offs, implementing training and worker development programs among other employee related activities. Motivation means like rapid-decision making, provision of an environment that encourages ambitious ideas helps in increasing productivity, (Schoenberger, 2004). They use 70/20/10 rule where by workers spent 70% of their time in search and advertising, 20% on project of their choice and 10%nto far-out ideas (Ben E., 2005 ). The fit between the PMS and the company strategy The objective of performance management process is to align individual performance and organization objectives and performance, (Seiden & Sowa, 2011). The main objective and business strategy of Google is to become competitive in the communication, provision of access to information and advertisement industry. The performance management practices of the company like motivation of workers, provision of training and worker development, performance appraisals, good recruitment practices has enabled the company’s workers to be more productive. The workers have improved individual and teamwork creativity and innovations that are helping the company to be more innovative in the creation of new products in the market. Innovativeness of the company has enabled it to control a big market share thus enjoying economies of scale. How to improve Google PMS Google is known to be great employer with majority of its success resulting from its efficient human resource programs and practices. There is however, some gaps in its human resource management that require improvement in order to be effective in performance. The recruitment process of Google is too long, time consuming due to its screening and interviewing process. This makes potential workers to quit before finishing the recruitment exercise. The recruitment process needs to be change to take less time than its current period of over four months. The time taken to give new recruits permanent jobs instead of working for long in contracts should be changed in order to encourage improved performance among such recruits. Its performance appraisals should be improved to cover on-the-job performance of new hires. Conclusion Performance management in organization is the driving force in the realization of improved productivity of its human resource. Google as a global leader in the advertisement and information access provision has achieved much success due to its performance management system. Google uses means like performance appraisals, management by objective, training and development of its workers among other means to improve the productivity of its workers. For success in an organization to be realized, its performance management system must align with its strategies, objectives and ambitions. This alignment and good HR practices has greatly helped Google to achieve its strategic plans. References Caldwell, C. M. Performance Management: EBook Edition. New York: AMACON Division of American Management Association. 2002. Print. Ben, E. Managing Google's Idea Factory. Business Week. Issue 3953(2005): 88-90. Chaffey, D. Google case study-covering Google business strategy and technology case. 2007. Web. 11 December 2013. Cook, J. How Google Rewards their Employees. 2012. web. 30 November 2013 . Google Inc. Google mission Statement. 30 November 2013. Web. < http://www.google.co.ke/about/ > . Google Market Share Up. web. Retrieved 30 November 2013 from http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/05/google -market-share-up- again.html Lashinsky, Adam and Vogelstein, Fred. “Is Google really worth it ?” Fortune (Europe). 150. 9(2004): 99 -99. Savoia, A. & Copeland, P. Entrepreneurial Innovation at Google. Computer, (2011): 56-61. Schoenberger, C. R. Out of Context. Forbes. 174. 11(2004): 64-68. Selden, S. & Sowa, J. E. (2011). Performance Management and Appraisal in Human Service Organizations: Management and Staff Perspectives. Public Personnel Management, 40.3(2011): 251-264. . Read More