ANNA BAIRD: Hi, I'm Anna Baird, one of our global subject
matter experts here at Google for culture and innovation.
In my experience working in consulting and technology
and particularly in startups, I have
seen the mindset of openness and transparency
be key to the right foundations for innovation and creativity
in the workplace.
Today I want to share a little bit about Google's culture
when it comes to openness and transparency.
And the journey really starts with our founders
Larry and Sergey.
So let me tell you a little bit about where Google began
and why and how it has tried to keep that mindset even
to this day.
From the very early days, transparency
has been a central focus for Googlers founding team, Larry
and Sergey.
You can imagine starting in a garage
in Silicon Valley in 1998.
You could see one another's work product.
You would easily share assets and documents.
You would have ongoing discussions to bring the team
up to speed on your efforts.
This is all logical when you are a handful
of people working together.
Like any company in growth mode, as Google grew up,
keeping this openness was something
the executive team wanted to champion.
For Larry and Sergey, this meant walking the talk.
And they did just that in company-wide meetings.
This transparency started with our all-hands meetings,
led by Google leaders.
This meeting provides a forum for any Google employee
to ask questions directly to the leadership team.
Making transparency paramount, sharing confidential financials
and plans is baked into the all-hands meeting,
now also known to Googlers as TGIF--
Thank Google It's Friday.
This is pretty impressive, given the risk
associated with this openness and transparency.
But Larry and Sergey felt strongly
that Googlers knew to keep information safe internally.
Even more importantly, having such transparency
allowed Googlers to see the real inner workings
of the organization.
Many employees remark that this transparency
makes them feel like they have a direct impact on the business.
Despite expansion and size of the executive team,
the company-wide meetings have remained
very open and transparent, including
the sharing of projects that wouldn't
be known to the street or external people.
In some cases, press have gotten a hold of leaked information
from these meetings.
And yet the executive team at Google
have remained firm that this culture of defaulting to open
is paramount to innovation, to creativity,
and to allow Googlers to feel like they
can have an impact at work.
And while default to open was born
in the all-hands environment, it didn't stop there.
Beyond company meetings, the culture of defaulting to open
has extended into how Googlers internally share information.
Google Drive was designed initially
for internal Google use and then later released
as a product to the public.
Drive enables people to share and collaborate in real time.
Employees can see other people's changes, edits,
and suggestions live as they happen.
But the real point here is that defaulting to open
has taken on a whole new meaning as Google
has created products such as G Suite and Google Cloud
Platform.
Now defaulting to open means that
when you create new Docs, new Sheets, new Drives, you
automatically default to it being
searchable by other Googlers.
You must actively make it private
or restrict settings if it is not
something you want to share.
This is quite a cultural shift when
you think about the majority of large corporate collaboration
rules where defaulting to private is the norm,
and sharing is the added action you take.
But at Google, it's the opposite.
And as we have taken G Suite and Cloud
public to offer to our customers,
we continue to encourage them to think differently
about the pros and cons of sharing and collaborating
in real time, allowing their own version of default
to open as a cultural basis for more innovation to emerge.
And so from the beginnings of Larry and Sergey
starting to share in meetings and encourage the company
to be open and transparent about our work to
where we are now with tools of enablement
through G Suite collaboration, you
might be wondering, well, what's next?
Or what else?
We have two specific examples of how the culture of default
to open has evolved at Google.
First, in our all-hands meetings now, we
have a tool called Dory that allows
any Googler watching from anywhere in the world
to ask a question.
These questions can be posted anonymously,
voted on by other Googlers, are displayed live,
and the leaders running the meeting answer the questions
in rank order.
That's a pretty cool way to be transparent about what
information employees want to know.
Our second example comes in the way of a debrief
after projects are complete.
We've developed the blameless postmortem as a way
to have an open, honest, and constructive view on what
did and didn't work in the project,
all without placing blame on any one person in the project.
Delivering the blameless postmortem
as a team allows everyone to have a say
and can be shared team wide, division wide, and even company
wide so that we can all learn from one another's experiments.
And that is where I leave you here today,
which is that defaulting to open for Google started small
but has enabled our culture to innovate.
Thanks for listening, and go forth and share.