Google’s 20% Formula in a Project Management Perspective

Google’s 20% Formula: releasing 20% of its employees’ time to work on anything they want. 

Google’s 20% formula should be taken with a pinch of salt, especially in the context of project management. I agree that the formula can encourage creativity and innovation, but for the formula to work without jeopardizing a company’s main operation and main projects, the company may require a higher workforce and capital. It may become another issue that should be dealt with.  

Even in Google, the formula has been scrutinized. In 2013, a Google employee said that the company’s 20% rule was as good as dead since it became too difficult for employees to take time off from their main duty (Mims, 2013). Marissa Mayer, the former CEO of Yahoo! and a former Google employee, also scrutinized Google’s 20% rule, calling it as 120% time rule in reality (D’Onfro, 2015). It is because the main job and the main project still require employees to spend almost 100% of their time or even more. It even stated in the article that they want the employees to overwork in a good and engaging way (Bergstein, 2014).

I still think that the formula can be applied successfully, but it comes with several risks that should be controlled first. The 20% rule can provide time to find innovative solutions that may lower costs while also saving time and maintaining quality. Exploring these opportunities takes an investment of time and energy, and on a time-sensitive project, the project manager must create the motivation and the opportunity for creative thinking (Watt, 2014).

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Google’s view on not letting people work from home

The main reasoning behind the prohibition to work from home is that it can not effectively develop positive workplace relationships and organizational culture, which Eric Schmidt called as water cooler effect. Physical separation may become an obstruction to coworkers’ interactions, slowing down knowledge transfer and the establishment of trust between coworkers.

So the main reason is not that the company does not have enough trust in the employees, but they have concluded that remote work is just not the right way. Various studies have found that frequent face-to-face interaction can foster the development of workplace relationships (Barry & Crant, 2000). Trust is more likely to be established in face-to-face communication over electronic communication (Rocco, 1998). And remote work may jeopardize knowledge transfer in a company (Taskin & Bridoux, 2010). However, these arguments may also be untrue.

As far as my research, there are many conflicting studies regarding the benefits and drawbacks of letting employees work from home. Allen et al. (2015) also noted these conflicting studies of telecommuting. For instance, Golden and Raghuram (2010) studied teleworkers for 6 months period and found that they establish more trusting relationships with their coworkers, stronger interpersonal bonds, and greater organizational commitment. Bloom et al. (2015) studied 16,000 employees in China and found out that employees who work from home have a 13% performance increase, as well as increased job satisfaction and loyalty.

I think it is safe to say that the work-from-home policy should be analyzed on a specific case-to-case basis. Google has tried some sort of “remote this and remote that”, and found out that it just does not work (Bergstein, 2014). It’s not that the company does not trust its employees to work remotely, but it is considered an unfit policy. However, it may not be the case with other companies with different backgrounds.

References

Allen, T. D., Golden, T. D., & Shockley, K. M. (2015, September 24). How Effective Is Telecommuting? Assessing the Status of Our Scientific Findings. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 16(2), 40–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100615593273

Barry, B., & Crant, J. M. (2000). Dyadic communication relationships in organizations: An attribution/expectancy approach. Organization Science, 11(6), 648-664. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.11.6.648.12537

Bergstein, B. (2014, September 29). Google Execs Have Ideas on How to Run Your Business. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/09/29/250066/google-execs-have-ideas-on-how-to-run-your-business/

Bloom, N., Liang, J., Roberts, J., & Ying, Z. J. (2017, February). Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(1), 165–218. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26372598

D’Onfro. (2015, April 17). The truth about Google’s famous “20% time” policy. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-20-percent-time-policy-2015-4

Golden, T. D., & Raghuram, S. (2010). Teleworker knowledge sharing and the role of altered relational and technological interactions. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 31(8), 1061-1085. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.652

Mims, C. (2013). Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead. Quartz. https://qz.com/115831/googles-20-time-which-brought-you-gmail-and-adsense-is-now-as-good-as-dead/

Rocco, E. (1998, January). Trust breaks down in electronic contexts but can be repaired by some initial face-to-face contact. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 496-502). https://doi.org/10.1145/274644.274711

Taskin, L., & Bridoux, F. (2010). Telework: A challenge to knowledge transfer in organizations. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 21(13), 2503-2520. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2010.516600

Watt, A. (2014). Project Management. BCcampus Open Textbook project. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. https://opentextbc.ca/projectmanagement/

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