I don’t understand why everyone is so fired up about this. He isn’t threatening their salaries or their jobs – he said their BONUS was at stake! Any company I have ever worked for, from Fortune 500 Ingersol Rand to a marketing firm, bases salary and bonus on performing your job to meet the business goals of the organization. If you don’t eat the dinner you don’t get the desert.
Besides, there are lots of people looking for jobs these days through no fault of their own. If Google employees can’t develop social, or if they can’t learn how to become a social business themselves and be pertinent, then people should not get paid. They should worry about their jobs. Other Enterprise organizations are clearly taking this seriously like Kraft Food and Cisco, etc. If you want to have a competitive advantage you need to become a social business and transformation can be difficult.
Dear Google: You Can’t Threaten People Into Being Social
There have been signs over the past few months that Google is feeling the pressure to step up its social efforts — the +1 features it announced a week ago being just one of them. But the clearest indication yet is a memo from newly-minted CEO Larry Page that told employees their bonuses are effectively on the line if the company’s social efforts don’t work. The Google co-founder may see it as a carrot, but many of his employees are likely to see it as a stick — and you can’t threaten people into being social.
Will Larry Page’s attempt to rally the troops and incentivize them to get social actually have some tangible impact on Google’s ability to succeed in this area? That remains to be seen, but I’m skeptical. I think Google staffers are more likely to resent these moves rather than feel inspired, and resentment isn’t a great foundation for a new social effort.
