Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.

    • Reyali@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      H&R Block has prioritized these worker-focused things since 2020, and in the past year its stock price has frequently broken its record high since going public in 1962. Its CEO has been interviewed by Fortune magazine about his commitment to keeping a “work from anywhere” policy at the company. The business is “winning” by the most public metric used to determine that, and I think their commitment to these exact things is a big part of why.

      It’s amazing: when you treat employees like human beings, you tend to have better employees, and better employees make you more successful. /shocked pikachu face

  • psvrh@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    Because Google was so focused and strategic before the pandemic rollseyes.

    The issue is Google’s broken governance and incentive system, which gives product owners and executives incentives for new products and actively disincentivizes maintaining and improving existing products…and that was a thing from well before the pandemic hit.

    It’s why Google launched three pay systems and had five messaging systems at the same time.

    And, finally, this is all because of the strategy set by senior leaders.

  • LittleBorat3@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Did some companies really go back to the office100%? We sure did not, going to the office is more of a social thing, maybe for all hands meetings, customer presentations and that kind of stuff.

    The company wins because they can have a shiny office in the city that does not need to have workplaces for all employees but maybe 20% of them at a time.

    With all the weird stuff that people do at home, productivity is still higher. In times of crunch working from home has saved me more than once. Etc blabla is this really still a discussion nowadays?

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      In my time managing a team of about a dozen WFH employees, I had 10 of the 12 overworking every damn week. They were putting in time off-the-clock just because they were sitting at their desk without anyone coming in to shut off the lights and because they were comfortable at home. In the four years or so that I did that job, I had more problems with people overworking themselves than slacking off.

      There were a couple times employees were obviously doing the bare minimum and playing video games. Since I managed in-person teams as well in the past, I know that this is normal, there will always be some percentage of employees that cannot stand working and try to do anything to avoid it. This happens WFH as well as in offices, but when it’s WFH the company managers and owners don’t have visibility on it, and thus feel not in control, and that’s the very worst feeling for most of these folks who run companies.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      3 months ago

      We do a day a week just to catch up and remember how to speak.

      We might occasionally have to come in for a few days if the owner is in the country. That’s like once or twice a year.

      I was asked how I felt about coming back full time and I told them straight. There’s lots of places that don’t demand that, and they pay more than we do. Don’t lose good staff to nonsense policy.

    • Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      I think it’s been proven time and time again that return to office mandates are a way to avoid severance packages. People end up leaving voluntarily. In the age of tens of thousands of layoffs at all the big tech companies this has to have saved them thousands of salaries worth of compensation packages.

      They don’t care about the “quality” of workers because if someone is truly important they get exceptions, everyone else is imminently replaceable.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      My last two companies have been mostly fully remote, we’ve done all hands meetings, we’ve done regular scheduled meetings, and everything in between all remotely. It works well, employees are happier and we produce better work as a result.

  • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    It honestly took me a while to figure out why people were criticizing him. I read his remarks as a positive and didn’t realize he thinks having a work-life balance is a bad thing. Odd coming from someone who is fucking retired. “You work, I live. Things are balanced.”

    • isles@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Odd coming from someone who is fucking retired.

      I’d suspect he sacrificed work-life balance his whole career (yes, CEOs are known for golfing and vacations, but I bet they still think of work 24/7). So just like people complaining about student loan forgiveness, some people get so angry if they perceive someone might have an easier experience than they did.

    • lustyargonian@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      He’s complaining that googlers aren’t killing products faster anymore because of the remote work. It was easier to just say “hey how about we kill gtalk” over on campus coffee shop discussions, but now they’ve to do that on Google meet and it limits the imagination of what all they could kill next week.

    • Curious Canid@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Well, clearly, their executive team all need to be in the office. Their actual workers can be trusted to work from home.

  • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Of course, of course. It can’t possibly have been management infighting, lack of direction and destructive short term greed. No, it was people wanting to see their kids that are to blame.

    • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      The suits have taken over and are cannibalizing the current portfolio. Search is being transformed into a large AI powered advertisement billboard to pump up the profit. Now they’re all surprised search is less used and realize that search is the gateway to their other services. And the management blame storm begins.

  • einkorn@feddit.org
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    3 months ago

    told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.”

    Yeah, so I know for whom I wouldn’t want to work after graduating.

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 months ago

    If he has time to complain about other people, then he is probably not essential to the operation. Maybe he should be fired instead.

    • Dead_or_Alive@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      He retired from his role at Google a few years ago so yeah…

      But he is still a typical C-Suite asshole. Blame workers for strategic corporate failures (Googles competition all offer WFH) and take personal credit (and bonuses) for any and all successes.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      He’s retired, hasn’t been involved with Google for years. He’s just insanely rich, and still holds billions in Google shares.