I had the opportunity to attend Google’s Agency Developer Day and it was a great learning experience. I am always interested in getting hands on with exploring Google’s innovative ideas.
While I was definitely impressed by Google’s innovative products, I’m also impressed with many of the innovative benefits that it’s employees receive. Google truly understands the value of employees and it’s fairly obvious by productive and motivated they are.
The first speaker of the conference was explaining how Google is just as innovative internally as it is with the products it develops. This includes how Google handles travel. Here’s how they do it:
- Google runs a spider that that goes out and crawls travel sites, scrapes all of the prices for flights, and stores it in it’s travel database (it’s travel flight price system)
- When a Google employee needs to travel, they enter their departure/destination info and the flight price system kicks back what it considers a fair price. So, let’s assume that a Google employee searches for a flight from New York to California and Google’s system tells them, “You should pay no more than $500 round trip”.
- Once Google assigns the employee a fair price estimate, it’s up to the employee to find the right deal.
- Here’s the motivator:If an employee books a flight cheaper than what Google’s system estimates, the difference is deposited it in the employees’s personal travel savings account. Once enough travel dollars have been saved, they can take a flight to wherever that money gets them.Continued example: Google tells the employee that he/she should not spend more than $500 for a flight from NY to CA. If the employee manages to book a flight that costs $350, the difference of $150 ($500-$350) is deposited in to the employee’s personal travel savings account.
I think Google’s travel policy is a phenomenal idea. I believe that if companies/organizations/agencies were to adopt Google’s model of employee value, more innovation and productivity would be organically created.
