Google Employee Handbook
Google Benefits: What the Company Offers Its Employees
- This Employee Handbook is an advisory document and does not create rights or privileges for employees nor add duties or responsibilities for management. The failure of a supervisor to follow any procedure in this handbook shall not create any rights for any subordinate employee. No contract of employment is created by this handbook.
- Employee Handbook (Employee Policy) Employee Handbook (Employee Policy) Employee Handbook provides key policy regarding 'open door', safety, security, tobacco, etc.
- Employee Handbook. The state of Indiana Employee Handbook is provided only as a resource summarizing the personnel policies and procedures for the employment relationship between the state and its employees. This handbook is not a contract of employment, does not create any such contractual obligations for the state, and does not create.
Big Blue’s Blue Ribbon Standard – Sidling Up to the Benefits Bar
The Valve employee handbook. Valve’s notorious employee handbook went viral and is commonly shared as an example of a strong handbook (and for good reason!). I mean, how many company handbooks throughout history have gone viral? The handbook itself is.
Google benefits: What’ll they be – extra company-paid life insurance or a better health plan?
Google has scotched its white-shirt and blue-suit dress code, but its employees still enjoy some pretty cushy perks. In Money Magazine‘s ranking of the companies with the best benefits, Google came out on top, placing first in 2016 and second in 2017. Here’s what Googlers get so you can compare how your benefits measure up to the Big Blue standard.
Google Retirement and Savings Plan (Pension and investment plans)
The trend is toward “defined contribution plans,”, in which employee contributions are matched by the employer, and away from traditional “defined benefit” plans, which put a greater emphasis on the employer’s guarantee of a retirement income. Defined contribution plans are “portable,” meaning that you can take the money in it with you if you change jobs or go into business for yourself. Employees only benefit from old-fashioned pension plans as long as they stayed with the company a requisite number of years.
Defined contribution plans come in as many different varieties as Heinz condiments. Most popular of all are 401 (k) plans, which allow employees to contribute pretax-income. Many companies also will match employees contributions. Under certain circumstances, you can tap into your 401 (k) savings for unforeseen expenses. Profit-sharing plans enable employees to share in a company’s success. Likewise, Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) allow employees to purchase company stock at a discount or receive part of their salary in the form of company stock.
Google employees can choose between a traditional pension plan or a 401 (k), which includes matched employer contributions. IBM will match 50 percent of employee contributions up to 6 percent of salary.
Google also offers an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP. The company pays out up to 10 percent of an employee’s salary, depending on yearly revenues. In addition, employees participating in the ESOP can buy company stock for 85 percent of market share price.
Health Care and Health Plans
To clip costs, companies are promoting “managed care” plans and trying to wean employees away from traditional so-called fee-for-service plans in which they were free to choose their own doctors. Employees increasingly are being asked to pay a larger percentage of the cost of their health plan, presenting a Hobson’s choice higher deductibles or higher premiums.
Concerning Google employees, they can choose between a range of health care and dental plans. Employees pay a flat fee a month for individuals and up to twice a month for families, depending on the plan selected. The highest deductible amount can be as high as $2,000 for a family. Reimbursements cover 80 percent of costs for major medical; 100 percent for surgical and hospital costs.
Google Employee Handbook Template
At Google, dental insurance costs about $50 a month. The lifetime maximum coverage for dental work is around $20,000.
Life Insurance
In fact, most companies offer some form of life insurance today. The main differences are between plans that are fully employer paid and those that depend on employee contributions. Some companies offer a combination of both. Most core plans provide a cash payout equal to one times the employee’s most recent annual salary, sometimes with a cash maximum. Often employees have the option of purchasing additional coverage. In the case of IBM, this company’s employer-paid life insurance pays out up to $200,000, based on length of service. Employees can make contributions toward additional life insurance of up to five times their salaries.
Google retirement plan can safely lead you to the best beaches in the world. Photo by iGotOffer.com.
Disability Insurance
This benefit is more important than life insurance, since it is more likely you’ll need to make use of it. Employers differ in their formula for calculating short-term disability payments. Some use the salary continuation method in which employees receive their entire salary or a percentage of their salary, depending on years worked, for a defined period of time before long-term disability benefits kick in. Other employers use the “accrual” method. Your benefits are based on the amount of time you’ve worked for the company. Long-term disability payments are generally a fixed percentage of your salary. Many employers allow you to purchase supplemental coverage.
For Google employees, the short-term disability insurance provides full pay for up to one year. Long-term disability options range from 50 to 70 percent of pay.
Time Off
Googlers get five weeks of vacation after 20 years. Twelve holidays during the year. You can take parental personal leave for up to three years with benefits.
Extras Annual reimbursement of up to $2,000 for health and fitness programs or personal financial planning fees.
Flexible benefits at Google
Increasingly, you can order your benefits à la carte. Each employee receives a certain number of credits and can use them as he or she sees fit. For instance, you may be able to “buy” extra vacation days with part of your salary, “sell” the credits for cash, or use them to purchase extra life insurance or health insurance. Employees who are covered under their spouse’s health plan might want to cash in their own health benefits and invest the money in a company stock purchase plan or some other savings option. A number of companies also allow employees to put a certain percentage of their pretax salary in “spending accounts” for health or “dependent” care. Some employers match these contributions.
“Feel Good” Perks
Ready-to-est take-home meals. Dry cleaning on the premises. Company bank branches offering discount rate mortgages. These are just a few of the so-called time and convenience benefits some more enlightened companies are starting to offer overworked employees.
Welcome to the benefits smorgasboard
Finally, remember that chances are that your company benefits plan now offers you as many different choices as there are items at the salad bar in the company cafeteria. The number and range of options, of course, varies widely from company to company. Here are some of the things that are being served up.
With more companies cutting back on basic benefits like health care, such programs offer a relatively inexpensive way to help employees feel good about their employers. What’s next? Who knows… for example, IBM, Appple or iGotOffer offer “concierge” services that will take care of various errands for employees, from buying gifts to obtaining hard-to-get tickets to sport events.
Links
- Contact Google – Google
- Trade in your old cell phone for cash – iGotOffer
Google perks: The secrets behind America’s favorite employer [Video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ANgEo40VSE
Video uploaded by CBS News on January 22, 2013
Possibly one of the most sought-after companies to work for in the 21st century, it’s no surprise that Google has an awesome onboarding program.
Google hires only the best. Their interview process is notoriously rigorous and that’s if you get past the thousands of other applicants. All of this makes sense — they are a huge player in every niche in tech and have a solid monopoly on the search industry. And they want to stay there. Google can’t afford the unproductive employees, high turnover, or wasted potential that comes with a crappy onboarding program.
1. In-person training (pre-COVID)
Onboarding is particularly important at Google because the inner workings of the company are top-secret, often parodied, and fanaticized. New hires often have a Disney-esque image of their new job. Once hired, these new Googlers or Nooglers undergo a two-week in-person training and orientation program that explains the organizational structure, core technologies and programming practices. Beyond that, senior engineers deliver live lectures on Google practices and culture. during which they talk about their experience and share the “engineering perspective”. This way, higher-ups are better able to establish rapport and reach the Nooglers because everyone shares engineering values and language.
Of course, 2020 has forced Google and just about every other organization on the planet to rethink the physical component to their onboarding process. CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai recently announced that the search giant would have most employees working remotely until at least 2021.
2. Thorough Introduction to Company Culture
A class at Google, Life of an Engineer, is the lifeblood of the onboarding process. It helps developers acclimatize to the norms and and practices that make productive Google employees. For instance, one of Google’s fundamental organizational values is change—something that we can all agree we are more used to these days. Technological and organizational evolution is so rapid that a positive attitude towards embracing new systems and ways of doing things is critical to feeling comfortable and being successful at Google. During the course of the presentation, the new engineers learn their way around available intranet resources, which explain how to become a productive Google engineer. It will come as no surprise that Google uses an internal tool called “MOMA” to serve up these intranet resources through a Google-like search interface.
Other cultural axioms relayed include: “we are all researchers” “learning to find out” and “find role models”. Notice a trend? Due to constant change, employees are advised not to memorize primary information, but rather to understand how they fit into the larger system. That way, a Noogler isn’t left hanging when a process changes. When something changes, instead of worrying, they are confident they can easily find out how to work with the new system or information.
For engineers, a large part of the orientation process consists of browsing the elaborate bank of knowledge the engineering department has created. There are pages for teams, individual engineers, and virtual institutions with courses (see #4). The purpose of the initial class isn’t to relay all the information, it’s to give them an idea of the larger structure and the ability to leverage the knowledge throughout their career.
This perplexity to change isn’t unique to Google. Many growth organizations face the challenge of keeping everyone up to speed in an ever evolving organization. Since MOMA isn’t available to the public, these companies are beginning to leverage knowledge management systems like Obie to provide better access to frequently asked questions and centralize knowledge.
3. Checklists
A company-wide list lets Nooglers know what to expect in the first week to month and beyond. It acts as a reference so developers don’t feel pressured to memorize systems, practices, events and institutions in the first week.
4. CodeLabs
Even the juggernauts hired by Google have to learn how a particular proprietary technology works, so Nooglers attend hands-on tutorials called Codelabs to get up to speed. Of course, these days the Codelabs are held on Google Meet. Presumably a Noogler is an experienced developer so the point of these tutorials is to give them simple tasks to acclimatize to the technology. They’re also used by experienced engineers who wants to periodically refresh their knowledge of different instruments so there’s no shame in attending one. Since Codelabs sometimes lack context-specific information, Google created Codewalks that are hosted by a code’s designer or expert and go over examples and the source code.
5. Seriously, Extensive Resources
Beyond the class, intranet, rookie mailing list, and initial orientation, there is a company-wide glossary so everyone is speaking the same language and a developer handbook so everyone is on the same page stylistically. I won’t give an example here because I don’t want to risk making a complete fool of myself. But to clarify, the handbook doesn’t tell Nooglers not to pair plaid patterns, it determines the notes and hierarchy they code using. Nooglers aren’t required to memorize the glossary and handbook, but everything is there for reference.
6. On-the-job training
The first project assigned to new software engineers is called a “starter project”. The project is supposed to be short (around two weeks) and be a good introduction into a specialized field. Apparently the specialization aspect is less true in practice, but starter projects are low-risk and not overwhelming in the slightest.
7. They have a (functioning) mentorship program
Every Noogler is assigned a mentor who is successful within the company and who has taken a course on typical new hire needs. At first, the mentor is just a friendly face to meet them at the end of their first day and show them the facilities, but their formal relationship spans an average of three months. Google has tried to make mentorship informal, which means some mentors are better than others — and some veteran Googlers have been known to take whole groups of Nooglers out to lunch so they can ask questions.
Google engineers are usually organized in small teams to minimize the complexity of environment. This arrangement allows for close collaborative professional relationships, or cognitive apprenticeships, between the established team members and the rookie.
To overcome the perennial problem that newcomers are afraid of asking “stupid questions,” Google has created NEHEN or “Noogler Engineers Helping Engineering Nooglers,” a dedicated mailing list (although this audit is a couple years old so I’m assuming Google and NEHEN are post-email on this). The list is highly used in the first ten months of a given hiring period: a top poster makes fewer than 10 posts/month, but the list receives an average of 1000 posts per month.
8. They Still Check-in
Even once they graduated from Noogler to Googler, employees send weekly snippets, which are a very short bullet point describing what they did that week. At the end of every quarter, they take part in a self-assessment and set goals called Objectives and Key Results. During the initial orientation lectures, Nooglers create some of these measurable goals, which could be daunting, but the Rule of Thumb is they should achieve 70% of what they set out to do.
Enable one source of truth for your new-hires and level up onboarding by ensuring everyone has what they need to be successful on day one with Obie!
