Google’s Employee Perks and the Yellow Pages

Tuesday??s article in the New York Times about Google??s million dollar employee incentives inspired Shawn Wiora, a former Verizon Information Services manager and Yellow Pages consultant, to send me an e-mail asking what might happen if directory publishers followed suit and began offering more creative incentives for their people.

The article, Wiora said, made him think back to a question he helped me tackle in the recently published Kelsey Group White Paper on creating a customer-driven Yellow Pages organization (??Creating a Customer-Focused Yellow Pages Industry,? #04-04, 12/31/04): How do publishers motivate employees to be customer focused?

Google believes powerful employee motivation can come from creating opportunities for employees who contribute to important company initiatives to reap huge financial rewards. Google??s Founders?? Award, which is given to employees who work on outstanding projects, is backed by millions of dollars in Google stock.

According to the New York Times article, the first two Founders Awards given out last November to about 24 Google employees came with US$12 million in restricted Google stock. One award was given to the team that created the technology that enables Google to serve up those advertisements that are most closely aligned with a user??s search (how important is this innovation for Google?). The other award went to a team of Google business people who worked on a ??particularly important deal to us,? Google??s co-founder and co-president, Sergey Brin, told the New York Times. ??We have people who just do phenomenal things here. I wanted a mechanism to reward that.? The Founders?? Award is also a way to lure the best and the brightest people to Google post IPO, Brin said.

Wiora believes publishers, particularly those that want to become more customer focused, might be able to learn something from Google??s approach toward rewarding and motivating its people. I think he??s right. As we noted in the White Paper, employee involvement and buy in is critical to serving customers better and meeting and exceeding their needs. Therefore, all employees, from senior management to rank-and-file workers, need to be evaluated and rewarded based on customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics. And while it might not be feasible for Yellow Pages publishers to offer their most outstanding employees millions of dollars in stock, they can certainly up the ante and provide more creative and substantial employee incentives than the standard ??quality award? or 2.5 percent annual pay hike.

Asked Wiora: Can you imagine a Yellow Pages publisher offering their employees $50,000 for the best Yellow Pages idea in 2005? What is even more interesting to imagine are the amazing ideas that might result from such a reward.