Google and Alphabet risk being stuck in a #MeToo time loop
by J. Jennings Moss
Originally published May 19, 2019 in the Silicon Valley Business Journal.
Six months after a global walkout by thousands of angry Google employees and a few days before several hundred more employees staged a sit-in at the company’s Mountain View headquarters, I had the chance to ask the chairman of Google’s parent company how he felt about these confrontational workers.
John Hennessy, who replaced Eric Schmidt as Alphabet Inc. chairman in January 2018, reflected upon his time in academia administration. The computer scientist, businessman and professor spent 16 years as president of Stanford University, which he said gave him an advantage since “students never hold back” and were always willing to tell him how things should be run.
“I think what we’re seeing now is the scale of our companies has become so large, and if you have even a small percentage of your employees who are unhappy with something, in a company that has 100,000 employees, 2 percent is a significant number of employees,” Hennessy told me during an April 16 interview in front of more than 210 chief executives and other C-Suite officers gathered for the ACG Silicon Valley Grow Awards.
“They can cause a lot of concern, angst, disruption. I think they do it from the viewpoint of really being deeply concerned about these issues,” Hennessy said before offering a final thought about what the company’s leaders need to do when responding to employee protests. “Figuring out how we balance that against the interests of both the customers and the shareholders, that’s what we have to balance out.”
I was reminded about that exchange this week when it became clear that Google’s protesters were still angry and still demanding various corporate actions. In a post Wednesday on Medium, they issued four new demands related to how the company has handled past sexual harassment complaints and how it has allegedly treated protest leaders (one of the demands was a demand to satisfy all previous demands).
“Google seems to have lost its mooring, and trust between workers and the company is deeply broken,” said the post by the group Google Walkout For Real Change. “As the company progresses from crisis to crisis, it is clear Google management is failing, along with HR. It’s time to put HR on a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) and bring in someone we trust to supervise it. It’s time to escalate.”
What the protesters want, in part, is an independent investigation of the company’s human resource department’s response to “working conditions, discrimination, harassment and retaliation” complaints. They noted how Uber took this route, bringing in Eric Holder, former President Barack Obama’s attorney general, and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington to take part in an outside investigation of the company’s own sexual harassment complaints.
When the Uber investigation was done, it painted a highly critical picture of the ride-sharing giant. A week after its release, CEO Travis Kalanick resigned.
The good news for Uber is that it helped the San Francisco-based company regain its footing. Uber hired an outside CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, who helped reset the culture and guide the company toward its debut this week on the New York Stock Exchange.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Larry Page, the CEO of Google parent Alphabet Inc., would be wise to follow the Uber example and allow for such an investigation. That would satisfy a key demand from the protestors and allow the company to move forward (assuming employees accept the investigation’s outcome). Otherwise, Google and Alphabet could be stuck in a #MeToo time loop.