Elephants Before Unicorns by Caroline Stokes

Author:Caroline Stokes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
Published: 2019-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

CASE STUDY

What We Can Learn from Google

A 2018 lawsuit brought national attention to corporate communications within Google. Engineer James Damore was fired after he wrote a screed against Google’s affirmative action and diversity policies. Although he had communicated these thoughts via Google’s internal network, the post went viral after it was posted online. Damore then brought a lawsuit against Google in which he cited many of these internal Google conversations. Employees who had been communicating privately among themselves found that their words had a national audience.

A noted part of Google’s corporate culture is the tendency for employees to have freewheeling discussions, some related to the job and some not. Damore included screenshots of these discussions in his lawsuit that found their way online. As a result, many of the participants were subjected to online harassment and doxing (when private information, such as a physical address, is revealed without consent). In response, Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced a new companywide policy specifically prohibiting doxing. In his statement, Pichai noted that although communication between employees takes place on internal channels, Googlers should be wary of how these conversations would appear if made available to the wider public. He added that employees should, “avoid blanket statements about groups or categories of people,” and avoid, “trolling, name calling, and ad hominem attacks,” stating that the goal of conversations should be to “understand more, not to be right.”

What happened at Google is an extreme example, of course. Regardless of your opinion of James Damore, I believe Pichai’s response was wise. The goal of the new policy was not to stifle conversations. Rather, it had two aims: to protect employees from harassment and to create the conditions for healthier, more inclusive dialogue.

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