Passion

For many years, Googlegeist was Google's annual employee survey, asking about everything from productivity to feelings of inclusion. To make the survey as much of a census as possible, and thus have meaningful data at even the line manager level, Google leadership would make big and eye-catching gestures to encourage participation, from delivering cupcakes to the microkitchen with Googlegeist logos in icing to announcing they would dress up as a bear and ask a question at TGIF if their team had at least 90% 'geist participation. Googlegeist results drove real change; teams would form a committee to act on significant negative feedback, processes could change if "I'm not slowed down by unnecessary bureaucracy" or "Google is hierarchical in ways that affect me negatively" scored high enough in a team. Some of Google's early DEI work was driven by answers to the question "Google is a place where all types of Googlers can succeed," particularly when those results were sliced by self-identified race and gender categories.

In 2023, Googlegeist was changed from an annual survey to a weekly email, with two questions from the original survey presented weekly. This provides an ongoing "quick read" of employee sentiment, so leaders don't need to wait a year to discover their team isn't feeling productive. But it also meant that taking Googlegeist was no longer a shared cultural experience, something we were all doing together. Product area or team leads might share some Googlegeist results at a quarterly all-hands meeting, but we didn't have a company-wide TGIF devoted to how the company is feeling about itself.

Sometimes the weekly Googlegeist email timing has been pretty amusing, though. This week I was asked "Over the past month, my work gave me a strong sense of purpose." My work the past month has been (1) tell people that they're wonderful and I'll miss them after I leave Google and (2) volunteering at Burning Man to ensure people have a good time safely. So yeah, that's a pretty good sense of purpose. I think it asked the same question at the start of January 2024 when my work "over the past month" had been climbing volcanoes and swimming with manta rays and walking through botanic gardens in Hawaii.