FOUR BEST PRODUCTIVITY TRICKS I LEARNED AT GOOGLE
A TWO-YEAR
TENURE AT GOOGLE GAVE A TEAM OF PEOPLE THE PRODUCTIVITY SKILLS TO START THEIR
OWN VENTURE.
When Google acquired
the online photo editor Picnik in 2010, CMO Lisa Conquergood and the rest of
the Picnik team went, too. They worked on the site until Google narrowed its
focus and closed Picnik in 2012. Still believing in the concept, the original
Picnik team left Google and founded the photo-editing site PicMonkey.
However, during her
two years' tenure at Google, Conquergood got a chance to experience the
productivity and workflow in one of the world’s most successful companies.
"Google’s whole
mission is to organize the world’s information," she says. "They do
that internally as well."
While a startup can be
much nimbler than a large corporation, Conquergood and the rest of the
PicMonkey team decided to incorporate four productivity tricks they learned at
Google in their new venture.
Google has a large
employee base of passionate people, and Conquergood says they have to find ways
to be productive and efficient at scale. The company creates its own
productivity tools, some of which are later released to the public, such as
Google Hangout.
"Google has
offices distributed all over the world," Conquergood says. "It’s
important to get people together quickly and easily. Conference calls don’t
give you the ability to display something on your monitor to collaborate.
Google Hangout was created to let employees do that."
PicMonkey uses
Hangouts for meetings with partners: "It allows us to stay connected in a
more personal way versus a disembodied voice on the phone," says
Conquergood. "There is less tuning out on video calls as you are being
watched and are less likely to check your phone or have a side conversation.
Reading people’s body language and expressions are an important part of
communication, and video provides this hands down over a phone."
Each week, Google
employees are asked to complete something called Snippets, says Conquergood.
They record what they accomplished during the prior week and what they have
planned for the week ahead.
"The idea here is
transparency," she says. "Anyone can access anyone else’s Snippets.
If I’m interested in collaborating on a project, I can look at Snippets and see
if someone is already working on the same thing."
In a small startup,
there was no need to build infrastructure to accomplish the same objective.
Instead, PicMonkey uses something called a "Daily Standup" where
employees share their three main focuses for the day, and if they have any
roadblocks to completing those items.
"Like Snippets,
this is our touch point with each other," says Conquergood.
"Transparency helps us be super collaborative and fluid."
The amount of email
Conquergood received while at Google was overwhelming. While the company
doesn’t train employees on using Gmail more efficiently, Conquergood says
documentation and word of mouth became helpful in learning time-saving tricks.
One of her colleagues
shared the existence of a mute button where you can opt out of
multiple-recipient email exchanges that are no longer relevant to you. Conquergood
also uses the priority inbox tool that funnels important emails to the top of
your inbox. And she sets up smart filters to segment out emails that only need
to be checked once a week.
At PicMonkey,
Conquergood put these tools to use, too, but this time she places priority
designation on external emails instead of internal. "I get fewer emails,
but now I have a higher percentage that are important," she says.
"External emails are often about business development, and I need to look
at those first."
Meetings at Google
were meaningful, says Conquergood. "Before going in, we always knew the
goal of the meeting, and before we left, we were crisp on what the next tasks
were and who was assigned to them," she says.
This Google approach
is even more important in a startup, says Conquergood, where it’s vital to be
clear about who owns the next steps.
"While the
benefit of a small organization is that everyone is wearing multiple hats and
diving in to get things done, this can lead to overlap or assumptions that
someone else is owning a specific task," she says. "To avoid
overfunction or underfunction whenever a task or project is discussed, there is
a clear task and acknowledgement of who is driving or on point."
BY STEPHANIE VOZZA
http://www.fastcompany.com/3050258/know-it-all/the-four-best-productivity-tricks-i-learned-at-google?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-weekly-newsletter&position=4&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=09042015
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