Google re:Work Shares Resources to #MakeWorkBetter
I love writing with mechanical pencils. My mother bought me a Mickey Mouse mechanical pencil over a decade ago and it’s one of my favorites. It’s fun and brings me a smile while I’m working. We could all use more of those.
It will come as no surprise that we spend a good deal of our time working. As such, I decided that one of my resolutions for 2016 is to have fun office supplies. It might sound silly but I’ve decided that, given how much I work, I am going to treat myself to fun office supplies.
The reason I’m sharing with you a story about Mickey Mouse mechanical pencils is because I discovered a website that you might be interested in checking out. It’s called re:Work. The site is hosted by Google.
re:Work is founded on the idea that we spend too much time at work not to have a happy, healthy and productive work experience. Their goal in creating the site is to share data and information from Google and other organizations about the employee experience.
The site is divided into five subject categories. Currently, the subjects are goal setting, hiring, managers, people analytics, and unbiasing. For each subject, the site shares how many guides, case studies and blog posts are associated with each for easy navigation.
Blog: It appears the blog posts once a week or every other week, so it’s definitely manageable. Writers are from Google, as well as academics. I thought the topics were forward-thinking. For example, the front page of the blog has posts on civility at work, unconscious bias, and “job crafting.”
Case Studies: A wide variety of subjects from benefits to productivity to recruiting. I liked the balance between industry, government and non-profit sectors. And the case studies were very easy to follow: here’s the challenge, this is what we did, and here are the results.
Guides: The site includes what I would call “how to” activities called guides. For example, there’s a guide called “Adopt an analytics mindset” which has 8 steps, including the questions you should ask and the analytics value chain. Readers can share the guide, print it and also rate its usefulness. I could see this being something that a manager forwards to an employee. Or an employee prints and tries to practice.
While Google admits they won’t be able to cover every topic and they aren’t experts at everything, they are making a commitment to share what they know. And that’s fantastic.
The goal of re:Work isn’t for organizations to duplicate what Google has done. It’s to gain some creative inspiration from their stories and information. Take what appeals to you and ask how this could work within your organizational culture. Great approach!
We don’t have to recreate the wheel to re:Work our organizations. We just need to be open to listening and sharing the stories of others.
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