Essay Example on Google: A Leader in Tech Innovation and Online Services

Introduction

Google is a search engine company based in Mountain View, California. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brian in 1998 and started as an online search company (Hosch & Hall, 2020). The company is currently offering 50 internet products and services ranging from emails to online document formation to software for tablet computers and phones. Due to its dominance and diversity of products and services, the company has remained among the top four high-tech companies in the market, along with Microsoft, IBM, and Apple. The operation of Google is built around proprietary computer codes that include Map Reduce and Google File System (Hosch & Hall, 2020). Due to the fast growth of Google, the two founders hired Eric Schmidt as the chairman and CEO of Google to avoid more internal management problems. The company spends large sums of money on sales and marketing to secure significant Internet marketing advantages. Google provides Gmail, Google Books, Google Earth, Google Apps and Chrome, Android operating systems, social networks, and Google+ (Hosch & Hall, 2020). Google's mission statement is to consolidate the World's information and make it collectively accessible and, at the same time, useful (Schneider, 2019). Google's mission statement and corporate culture suggest that money can be made without doing evil, work is supposed to be challenging, and the challenge should be fun.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Organization Structure

The company uses its organizational structure and culture to accomplish intended goals in developing proficiencies for corporate growth. Its system is designed to support the need for innovation and creativity (Smithson, 2019). The company structure of Google has strengthened business competencies to counteract competitive forces from other tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon.com, Facebook, Apple, and IBM (Smithson, 2017).

Google applies a divisional-sized organization structure, one of the organization's structures under Mintzberg's framework. Divisionalized form mostly applies to large organizations with diverse products and services, such as Google. In a Divisional form structure, the central headquarters of the organization supports self-governing divisions that contain their unique structures and make their own decisions (Sinha et al., 2017). These divisions are marketing departments, operations departments, financial departments, and many others. To create divisions and group employees, Google makes use of function as the center for grouping its workers and creating divisions such as the Engineering and design group, sales and operations group, and product management group (Smithson, 2019). Due to its diversity of products and services, the company also makes use of products to create divisions, such as the pixel devices development group. In its divisional form, the company has managed to maintain flatness such that the company's employees can avoid intermediate administration and communicate directly with the higher management, which helps the employees to meet and share info across the respective teams or departments (Smithson, 2019). Google’s organizational structure supports the company’s organizational culture to maximize creativity and innovation through group and departmental divisions in terms of its products and services. The groups or rather departments are required by the company to come up with new products or upgrade the existing products according to the current client’s needs. This configuration between Google’s corporate structure and culture helps the company to achieve a competitive advantage against other competing companies such as Amazon.com, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook. Despite several reorganizations and restructuring, the company has maintained its organizational structure.

Google Strategic Objectives

The company also possesses a strategic objective of developing new products while it continues to upgrade the existing products and services. The company has a market penetration strategy since it primarily depends on market penetration as an intensive growth strategy. The purpose of this strategic objective is to acquire more customers from the firm’s market, especially outside the USA in countries like China, where Google competes with large search engines. Additionally, Google has aimed to differentiate its products. The company aims to continue ensuring that its products are unique and stand out in the market in terms of their features and function. It will ensure the company has competitive products, which will help the company achieve a competitive advantage in penetrating the market and also increase Google’s market share. The company aims to attain quality and customer experience by focusing on the development of customer support through calls, which will ensure that customer satisfaction is at 100 %.

Employee Motivation

The company uses several theories to achieve employee motivation at the workplace, which eventually improves output for the company. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs is one of the theories whose aspects have been adopted by Google. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory by Abraham Maslow that states that people are often motivated by the five types of needs: physiological needs, safety needs, love, self-esteem needs, and needs of self-actualization (McLeod, 2020). In the theory, which is presented in a pyramid form, the needs lower down in the hierarchy should be fulfilled first before the needs up the pyramid are attended. The psychological needs under the theory are food, water, air, and sleep. Therefore, to ensure a comfortable working environment, the employees should be provided with these needs. If the psychological needs are not met, then it is hard for the workers to advance to the next level of the pyramid since they won’t have the motivation.

The motivational system of Google covers all the five needs in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The company uses various extrinsic motivators to address the security, physical, and social needs of its workers. To ensure that the company employees strive to accomplish their higher levels of self-actualization, the company pays its employees $6000 annual education costs and lets their employees work independently.

Google employs equity theory in its operations, where it believes that treating people should come first before making money. Through the application of this theory, the company aims to motivate its staff once they recognize that they are being treated well by the company. The company strives to treat all the employees equally and let them air their views and ideas while choosing the projects they would like to work on, depending on their capability levels. Giving the employees such freedom motivates them to do their best in the projects they choose and, most importantly, deliver their work on time since they determine their own work schedules.

Google creates uncountable openings for the company staff to get out of their offices and join events such as wall climbing, hiking, and pajama and costume parties regularly. These events enhance the employees ' ability to interact, make friends, and share ideas. This primarily contributes to their happiness because they get time to have fun and relax, which eventually improves the employee's work effectiveness and quality.

To motivate its employees, the company has created a serene and comfortable working environment. The company possesses nicely designed offices with a lively green environment with a conference room designed like a small apartment where employees are even allowed to bring their dogs. Such type of an environment helps the employees to feel at home and have a sense of belonging. The Google employees deliver the best because their happiness needs and sense of belonging are met. Most of all, the social need under Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is satisfied.

Google also provides the employees with their health covers and that of their families, which fulfills the need for safety under Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Further, it ensures that there is insecure compensation for workers, such as salary and job security. This has, in return, motivated employees, leading to retention of performing and happy staff that are very productive. It is attributed to the company’s continued success since its inception.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths and Weaknesses

The strength of Google is that it gives access to the widest group of internet users across the world (Vu, n.d). It helps the company to gain an advantage over other tech giants. Additionally, the company provides a quality customer experience, which enhances customer retention. The company also has open-source products such as Google Maps, which are basic in the everyday operations of the world population(Vu, n.d).

Google's weakness is that the company relies on one source of income, which is advertising, with 95% of Google’s revenue coming from advertising (Vu, n.d). The company offers some unprofitable products since they don’t charge users while it is at the same time involved in patent litigation, which costs time and money for the tech giant.

Opportunities and Threats

Google’s major opportunity is the ever-growing number of internet users across the world. This automatically improves its revenue and user base. The company has also been involved in several acquisitions, which have helped it to grow and compete against other tech giants, with some of the acquisitions being YouTube and Motorola Mobility (Vu, n.d). Google has also made several innovations, such as the creation of driverless electronic cars without wheels and pedals and Google fiber cables.

Threats for the tech giants are its unprofitable products and intense competition that arises from other tech giants such as Microsoft and Yahoo. An increased number of mobile users is a major threat to the company since it means that fewer searches will be done on computers (Vu, n.d). Additionally, Google has been accused of prioritizing its own searches compared to the competitors’ through the EU antitrust laws, which might end up getting the company heavy penalties and also cost its image.

References

Hosch, W & Hall, M. (2020, May 11). Google: American Company. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Google-Inc

Schneider, L. (2019, June 25). Company Profile and Job Information for Google. Balance Careers. https://www.thebalancecareers.com/google-overview-company-culture-and-history-2071320

Sinha, R., Singh, P., Thakkar, K., Shah, J., & Sharma, S. (2017). A Study on Mintzberg’s Framework for Organizational Structure. file:///C:/Users/user1/Downloads/Mintzberg%20Organisational%20structures.%20%20Good%20Article%20%20(1).pdf

Smithson, N. (2019, February 13). Google’s Organizational Structure and Organizational Culture (An Analysis). Panmore Institute. http://panmore.com/google-organizational-structure-organizational-culture