Chapter 8: Training & Development

Training and Development in Google’s

Googler-to-Googler (g-2-g)
Course: Global Talent & Human Capital Management/MIHRM 704/Summer 2020
Guide: Create an employee-to-employee learning program

Introduction:
Learning happens every day in the way we work. It's the way we interact with each other
internally with our teams, externally with our customers, as well as with our partners. Some
important facts that we should know about the learning and development. Research shows that:
12% of learners say they apply the skills from the training they receive to their job.
38% of managers believe that their learning programs meet their learner’s needs.
1 out of every 3 employees say that uninspiring content is a barrier to their learning.
68% employees prefer to learn at work, 58% prefer to learn at their own pace, 49% prefer to
learn at the point of need.
#1 reason employees feel held back from learning is because they don't have the time.
94% employees would stay longer if their company invested in their career
Organizations that embrace a culture of learning create an environment that encourages curiosity
and knowledge sharing, which in turn leads to better business outcomes. A strong learning
culture can better position your organization for future needed skill shifts and primes employees
to think and act more like owners when it comes to their own development needs. One effective
way to promote a learning culture is through an employee-to-employee learning program.
Employees develop and grow by teaching others, and the people in your organization learn from
peers with first-hand knowledge of the business.
At Google, 80% of all tracked trainings are run through an employee-to-employee network
called “g2g” (Googler-to-Googler). This volunteer teaching network of over 6,000 Google
employees dedicate a portion of their time to helping their peers learn and grow. Volunteers —
known internally as “g2g’ers” — can participate in a variety of ways, such as teaching courses,
providing 1:1 mentoring, and designing learning materials, and they come from every
department of Google.
Many of the most popular classes led by g2g’ers focus on general professional skills, like
negotiations and leadership, and role-related skills, like sales training and Python coding. It’s
also helped upskill huge numbers of employees around new opportunities. For example, as
mobile computing on smartphones exploded, thousands of Googlers went through an Android
training bootcamp run by the very Googlers who worked on Android.

Training & Development MIHRM/MBA/EMBA Summer 2020

Google still uses vendors (and a few internal “professional” trainers) to teach some classes, but
sparingly, and for content that’s either highly specialized, or targeted to executives.
An employee-to-employee learning program is not about “doing more with less.” If you’re
looking to save money on a training budget and mandating participation, you could end up with
resentful employee teachers delivering rushed classes to confused employee learners. Before
proceeding, consider potential pitfalls. One thing that has made the g2g program so successful at
Google is that the employees participate voluntarily and are supported by a culture that values
learning.

Define your learning goals:

What are your goals for learning in your organization? What do you hope to achieve by
launching an employee-to-employee learning program? These are important questions to ask at
the start. The goal at Google is to provide the right learning to the right people at the right time.
For g2g, this means focusing efforts on providing high quality learning experiences at scale
through community-driven initiatives.

This goal is anchored on three core beliefs:

 All employees have the right to learn, regardless of location, role, tenure or level in the
organization.
 Learning is the responsibility of the entire company, not just the Learning &
Development team.
 Trust that employees are smart, capable and motivated — they have the capacity to grow
Google’s learning culture.
Make sure your org size can support an employee-to-employee program. While empowering
employees to teach and learn from each other can offer tremendous benefits, it may also be
impractical given the size of your organization. There is a cost to selecting, supporting, and
training employee facilitators. Take time to do an analysis to determine your setup and operating
costs and comparing that to what it would cost to provide the same training via other means (e.g.,
vendors or full time staff).
Make sure the content can be appropriately delivered by a peer. If you’re trying to teach highly
specialized content, content aimed at your most senior leaders, or content that could be very
sensitive, consider having a professional deliver that content. You don’t want to setup an
employee facilitator to fail by giving them an impossible task.
Remember that not all learning happens in a classroom with a single teacher in front of multiple
students. So even if a full employee-to-employee learning program doesn’t make sense for your
organization, consider the many other ways your employees can help one another learn. One on
one mentoring programs can be incredibly powerful or having employees hold open office hours
can be an easy way for expertise to be shared.

Training & Development MIHRM/MBA/EMBA Summer 2020

Make learning part of the culture:
In order for an employee-to-employee learning program to work, it needs to be part of a wider
organizational culture that values continuous learning. No matter your industry, it’s likely that
your employees, your organization, and, ultimately, your bottom line would benefit from a
culture where employees were constantly learning new things, seeking out new opportunities,
and developing new skills.
The success of the g2g program at Google is due largely to the culture of learning fostered within
the company. The g2g program is aligned with Google’s core learning philosophies:
 Learning is a process, not an event that requires motivation, opportunities to practice,
and continuous feedback.
 Learning happens in real life, especially during transitions or challenging moments.
 Learning is personal. Everyone has different learning styles and different levels of
challenge within which they can work.
 Learning is social. Google supports an environment for Googlers to connect with peers
for advice and support.

Here are a few things Google has done to help make peer-to-peer learning a part of
the culture:
 Strong leadership sponsorship: Like so many large-scale efforts, getting support from
the top is critical. Employees need to hear (and hopefully see) that leaders believe that
learning is an important part of work. At Google, one senior leader said: “It’s very
unlikely that you’ll ever learn faster, or better than you will from one of your fellow
employees.”
 Connection to core values: It can be easy to pay lip service to employee development,
but it’s difficult to fake if your core values include how you treat employees. If your
organization is serious about fostering a learning culture, tie it into your organizational
mission or core values. By then supporting an employee-to-employee learning program,
you’re sharing responsibility and ownership for a learning culture with your employees
and everyone can see how it connects to your organization’s reason for being.
 Start early: Making it clear and explicit from day one that learning is expected and part
of everyone’s job is an important opportunity. Consider how you can incorporate it
directly into new hire orientation or encourage managers to bring it up with new team
members. At Google, the new-hire (“Noogler”) orientation program itself features
multiple g2g facilitators talking about a variety of topics.

The g2g team is often asked: “How do you motivate people to do something outside their core
job?” The answer is actually pretty simple; trust people to do great work, give them tools and
feedback, show them how it connects to the big picture, and then step aside. When the team

Training & Development MIHRM/MBA/EMBA Summer 2020

focused their strategy around trust and support, participants have consistently exceeded
expectations.

Learning & Development Best Practices from the Top Silicon Valley
Companies
1. Google: G2G (Googler-to-Googler) Training Method
At Google, 80% of all tracked trainings are run through an employee-to-employee network
called “g2g” (Googler-to-Googler). The “g2g” learning program is created to offer first-hand
knowledge in different fields, from employees to employees. What makes the program so
successful? Summed up in one sentence, it promotes a culture that values learning.
First, Google acknowledges the employees’ right to learn. Second, it gives them an opportunity
to grow with an on-the-job-training and allows them to give back to other employees by
participating in the program. Finally, with the g2g program, the company trusts its employees
“to be smart, capable and motivated and have the capacity to grow the organization’s learning
culture.”
So, even if the program is of a “voluntary nature,” employees care for the value it provides both
to them and the organization as a whole, and support its nurturing power. Google has learned to
prioritize relationships and fun at work because studies have shown happy employees
outperform the competition by 20% and are 12% more productive. In fact, Google raised its
employee satisfaction by 37% by implementing company culture initiatives.
Micro learning (the Whisper Course) and Nudges for a Better Organization
According to Google, “your own employees are perhaps the most qualified instructors available
to you.” The role of the managers in establishing a “healthy team culture” for group employee
learning is immense.
Google’s bite-sized lessons, part of the so-called “Whisper course” were created to make
messages “stick.”
The micro learning method was used to remind managers “of the importance of regularly
showing genuine and explicit appreciation for their team members.” A survey showed that
because of its positive effect, 95% of the participants would recommend the whisper course to
fellow Googlers.
Google still uses micro-learning to nudge managers “to take action when they receive their
survey results on how they are doing as a manager.”
An internal analysis showed that “Google managers who received a whisper lesson improved on
that behavior in the next survey by 22–40 percentage points.”

Training & Development MIHRM/MBA/EMBA Summer 2020

Nudges are, “simple interventions that change behavior in a predictable way.” Based on
behavioral economics, which studies why people sometimes make decisions against what seems
rational or logical, nudges can improve work experience in organizations. But only if they are
transparent and don’t limit choice.

2. Microsoft — Growth Mindset equals Skills Improvement

Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has spent years researching how
having a ‘growth mindset’ impacts students’ academic performance. It is important to note that
her impactful work influenced many people, including a 13-year old student who put “Prof.
Dweck’s findings into practice” and “experienced great improvement” in those areas of his life.
Among other things, the student’s letter included a candid confession, which she read during her
TED Talk with a smile on her face and a fascination that shined through,“ I now realize I’ve
wasted most of my life.”
So, when Satya Nadella became the boss of Microsoft in 2014, he expanded on prof. Dweck’s
impressive work based on solid research. The goal was to encourage employees to embrace a
change in their mindset and believe that if they are eager to learn, their skills will improve over
time.
Fixed vs. Growth Mindset
Prof. Dweck’s studies show a clear difference in achievements between students with a fixed vs.
students with a growth mindset. Through the years, she discovered that the school system that
praises talent and intelligence has failed because it makes students run from difficulty. In one of
her studies, scientists measured the electrical activity from the brain as students confronted an
error.
The brains of fixed-mindset students showed hardly any activity because they run from the error.
On the other hand, the brains of growth-mindset students showed substantial activity because
they engaged deeply and processed the error. The prof. is confident that “we can change
students’ mindsets. In one study, we taught them that every time they push out of their comfort
zone to learn something new and difficult, the neurons in their brain can form new, stronger
connections, and over time, they can get smarter.”

Training & Development MIHRM/MBA/EMBA Summer 2020

3. Facebook — Learning Culture where Innovation can Thrive
Facebook’s approach to L&D is multidimensional. With an objective to “promote respect and
foster a culture of continual learning,” Facebook’s learning culture is designed to provide
employees with personalized experiences for individual learning.
Their most recognized program, Managing Unconscious Bias, is based on the “belief that
understanding and managing unconscious bias can help employees build stronger, more diverse
and inclusive organizations.” The goal of the program is to train employees to acknowledge
workplace bias and reduce its negative effects.
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize-winning psychologist, introduced the notion of cognitive
biases together with Amos Tversky. Their theory is based on the explanation that human
judgments and decisions tend to differ from rational choice theory that is based on the premise
that the social behavior results from the behavior of individual actors.
The rational choice theory assumes that people make their personal decisions based on
preferences among available choice alternatives. According to Kahneman’s theory that shattered
the way we think about decision-making, human judgment and decision-making involve mental
shortcuts that help us deal with large amounts of information, quickly.
Because of these mental shortcuts, called heuristics, we make rational decisions without much
effort, which leads to decision-making biases. Both Facebook and Google, use the potential of
applying behavioral economics to help people value an idea and encourage them to make better
choices, which leads to better organizations.
The company’s signature training “Bootcamp” is a six-week introduction to the website’s code
base, mandatory for all Facebook engineers. The program has been a success in maintaining the
culture of the engineering team throughout Facebook’s growth.
“Bootcamp” allows engineers to determine how they want to contribute to the company and it
gives old and new employees an internal network that creates unity.
Managers have their own program called Facebook’s Engage Coaching Program that merges
new managers with an executive coach. Using one-on-one sessions, the coach helps the new
manager develop effective people management skills.
An overlooked learning program, Facebook’s FLiP (Facebook Leadership in Practice) is a peer-
to-peer program where leaders receive feedback and coaching from their peers and executives.

Training & Development MIHRM/MBA/EMBA Summer 2020

The coaching program offers great insights into leadership best practices, case studies, and team
building exercises.
Amy Hayes, Global Head of L&D at Facebook shares the company’s vital practices to deliver
just-in-time learning. Employees enroll in online communities using Facebook Workplace which
connects employees that have something to teach with employees eager to learn.

Training & Development MIHRM/MBA/EMBA Summer 2020