Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced to employees last week that a new effort called “Simplicity Sprint” will solicit ideas from more than 174,000 employees on where the company can focus efforts to improve efficiency and productivity. This comes just weeks after the Masters of the Universe told staff to work with “more hunger.”
CNBC reports that Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently announced a new company effort called “Simplicity Sprint,” which is an effort to improve company efficiency and employee focus during a time of economic uncertainty and risk.
The project was announced at the company’s regular all-hands meeting last week, and the tone of the announcement seemed urgent as employees asked about layoffs and the slowing of hiring. Pichai asked employees for input, according to attendees and related internal documentation.
“I wanted to give some additional context following our earnings results, and ask for your help as well,” Pichai said, referring to Google’s second-quarter earnings report that was released on Tuesday. “It’s clear we are facing a challenging macro environment with more uncertainty ahead.”
Pichai added: “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the headcount we have.” Pichai said that he wanted employees to help “create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer focused. We should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity.”
Google reported weaker-than-expected earnings and revenue in the last earnings report. Revenue growth slowed to 13 percent in the quarter from 62 percent a year earlier. CFO Ruth Porat said that she expected the company to continue facing challenges in the near term but had no formal guidance at this time.
Pichai introduced the “Simplicity Sprint,” program to crowdsource ideas for quicker product development. Pichai said that the company is opening the floor for employees to share their ideas via an internal survey and can reach out to management if they have further questions.
Questions in the survey include “What would help you work with greater clarity and efficiency to serve our users and customers? Where should we remove speed bumps to get to better results faster? How do we eliminate waste and stay entrepreneurial and focused as we grow?”
Breitbart News reported in July that Pichai previously told employees to work with “more hunger.”
In a letter to all employees, Pichai wrote:
Because of the hiring progress achieved so far this year, we’ll be slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year, while still supporting our most important opportunities. For the balance of 2022 and 2023, we’ll focus our hiring on engineering, technical and other critical roles, and make sure the great talent we do hire is aligned with our long-term priorities.
Moving forward, we need to be more entrepreneurial, working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days. In some cases, that means consolidating where investments overlap and streamlining processes. In other cases, that means pausing development and re-deploying resources to higher priority areas. Making the company more efficient is up to all of us — we’ll be creating more ways for you all to engage and share ideas to help, so stay tuned.
Scarcity breeds clarity — this is something we have been saying since the earliest days of Google. It’s what drives focus and creativity that ultimately leads to better products that help people all over the world. That’s the opportunity in front of us today, and I’m excited for us to rise to the moment again.
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan