According to Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal, “Every day, every hour, hundreds of people with no particular training or education or demonstrated aptitude for the job, are made managers.”(Murray, p.xi) Based off this statement, many would assume that managers do not matter in the workplace. For some, managers are simply the bane of their existence; setting unachievable goals, full of criticism and proponents of wasted and unutilized time. “[Engineers] long believed that management is more destructive than beneficial, a distraction from “real work” and tangible, goal-directed tasks.” (Garvin,2013) states David A. Garvin of the Harvard Business Review. Although this mentality is evident in many workplaces ranging from small startup companies to Fortune 500 corporations, one company set out to find if managers truly did matter.

Google’s History and Culture

Google was created in 1998 by two computer science students while attending Stanford University. The company has not celebrated its 18th birthday yet, but it has more than 57,000 employees across 40 countries. According to Fortune, Google has been on the list of 100 Best Companies to Work For 10 years, and is celebrating its seventh time at No.1. Many would attribute this exclusive award to Google’s culture. “The company culture truly makes workers feel they’re valued and respected as a human being, not as a cog in a machine, (2016)” quotes one Google employee. Not only does Google demonstrate value and respect for their employees, but they believe in the rare attitude of (mostly) complete transparency. Between the Transparency Reports regarding requests from the government to software engineers having access to Google’s code on their first day of work, employees quickly learn to value openness, honestly and the importance of conversations. Additionally the perks are exceptional. At least three weeks off a year, dry cleaning, arcades, on-site barbers and free gourmet meals are only some of the perks available to employees. The overall culture may seem great to the majority of people. Feeling valued, having access to the company code and a free meal is rare in today’s workplace. Although, not everyone is happy about certain aspects of Google’s culture. First, the median age of employees is 29, which varies drastically from the U.S. average of 43. The result can be a significant difference of views between employees, which may result in unjust perceptions or assumptions. Secondly, Google does not focus on hierarchy and has been accused of having a very flat organizational structure. It is typical for many employees to share similar titles as their counterparts and the likelihood of rising in the company ladder is uncommon. Finally, Google’s culture is very engineering-dominated. According to Eric Flatt, a software engineer at Google, “We are a company built by engineers for engineers.” (Garvin, 2013) In the past, it was common for many engineering managers to have 30 direct employees. Typically, these employees would find themselves performing mostly independent tasks and avoid guidance or direction from their managers. “Engineers generally want to spend their time coding and debugging. Many think that talking to direct reports gets in the way of getting that work done”, (Garvin, 2013) said Nadav Eiron, an engineering director. As a result, many employees at Google found themselves asking, is a manager really necessary?

Project Oxygen

What makes a manager successful? Who are successful managers? More specifically, do managers matter in a company? Google intended to answer of all these questions through the creation of Project Oxygen.