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Imagine your legal and compliance team suddenly become more … well, compliant – and your people are set free to think about how to do business better. Why? Because, according to some people who’d know, doing so is the first step toward genuine innovation – the essential to business survival in the digital age.
Larry Page, the creator of Google, once said: “If you're not doing some things that are crazy, then you're doing the wrong things.”
What he is referring to is the essence of innovation. In order to be truly innovative, you need to push the envelope. And this is exactly what the staff at Google are invited to do.
For those of us who work in financial services however, doing things that are crazy may not necessarily bode well. How would we get these crazy ideas past legal and compliance (L&C) for a start?
Well, let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and assume that the assessment of ‘crazy ideas’ is the same for financial services businesses as it is for Google. And let’s imagine that whatever those crazy ideas are, our L&C teams are going to be OK with them. With that out of the way, we can look more closely at Page’s statement to see how his team of ‘Googlers’ are a key part of the innovation puzzle.
There is a key lesson here that every business can take on board, regardless of industry.
Ensuring innovation is part of your business DNA through employee engagement
I recently heard David Hewitt, Google’s Banking Industry Manager, speak at the Digital Financial Services conference in Sydney. Hewitt spoke about Page’s call for crazy ideas – something that definitely enticed the audience – but I was struck by something he said after that, something about the company’s mission.
Hewitt said that everyone within Google knows the company mission and that this makes it easier to create change. He also spoke a lot about the company’s current innovations but I would like to focus more on how Google engages its staff rather than looking at the products and services they sell.
The big lesson here is about the power of employee engagement. If you have big ideas that you want to take to the market, you need to take your staff on the journey first. You need to start with the top and work down – make sure your CEO and execs are all on board and are visibly supportive of what you are doing.
Why is this important? Because if your employees believe in what you are doing, then when it comes time to take that message or product externally, you will have more chance of success. You are less likely to come up against resistance to change if people have been accepting of the reason behind the change all along. And the more people you have supporting an idea internally, the more that will trickle to the outside and will influence the public.
Let’s look at Google quickly again. This is a company that is well known for its internal culture – ask anyone who knows a Googler (someone who works at Google) or even talk to those who saw the recent movie The Internship and you might hear of slippery slides in the office, sleep pods and even free food at the cafeteria. These all help to create an internal culture and indeed have landed Google the Fortune accolade of the best place to work for two years in a row.
But these things are very superficial. What do you discover by talking to the people at the coalface? Well if Hewitt (and my own anecdotal research) is anything to go by, Googlers are all well aware of the mission of the company. Of why they exist and what they are driven to achieve. And they support it. In fact, the staff at Google are arguably its biggest advocates.
The three point lesson from Google?
- Engage your employees and make sure they know your company mission – why are you doing what you are doing? What is your higher purpose and how do they fit in?
- Foster advocates within your team – ensuring staff know your mission is important. The next step, however, is making them see the merits of that mission and getting them excited about it so they take the message out externally
- Give your people the permission to create their own mark – the more engaged employees are the better your results and more innovative your solutions will be. Google invited its staff to think outside the box, to redesign and not reiterate – in short, they were told to flip the business model on its head and come up with a way of giving people information before they ask. How will you engage your people?
Related links:
Larry Page - Google Creator
David Hewitt - Banking Industry Manager - Google
Digital Financial Services Conference (#DigiFinance)
