I know, it’s top of mind for everyone, right? And I think what I believe what we’ve all learned over the last couple of years is, you can have a great strategy but the question is whether your culture is going to stand up with your strategy, be eaten by your strategy or accelerate your strategy? And so, how committed are people to our mission? That’s a huge question for us.
And coming into Waymo, which happens to be a mission-driven company, people have their ‘why’, everyone has their personal ‘why’. They’re on this sort of mission-driven opportunity because they’ve lost a loved one, or because they have a child who will never drive, or an elderly man who they had to take keys away from. And so because of our business model, it’s actually provides this galvanizing opportunity to sort of bottle; why are we all here?
I think, because we did so much hiring during COVID, all of those people literally didn’t go on that ride with us before COVID hit. And so now that we’re distributed, the question is; what is the way to keep people together?
So of course, we do company-wide meetings, we have cultural values, we highlight our values at every meeting, every month as a company. We don’t highlight them for the value, we actually illuminate them through the work that our hard-working employees are doing, and we take a lot of sort of cultural feedback surveys. And then we have Tiger Teams, who are addressing…
You know, one of our opportunities is to move faster. Like, we’re trying to do a lot and we have to move faster. And so we have a team that set up an entire process to be alerted if something is blocking execution, let’s move it out of the way, and let’s move as a company.
And I think it’s just really important to be nimble. But I think as we think about a hybrid work environment and people being geographically dispersed, how you actually escalate quickly and efficiently and don’t waste a lot of time trying to find the answer to what could really be a very easily solvable issue, I think it’d be top priority. And it also helps new people feel more included because they’re not the only ones.
It’s easy to say, “Well, I didn’t know because I’m new.” And it’s like, “No, maybe you don’t know because we have to figure it out in a hybrid environment level playing field.” Everyone has ownership and the opportunity to improve and everyone has a voice.
