Google, W.L. Gore Leaders Share Keys to Employee Involvement

At the recent 2007 Great Place to Work conference, Google Director of HR Laszlo Bock reported that the company had one million job applications last year. Google was the top company on the Best 100 Companies to Work For® list. Notable among Google practices is providing up to 20% of an employee's time to pursue any project of potential interest to the company and themselves. By leaving this time free, the company believes, employees are more likely to be creative than if every hour of every day is structured. Google gives all employees ownership in the company.

W.L. Gore and Associates, an ESOP company (number seven on the list) disdains traditional management styles altogether. Instead, when associates have ideas, they are allowed to pursue them, provided they can get enough other associates to go along and join their team. CEO Terri Kelly says this process is much more rigorous than traditional approaches that give management the ability to approve ideas (and may not even encourage employees to submit them), while also generating a lot more ideas than management would ever do on its own.