Google Employees Grumble Over Salary At The All-Hands Meeting, Company’s Executives Come Out In Defence

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Google Employees Grumble Over Salary At The All-Hands Meeting, Company’s Executives Come Out In Defence

Working at Google is considered a dream job by many. The company is known for a friendly work culture, rewarding salary structure and other additional perks that make it a hot favorite amongst job seekers. However, as per the results of Google’s famous annual survey, the search engine giant’s employees don’t seem to be as happy about their compensation as they used to be. The issue was raised by the employees at Google’s recently held All-Hands Meeting with Google executives bearing the brunt.

The Googlegeist survey

As per Google’s annual survey called the ‘Googlegeist survey’, around 53% of Google employees consider their pay as competitive. This percentage is a drop of 5 points from last year. Further 56% of the employees said that their pay is fair and equitable, which was down by 8 points in comparison to last year.

What happened at Google’s All-Hands Meeting?

Citing the results of the survey, Google employees bombarded the company’s executives with questions regarding their ‘not-so-satisfactory’ salary.

One employee asked, “Compensation-related questions showed the biggest drop in points from last year, what is your understanding of why that is?”

The question prompted Bret Hill, Google’s Vice Chairman of ‘Total Rewards’ to reply. He said, “There’s some macro-economic trends at play. It’s a very competitive market and you’re probably hearing anecdotal stories of colleagues getting better offers at other companies.”

Hill said that people were feeling the effects of inflation in their lives and were dealing with effects of location changes on their salaries. This was in reference to Google’s last year’s announcement where the company announced pay cuts for employees who moved or opted to work from home permanently.

Responding to the query of another employee who pointed out at Amazon’s adjusted base salary cap and Apple’s RSU bonuses and wished to understand Google’s plan of action with regard to employees salaries, Hill said, “We already compare favorably to these companies. We are able to hire from them. However, we will make changes if and when we need to. This trend of drop in employee compensation is concerning to us and we are keeping a close eye on it.”

CEO of Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google, Sunder Pichai seconded Hill and further added “One thing I will add is, for any given company, we look very hard at Alphabet Inc. to see the net flow of people and how we are doing there. Google does very favorably throughout almost all companies.”

Tech Companies versus the Great Resignation

As per reports around 4 million workers have left their jobs each month since July 2021 and top tech firms are struggling to keep up. The trend has made employee retention and their satisfaction even more important to the tech sector. Responding to the situation, firms such as Amazon and Apple have announced bonuses and salary hikes for their employees.

In a statement to Fortune, Google spokesperson said, “We know that our employees have many choices about where they work, so we work to ensure that they are very well compensated. That's why we've always provided top of market compensation across salary, equity, leave, and a suite of benefits. Getting employee feedback is important and we'll continue to ensure we pay competitively everywhere our employees work and help them grow their careers at Google.”

Survey’s silver lining

Keeping aside the dissatisfaction over salary, Google’s overall mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ received a relatively high score of 90% from the employees in the Googlegeist survey while the company's values received 85% of votes. On the other hand, Sunder Pichai received a reasonably good rating of 86%.

In an email that brought forth the results of the survey, Sundhar Pichai said that the survey is one of the most important ways through which the company can assess workplace satisfaction.

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