Google sets rules to curtail employee debates
Internet giant bans ‘trolling’ on internal message boards and ad hominem attacks
Google is trying to quell the debates roiling its workforce by setting new internal rules designed to limit offensive language and personal attacks against fellow employees.
In a set of guidelines sent to employees, Google said it would discipline anyone who discriminates against or attacks colleagues or engages in discussions that are “disruptive to a productive work environment,” according to a copy of the guidelines reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The rules aim to curb socalled trolling — in which people are deliberately provocative or offensive online in order to elicit strong reactions — as well as “blanket statements about groups or categories of people.”
For Google, which has long prized its culture of open debate, the rules present fresh challenges about how to police employee speech while continuing to encourage free expression and unconventional thinking.
Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., gives its roughly 80,000 employees a number of digital tools with which to share and argue over ideas internally. Even in Silicon Valley, its Mountainview, Calif., campus is seen as a bastion of freewheeling discourse.
Yet of late the search giant has struggled to keep those debates under control. Over email discussion groups and a message board called Memegen, employees have waged verbal wars over all manner of social and political beliefs. Many insiders increasingly see these as a drain on productivity and a barrier to conducting business.
Google has punished employees for online posts that violate its employee code of conduct, but the new community guidelines, which were sent to employees last week but hadn’t been previously reported, are the first set of rules explicitly geared toward governing discussions on the forums and across the company’s campus. The rules are broad, asking employees to respect one another and honour Google’s values, and they leave room for interpretation about what type of conduct is prohibited, a review of the guidelines shows.
Google finds itself in a situation similar to that at many universities, which have long tried to strike a balance between permitting free speech and maintaining civil discourse, said Lisa Nishii, a professor of management at Cornell University’s IRL School.
The alternative to issuing guidelines would be giving employees the impression that anything goes, which could undermine Google’s efforts to promote a culture of inclusion and respect, Ms. Nishii said. “On the one hand they say inclusion is important but if on the other hand they allow incivility to continue, it would amount to inconsistent messages.”
The move also follows a controversy in which some Google employees protested the company’s involvement with an effort code-named “Project Maven,” which involved helping the Pentagon identify and track potential drone targets through artificial intelligence. Google decided not to seek renewal of the contract, drawing criticism from some who contended the company was putting the politics of certain employees over national security.
Google earlier this month laid out a new set of internal guidelines for determining whether new artificial intelligence products meet its ethical standards, including a ban on the use of such technology in military weapons.
That sort of employee activism rippled to other tech firms this month. Companies, including Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc., have had to contend with employee unrest over their ties to the government, driven by the Trump adminis- tration’s controversial policy that separated migrant families at the southern border. Microsoft employees demanded the company sever its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement while Salesforce employees asked Chief Executive Marc Benioff to re-evaluate the company’s work with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency.
So far, none of the companies have acquiesced to their employees’ demands.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company would stand up for its “enduring values and ethics” and denounced the Trump administration’s immigration policy but said Microsoft’s technology was not being used to enable the separation of migrant families. A Salesforce spokeswoman said: “We’re proud of our employees for being passionate and vocal, and will continue the conversation on this and other important matters.”
To enforce its new rules, Google plans to leave much of the interpretation to its volunteer army of intranet moderators, who have day jobs at Google but in their spare time oversee discussion groups about anything from animal rights to sexual expression.
Google so far has been relying on those moderators and other employees to flag instances of abuse on their forums, which triggers a review by human resources staff.
The new rules are being issued nearly a year after Google fired a software engineer, James Damore, who wrote an internal memo saying gender differences might have something to do with women’s underrepresentation in the tech workforce.
His memo and resulting dismissal ignited frenzied debate between employees, some accusing Google of wrongly firing an employee for expressing himself and others saying the company hadn’t done enough to stand up for gender equality.
Since February, more than 2,600 Google employees have signed a petition calling for the company to do more to curb harassment against employees and offer more transparency on how human resources staff conduct investigations.
Liz Fong-Jones, one of the organizers of the petition, said the new guidelines don’t go far enough in addressing their concerns.
“We don’t believe the new Code of Conduct adequately supports employees speaking out about the racism and sexism we face,” the organizers of the petition said in a statement.
Harmeet Dhillon, Mr. Damore’s attorney, said in an interview that Google is moving in the wrong direction with its guidelines. “You’re going to have a bunch of employee mod- erators ratting people out” to human resources, she said.
Ms. Dhillon said Mr. Damore wouldn’t comment on the new guidelines.
Mr. Damore’s firing was also followed by several lawsuits, including legal actions from female employees alleging pay discrimination against women, from male ex-employees and potential new hires claiming bias against conservative white men, and from a transgender engineer who said he was fired for making derogatory statements about what he called white male privilege.
Google last week told employees it had also revised its workplace-conduct rules, providing more details on what constitutes harassment and discrimination, a person familiar with the matter said.
The policy says derogatory or insensitive jokes and offensive images may be considered forms of harassment, according to excerpts of the policy reviewed by the Journal. The company added a new section to this policy addressing “retaliation” in an effort to curb the practice of doxxing, or sharing someone’s home address or other personal information to punish them for something. Google said in its new policy that it may terminate or demote employees who retaliate against another employee.