Google boss warns employees their productivity must improve

THE boss of Google has warned staff they are not productive enough and must find ways to reduce distractions at work.

Announcing a new initiative to boost output called Simplicity Sprint, Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, said: “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the headcount we have.”

Mr Pichai also told his 170,000 employees he would “love to get all your help”, at the internal meeting first reported by CNBC.

He added: “We should think about how we can minimise distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity.”

Google staff will be asked to put forward ideas for speeding up product development, as part of a scheme to “get better results faster,” Mr Pichai said.

Google has grown 10pc since the July 27 announcement of its financial results, trading at $115.70 (£94.34) in pre-market trading at the time of writing. This is a 13pc drop compared with last year as its share price tracks the broader rout in tech stocks.

An internal Google staff survey seen by CNBC and issued as part of the Simplicity Sprint drive posed questions including “where should we remove

speed bumps to get to better results faster?” and “How do we eliminate waste and stay entrepreneurial and focused as we grow?”

Fiona Cicconi, Google HR boss, added that the company is “not currently looking” to make redundancies.

Last week the advertising technology company recorded its slowest quarterly sales growth for two years, with its profits down 13pc as the company increased the amount it spent on buying up smaller businesses as well as deepening losses in its Google Cloud division.

Ahead of the financial results announcement Mr Pichai said Google would be slowing its pace of hiring, mirroring other tech firms such as Apple, Facebook owner Meta and Microsoft.

All of the major tech companies have cited fears about the economic environment as fears over accelerating inflation gather on both sides of the Atlantic amid a backdrop of skyrocketing fuel prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Sprint, in the tech industry context, is a term used to describe a focused burst of activity.

It is typically associated with the Agile software development methodology which aims to build computer programs through a series of sprints.

170,000

Sundar Pichai launched Simplicity Sprint to get ideas to limit distractions. Google said it is ‘not currently looking’ at job cuts