Sundar Pichai is an employee and board member. He's not a "regular" employee, but I don't think a regular employee gets enough perspective to make effective decisions across the company. They would have to take their board position more seriously than their full time job, which would make them not a regular employee anymore.
I think the claimed conflict is fundamental, not coincidental. When people talk about employee board representation, the central example of the representative they're talking about is someone paid to be involved in day-to-day, on-the-ground operations. Someone on the board of a large company would be worse than useless without dedicating a decent amount of time with understanding the complexities of the company's operation, which means they won't have time to be spending on the factory floor (or whatever) like a regular Joe.
This isn't insurmountable, as none of these constraints are inherent to the concept of employee representation. But it does require some more detail, or you end up with a decidedly non-central case like the one described elsethread, where Sundar Pichai counts as employee representation.
I have some experience with work councils in Germany and they have some significant downsides, including for employees, that we need to be honest about. Yes, employees get credible representation at the most senior levels of management, but that comes at a cost. My experience may not be universal but from what I gather it is representative.
First, works councils are strongly biased toward the organizational status quo by default. They can deny/delay opportunities to individual employees against the wishes of that employee and even though the works council has no credible claim to skin in the game. I've seen it happen and it demotivates employees it happens to. Companies use a lot of hacks to informally let people reorganize themselves without the consent of the works council to get around this.
Second, many trivial and inconsequential operational decisions become glacially slow because works councils tend to micromanage all of them at ponderous speed. Even obvious employee issues which would be resolved in 30 seconds at an American company can take months when the works council is involved, all to the benefit of no one really. This takes a very visible toll on speed of execution. It creates interesting dynamics when the company is global because the rest of the company may not be able to wait for the works council, so the employees under the works council may feel like they are on the outside looking in as the rest of the company moves forward.
The loss of autonomy over my own career would bother me as an employee. The loss of operational agility and execution speed would bother me as a business.
Sounds like your company wasn't familiar with how to handle a works council and treated it as an annoying necessary evil. AFAIU works councils are not supposed to be handled like that. They are supposed to be an integrated part of management, so them blocking something after a decision has been made just won't happen. If you do it that way, they won't like you.
The usually decent working relationship between management and works council is part of unions not being seen as petty (e.g. "employee X is strictly forbidden to do work Y even for a second, consequences be damned") and greedy here in Germany. Wal-Mart tried union busting here and it didn't go well at all.
All that being said, a well handled works council is probably going to slow down a company, but not after decisions have been made as you described. It is also going to help make better decisions sometimes.
This was at a large, established German company with German management. It wasn't as extreme as you are reading it but these dynamics did exist. Having large American offices working closely with the German ones made the impact of the works council on the operation of the company quite obvious because the Americans on a team were not subject to it (and there was a directive to operate "west coast style"). My other American friends that worked many years for German companies observed the same patterns.
I'm not saying works councils are bad per se, but they do have an effect on flexibility and execution speed that is significant enough that many Americans notice, especially in the western US where fast and flexible is the native mode of business (eastern US traditionally has a bit more rigid and European-like business culture).
Well if you're right, that works both ways the: if an employee can't take the company's interests into perspective, the board can't take the employees'. Of course, the premise is wrong. Both "worlds" are perfectly compatible, if you can come off the greed horse and compromise on the quarterly profits.
I'm sure some companies can benefit from employee representation on the board, but I don't think Google is one of them. Google is possibly the cushiest company to work for in the entire world. I and I imagine most shareholders would rather Google spend more money on self-driving cars than solving every little grievance employees have.
> Google is possibly the cushiest company to work for in the entire world
It has an enduring reputation for having been cushy in the past - and it might still feel cushy if you happen to mesh well with the prevailing company culture. But many people don't see it that way, apparently - to the point where they feel that their work itself is being impacted. And the way the whole Rubin story has been handled is also indicative of very real problems, to be sure. Many people want to work in a thoroughly professional environment, some place they can feel genuinely proud to be within - I can't blame the Google folks for walking out.
>And the way the whole Rubin story has been handled is also indicative of very real problems, to be sure.
Maybe Google has gotten worse, but the way the employees reacted to this "scandal" leads me to believe that they're acting entitled. Rubin was accused of harassment and asked to leave. That's all that should matter from an employee's perspective. The $90 million payout was a hedge to ensure that Rubin doesn't sue Google and cause negative publicity. It's not coming out of the employee's paycheck, so it's none of their business.
If an individual doesn’t mesh with the company culture, should the company change the culture or the employee change companies? I don’t mean to sound glib, but I don’t see any reason to think that every company should be a great fit for every employee.
The point of having employee representation in the board isn’t putting a janitor in the board room, it’s putting someone on the board who represents the interests of employees first. She doesn’t have to be a regular employee.
I think it’s the kind of idea that sounds good on paper, but it’s trivially easy to corrupt someone once they’re in that sort of position of power.
Make it so the representative is paid directly by the workers via a mandatory fee (whatever sum is necessary to pay their salary), and then make it illegal for the company to pay or reward that board member in any way. If the latter is breached, put the company's CEO in jail. No weaseling out with "fines" or "settlements" -- straight to jail.
Maybe my version is slightly too extreme, but I think we can be creative enough to find a good solution for this. It doesn't sound impossible to me at all. Other countries already have similar laws in place.
