Google is building steam to push itself in the industry where it is lagging behind in the AI race. And the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai is adamant that it will not accept any kind of behaviour that disrupts focus on the work and its co-workers. Pichai was quoted in a blog post this week, where he warns Google employees to keep their focus on the work and keep the office space for building products and not as a personal platform.
In the post, Pichai said, “this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Pichai wrote. “This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted.”
This isn’t the first time when Google employees have staged in-office protests but the nature and the timing of the latest unrest is clearly not going down well with Pichai and Co. The company has a track record of working with governments over secret projects that raises the warning bells among its employees which eventually makes its way to the public as well.
The recent firing episode involves Google and its reported deal with the Israel government over its cloud project. Google has laid off 28 employees after their involvement in a protest against the company’s latest contract with the Israeli government. As reported by The Verge, the layoffs happened after nine employees were suspended and then arrested in the US earlier this week.
These employees were clearly angered by Google’s dealings with the Israeli government worth $1.2 billion. In an internal memo to employees, quoted in the report, the company said that behaviour like this “has no place in our workplace, and we will not tolerate it.”
“The overwhelming majority of our employees do the right thing. If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” Google told the staff.
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