In “Learning from Google’s digital culture,” McKinsey & Company interviews Jon Kaplan, Google’s VP of U.S. Sales and Operations, about how Google’s culture developed and how the company is nurturing it.

“At Google, you really don’t walk into a meeting talking about your gut feel on something. You need to have the data to back it up. And so data is another key tenet of what’s made our decision making really successful.”

“We are, as you could imagine, highly analytical about our culture. One of the key ways that we measure how Google is changing over time is called Googlegeist, which is our internal survey that we give to all of our employees once a year, in January. It covers every aspect of what a great culture would include: innovation and autonomy, forward thinking, teamwork.”