Google hires Fiona Cicconi to head its HR team

Google revealed late on Tuesday that it has hired Fiona Cicconi, the Chief Human Resources Officer of pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, to lead its People Operations team. She will succeed Eileen Naughton, who announced earlier this year that she would be stepping down.

Cicconi has spent much of her career in the biopharmaceutical industry, with six years at AstraZeneca and before that eight years with Roche, where she held the position of Head of HR, Global Pharma Technical Operations. She was also with Cisco Systems and GE Oil & Gas.

In her new role, Cicconi will be handling the management of a 130,000-strong workforce that will be working from home until at least September 2021, and that will likely be following a flexible schedule when employees do return to the office.

Google has previously said that it plans to develop a system that schedules when employees are in the office, at home, or at remote locations, with team availability and workload factored in. Creating such a system will be a top priority in 2021, according to CEO Sundar Pichai.

“The role of people operations is central to this work, and I look forward to working closely with Fiona as we enter the new year,” he said as he welcomed Cicconi to the executive team.

Workforce scheduling and location will not be Cicconi's only challenge, though. She will also have to deal with the rocky relationship between employees and management: over the last two years, Google employees have been at odds with the company's policies on various issues, including the handling of sexual harassment cases, work on controversial projects, and how transparency and accountability should be managed.