Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

by Laszlo Bock

There’s ample data showing that most assessment occurs in the first three to five minutes of an interview

The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent).

Works well for programming jobs!

But without state-approved syllabi and standardized testing, my education can only go so far.

everyone’s OKRs are visible to everyone else in the company on our internal website, right next to their phone number and office location.

I just love this.

Having goals improves performance.113 Spending hours cascading goals up and down the company, however, does not.

calibration.

Good name - says what it is nicely - much better than Amazons "OLR".

We have an embarrassingly simple solution. Never have the conversations at the same time. Annual reviews happen in November, and pay discussions happen a month later.

This is fairly revolutionary. Must look more into this.

“Traditional performance management systems make a big mistake. They combine two things that should be completely separate: performance evaluation and people development. Evaluation is necessary to distribute finite resources, like salary increases or bonus dollars. Development is just as necessary so people grow and improve.”121 If you want people to grow, don’t have those two conversations at the same time. Make development a constant back-and-forth between you and your team members, rather than a year-end surprise.

Googlers working in engineering or product management can nominate themselves for promotion.

Interesting. Probably sounds more liberating than it is.

Poor performance is rarely because the person is incompetent or a bad person. It’s typically a result of a gap in skill (which is either fixable or not) or will (where the person is not motivated to do the work).

Yup.

Googlers with the best managers did 5 to 18 percent better on a dozen Googlegeist dimensions when compared to those managed by the worst manager.

manager quality was the single best predictor of whether employees would stay or leave, supporting the adage that people don’t quit companies, they quit bad managers.

The Army’s solution wasn’t more training. It was a checklist.

The power of checklists!

I realized that management too is phenomenally complex. It’s a lot to ask of any leader to be a product visionary or a financial genius or a marketing wizard as well as an inspiring manager. But if we could reduce good management to a checklist, we wouldn’t need to invest millions of dollars in training, or try to convince people why one style of leadership is better than another.

a semiannual Upward Feedback Survey, asks teams to give anonymous feedback on their managers:

Letting those who are at the bottom of the performance distribution know it, without tying that directly to pay or career outcomes, alerted and motivated them in as positive a way as possible.

addressing the two tails is where you’ll see the biggest performance improvements: There’s little benefit in moving a 40th percentile performer to be a 50th percentile performer, but going from the 5th percentile to the 50th is major.

Ericsson refers to this as deliberate practice: intentional repetitions of similar, small tasks with immediate feedback, correction, and experimentation.

It’s a better investment to deliver less content and have people retain it, than it is to deliver more hours of “learning” that is quickly forgotten.

Every meeting ended with immediate feedback and a plan for what to continue to do or change for next time.

In your company, there is certainly a best salesperson in terms of total sales. By turning to that person to teach others rather than bringing in someone from the outside, you not only have a teacher who is better than your other salespeople, but also someone who understands the specific context of your company and customers.

gfrreat idea

They told me our meetings seemed more focused, more thoughtful, and less acrimonious. And even though we were spending time on meditation, we were more efficient and were finishing our agenda early each week.

We have a broader program, called G2G or Googler2Googler, where Googlers enlist en masse to teach one another.

Today we have Leadership Gurus (drawn in part from the annual winners of our Great Manager Awards); Sales Gurus (for advice on selling, so that, for example, a Googler working in the auto industry in Italy can get advice from one in Japan); and Expectant and New Parent Gurus;

As a pragmatic matter, you can accelerate the rate of learning in your organization or team by breaking skills down into smaller components and providing prompt, specific feedback.

Giving employees the opportunity to teach gives them purpose. Even if they don’t find meaning in their regular jobs, passing on knowledge is both inspiring and inspirational.

How many people would you trade for your very best performer? If the number is more than five, you’re probably underpaying your best person. And if it’s more than ten, you’re almost certainly underpaying.

Pay a lkt fofr loutliers

Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure.… [T]hey become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.

What did work was creating a quarterly survey of just two questions: “In the last quarter, this person helped me when I reached out to him/her”; and “In the last quarter, this person involved me when I could have been helpful to, or was impacted by, his/her team’s work.” Every member of the team rated each other member, and the anonymous ranking and results were shared with everyone.

Love it

We decided to prompt managers with a reminder about the very small tasks they could perform that would have the biggest impact on their Nooglers, and therefore the highest return on an investment of their valuable time.

Make a checklist. Show team goals and create personal ones.

It turns out checklists really do work, even when the list is almost patronizingly simple. We’re human, and we sometimes forget the most basic things.

As an experiment, we added a fifteen-minute segment to Noogler orientation for some people that explained the benefits of being proactive, provided five specific actions Nooglers could take to find the things they needed, and reiterated how this behavior fits with Google’s entrepreneurial mindset:

some people save while young, others do not.”

the average savings rate increased to 13.6 percent of salary from 3.5 percent over forty months.

We were floored by the result. The proportion of total calories consumed from candy decreased by 30 percent and the proportion of fat consumed dropped by 40 percent as people opted for the more visible granola bars, chips, and fruit. Heartened by the result, we did the same thing in our New York office, home to over two thousand Googlers. Healthy snacks like dried fruit and nuts were put in glass containers, and sweets were hidden in colored containers.

Nudges are an incredibly powerful mechanism for improving teams and organizations. They are also ideally suited to experimentation, so can be tested on smaller populations to fine-tune their results.

We eventually assembled a group we call the Canaries, engineers of varying seniorities, selected based on their ability to both represent the views of the various constituencies within engineering and credibly communicate how and why decisions were made.

even a small connection to the people who benefit from your work not only improves productivity, it also makes people happier. And everyone wants their work to have purpose.

And then use them not just as exemplars for others by building checklists around what they do, but also as teachers. One