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

by Laszlo Bock

Welch and Conaty had implemented a 20-70-10 performance ranking system, where GE employees were sorted into three groups: the top 20 percent, the middle 70 percent, and the bottom 10 percent. The top workers were lionized and rewarded with choice assignments, leadership training programs, and stock options. The bottom 10 percent were fired. Under Immelt, the forced distribution was softened and the crisp labels of “top 20 percent,” “middle 70 percent,” and “bottom 10 percent” were replaced with euphemisms: “top talent,” “highly valued,” and “needs improvement.”

interesting: tiering seems awfully familiar, though the yanking is certainly different.

We also have fun with our ongoing products. Each year, we launch a Santa Tracker so children can track Santa Claus as he travels the world. And watch what happens if you type “do a barrel roll” next time you’re using Google.com or in a Chrome browser.

try this: "do a barrel roll" in google

We all want our work to matter. Nothing is a more powerful motivator than to know that you are making a difference in the world. Amy Wrzesniewski of Yale University told me people see their work as just a job (“a necessity that’s not a major positive in their lives”), a career (something to “win” or “advance”), or a calling (“a source of enjoyment and fulfillment where you’re doing socially useful work”).

How do google ads or double click engineers get this sense? Via the businesses they're helping? Doesn't tie that well to end user, does it?

How many of our companies make a practice of giving everyone, especially those most remote from the front office, access to your customers so employees can witness the human effect of their labors? Would it be hard to start?

How can we do this more and better? More research focus groups, power user summits?

Even the way the questions are chosen is rooted in transparency, using a tool (awkwardly) called Hangouts On Air Q&A. Users can not only submit questions, but also discuss and vote on them. This crowdsourcing prioritizes questions that reflect the interests of an audience.

Should we do this? Though I guess we don't get enough questions to need it :(

Dogfooders were the first to test-ride in our self-driving cars, supplying valuable feedback on how they work in daily use. This way, Googlers learn what’s going on, and teams get valuable, early feedback from real users.

More playing with kindles? Why don't we use Goodreads on them more? How many do, and how do they actually use them?

We do find mechanisms to address some of the same issues Bridgewater attacks. The way we solve the “backstabbing” problem, for example, is that if you write a nasty email about someone, you shouldn’t be surprised if they are added to the email thread. I remember the first time I complained about somebody in an email and my manager promptly copied that person, which forced us to quickly resolve the issue. It was a stark lesson in the importance of having a direct conversation with my colleagues!

I need to start doing this, or equivalent. Email and real-time anytime feedback should result in immediate discussion.

In 2009, Googlers told us through our annual survey that it was becoming harder to get things done. They were right. We had doubled in size, growing to 20,222 employees by the end of 2008 from 10,674 at the end of 2006, and growing to $21.8 billion in revenues from $10.6 billion. But rather than announcing top-down corporate initiatives, our CFO, Patrick Pichette, put the power in Googlers’ hands. He launched Bureaucracy Busters, a now-annual program where Googlers identify their biggest frustrations and help fix them. In the first round, Googlers submitted 570 ideas and voted more than 55,000 times.

Should find a way to do this too. Figure out what needs streamlining and make it happen.

Hire only the best by taking your time, hiring only people who are better than you in some meaningful way, and not letting managers make hiring decisions for their own teams.

Be explicit about why the hire is better than you as part of justification (at least to self)

Once we identified these attributes, we began requiring all interview feedback to comment specifically on each one. Not every interviewer had to assess every attribute, but at least two independent interviewers had to assess each attribute.

We don’t just look at the candidate side of hiring. Interviewers also receive feedback on their own personal ability to predict whether someone should be hired. Every interviewer sees a record of the interview scores they have given in the past and whether those people were hired or not.

I like this feedback. Could even indicate how well the hire performed after hire. Find interviewers whose votes correlate highly with later performance.

As a result, engineering Googlers have become significantly more positive about this issue, scoring 23 points (on a scale of 100) more favorably than before on the question of “In my work group, we deal effectively with low performers.”

Should we ask this? I wonder sometimes what perception is.

Critically, Googlegeist focuses on outcome measures that matter. Most employee surveys focus on engagement,106 which as Prasad Setty explains, “is a nebulous concept that HR people like but doesn’t really tell you much. If your employees are 80 percent engaged, what does that even mean?”

Referring directly to first break all the rules findings. They did find that strongly agree scores on these questions were correlated with individual and overall business performance. Though I think the point of the book isn't to use these to survey but in how to think about taking care of employees, figuring out where to spend time with them to help them succeed

Never have the conversations at the same time. Annual reviews happen in November, and pay discussions happen a month later. Everyone at Google is eligible for stock grants, but those decisions are made a further six months down the line.

separate development areas from compensation (do them in that order) to help remove external reward from being primary motivator

Now we asked for one single thing the person should do more of, and one thing they could do differently to have more impact. We reasoned that if people had just one thing to focus on, they’d be more likely to achieve genuine change than if they divided their efforts.

google feedback is: one thing the person should do more of, and one thing they should do differently to make them more successful

The research showed eight common attributes shared by high-scoring managers and not exhibited by low-scoring managers: The 8 Project Oxygen Attributes Be a good coach. Empower the team and do not micromanage. Express interest/concern for team members’ success and personal well-being. Be very productive/results-oriented. Be a good communicator—listen and share information. Help the team with career development. Have a clear vision/strategy for the team. Have important technical skills that help advise the team.

traits or behaviors of the best google managers

by thinking hard about employees’ individual strengths and the unique circumstances they face, and then use the meeting to ask questions rather than dictate answers.

how to prepare for 1:1s.

The most visible, a semiannual Upward Feedback Survey, asks teams to give anonymous feedback on their managers: Sample UFS Feedback Questionnaire My manager gives me actionable feedback that helps me improve my performance. My manager does not “micromanage” (i.e., get involved in details that should be handled at other levels). My manager shows consideration for me as a person. My manager keeps the team focused on our priority results/deliverables. My manager regularly shares relevant information from his/her manager and senior leadership. My manager has had a meaningful discussion with me about my career development in the past six months. My manager communicates clear goals for our team. My manager has the technical expertise (e.g., coding in Tech, accounting in Finance) required to effectively manage me. I would recommend my manager to other Googlers.

things you want your employees to say about you, a checklist of behaviors you should be demonstrating

There are over thirty Tech Advisors, for example, experienced leaders who offer confidential, one-to-one sessions to support Googlers in our technical organizations. These volunteers are selected for their breadth of experience and understanding of Google, and are tasked principally with listening. One of them, Chee Chew, described the experience of being a Tech Advisor this way:

Chee is now at Amazon, by the way

But there’s a deeper reason to have employee-teachers. 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. A learning organization starts with a recognition that all of us want to grow and to help others grow. Yet in many organizations, employees are taught and professionals do the teaching. Why not let people do both?

Always be learning, always be teaching :)

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.

better way to quantify this?

It turned out that many of the technical people didn’t view the awards as attainable either, because not every product has the same impact on the world, rolls out as quickly, or is as easily measurable. Improving our Ads systems has immediate impact that’s easy to gauge. Is that more valuable or harder to do than improving the resolution of our Maps imagery? What about building collaborative online word processing tools, like the one being used to write this book? Hard to say. Over time, many technical people started viewing Founders’ Awards as just a bit out of reach, reserved mainly for a handful of core product teams.

Yeah this is what i was concerned about. It heavily depends on the area someone works in and probably leans way toward the direct revenue generating opportunities.

And then some (though not all) of our best, most creative, most insightful technologists, who had built some of the most impactful products in our history, would realize that they were unlikely to win a Founders’ Award for the same work twice, and would immediately try to transfer to new product areas.

haha. Big payout makes people look for another area to work on because they don't think the same area will be recognized twice. Not an intended consequence.

Make it easy to spread the love So far, we’ve talked about rewards that are given by management, but enlisting employees in providing rewards is important too. As discussed in chapter 6, peers have a much better sense of who is really contributing to a project’s success than managers do. Remember Sam from chapter 7, who focused on managing up but whose tactics were painfully evident to his peers? It makes sense, therefore, to encourage peers to reward each other. gThanks (pronounced “gee-thanks”) is a tool for making it easy for people to recognize great work.

Should we consider something like this? Is it better than FEATS? what should the rest of Goodreads do to peer recognize?

To our astonishment, after we launched gThanks we saw a 460 percent increase in the use of kudos compared to a year earlier, when Googlers had to go to a special kudos website, with more than a thousand Googlers visiting the new version every day.

Isn't this a separate website too? Or was integrated into google plus?

At Google, any employee can give anyone else a $175 cash award, with no management oversight or sign-off required. In many organizations this would be viewed as madness. Wouldn’t employees cut side deals to exchange awards? Wouldn’t they game the system to earn thousands of dollars in extra income?

Still doesn't quite feel right to me. Didn't see data saying that peer bonuses were helping/good at google. I'll bet they just know that they can't take it away.

The team of course didn’t receive the outsize awards they would have had the product been the runaway success we all wanted. But we made sure they weren’t hurt financially by forgoing regular Google compensation.

Then they didn't actually forgo heir bonus, stock etc, right? Leader and product manager(s): were they rewarded for the failure? Slack's success shows the product could work really well, but Google's version didn't make sense to customers

The biggest lesson was that rewarding smart failure was vital to support a culture of risk-taking.

How important was the reward really? What if they didn't forgo bonus and stock? Or withholding this meant they could give it back later as "reward" for failure without incurring additional cost?

Now it’s a Googler-maintained perk that costs Google nothing more than the coffee the manicurist drinks.

And the office space!

I learned that the attrition rate for women after childbirth was twice our average attrition rate. Many moms coming back to work after twelve weeks felt stressed, tired, and sometimes guilty. After making the change in leave, the difference in attrition rates vanished. And moms told us that they were often using the extra two months to transition slowly back to work, making them more effective and happier when the leave ended. When we eventually did the math, it turned out this program cost nothing. The cost of having a mom out of the office for an extra couple of months was more than offset by the value of retaining her expertise

Has Amazon HR seen these data? [update: this was written before Amazon's parental leave policy!]

In the pilot, managers received just-in-time emails the Sunday before a new hire started. Like the Project Oxygen checklist, which showcased the eight behaviors of successful managers, the five actions were almost embarrassing in their simplicity: Have a role-and-responsibilities discussion. Match your Noogler with a peer buddy. Help your Noogler build a social network. Set up onboarding check-ins once a month for your Noogler’s first six months. Encourage open dialogue.

5 things to make new hires more successful. Send this list as reminder when starting. Anything we need to add to this?

Rather than take away sweets, we put the healthier snacks on open counters and at eye and hand level to make them more accessible and appealing. And we moved the more indulgent snacks lower on our shelves and placed them in opaque containers. In our Boulder, Colorado, office we measured

Are we doing this deliberately in SF office? (fruit on counter vs cookies and chips in the cupboards) :)

When you renew your license, you are asked, “Do you wish to become an organ donor?” Rather than waiting for you to sign up, they ask you. Three years later, Illinois had a 60 percent sign-up rate.

Washington does this too I've found out ;)

Make developmental conversations safe and productive by having them all the time, just like my manager used to do when we’d leave every meeting. Always start with an attitude of “How can I help you be more successful?” Otherwise, defenses go up and learning shuts down.

start asking this