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

by Laszlo Bock

nominated winners received trips, team parties, and gifts of the same value as the cash awards they would have received. Instead of making public stock awards, we sent teams to Hawaii. Instead of smaller awards, we provided trips to health resorts, blowout team dinners, or Google TVs for the home.

the experimental group was happier. Much happier. They thought their awards were 28 percent more fun, 28 percent more memorable, and 15 percent more thoughtful. This was true whether the experience was a team trip to Disneyland (it turns out most adults are still kids on the inside) or individual vouchers to do something on their own. And they stayed happier for a longer period of time than Googlers who received money.

The joy of money is fleeting, but memories last forever.

We still make exceptional cash and stock awards for exceptional people. And our annual bonus and stock grant awards follow more of a power law distribution. But over the past ten years we’ve learned that how you determine those awards is as important as how much you award. Programs that failed tests of distributive or procedural justice have been replaced or been improved. We’ve added a strong emphasis on accumulating experiences, rather than just money. We recognize publicly through experiential awards and reward privately through substantial differentiation in bonus and stock. And Googlers are happier as a result.

Make it easy to sprea...

enlisting employees in providing rewards is important too.

peers have a much better sense of who is really contributing to a project’s success than managers do.

encourage peers to reward each other. gThanks (pronounced “gee-thanks”) is a tool for making it easy for people to recognize great work. Google’s internal recognition tool, gThanks. © Google, Inc. The simplicity of the design is part of the magic. gThanks makes it easy to send thank-you notes by entering someone’s name and then hitting “kudos” and typing up a note. Why is this any better than sending them an email? Because kudos are posted publicly for other people to see and can be shared via Google+. Broadcasting a compliment makes both the giver and the receiver happier. And it’s actually fewer keystrokes than writing a private email, which makes it easier to do.

Simple, public recognition is one of the most effective and most underutilized management tools.

The other feature of gThanks is the peer bonus, which you’ll see on the bottom center of the screenshot. Giving employees the freedom to recognize one another is important.

At Google, any employee can give anyone else a $175 cash award, with no management oversight or sign-off required.

We’ve found that trusting people to do the right thing generally results in them doing the right thing. Allowing people to reward one another facilitates a culture of recognition and service, and is a way to show employees that they should be thinking like owners rather than serfs.

Reward thoughtful failure

the act of considered risk-taking itself needs to be rewarded, especially in the face of failure. Otherwise, people simply won’t take risks.

rewarding smart failure was vital to support a culture of risk-taking.

had a policy that any notable bug or mistake would be discussed at his team meeting in a “What did we learn?” session. He wanted to make sure that bad news was shared as openly as good news, so that he and his leaders were never blind to what was really happening and to reinforce the importance of learning from mistakes.

School in Los Altos, takes this approach to middle school math. If a child misses a question on a math test, they can try the question again for half credit.

“These are smart kids, but in life they are going to hit walls once in a while. It’s vital they master geometry, algebra one, and algebra two, but it’s just as important that they respond to failure by trying again instead of giving up.”

Trust your people enough to let them recognize each other, as well. It may be kudos and nice words, or it may be small awards. A gift card for a local coffee shop or a bottle of wine sent to an understanding spouse as a thank-you for the employee working late. Give employees the freedom to care for each other.

As Larry often says: If your goals are ambitious and crazy enough, even failure will be a pretty good achievement.

Swallow hard and pay unfairly. Have wide variations in pay that reflect the power law distribution of performance.

our founders’ letter from our 2004 IPO filing read: We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge, doctors and washing machines. We are careful to consider the long-term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity.

We use our people programs to achieve three goals: efficiency, community, and innovation. Every one of our programs exists to further at least one of these goals, and often more than one.

provide was the culture, where Googlers knew they could suggest new programs and shape their own workplaces.

sense of community helps people do their best work just as surely as increasing efficiency does by sweeping away minor chores and distractions.

we’ve expanded our definition of community to include Googlers’ children, spouses, partners, parents, and even grandparents.

Not surprisingly, our parents are incredibly proud of us and, surprisingly, most of them have no idea what we do for a living. Helping them appreciate the impact their children have, even when those children are fifty years old, is heartwarming.

Random Lunches, where people are set up with Googlers they’ve never met to get to know each other over lunch, are easy to coordinate and make the place seem smaller and more intimate.

When people gather together in unexpected ways, it inevitably spurs innovation—the

the way we use our benefits and also our environment to increase the number of “moments of serendipity” that spark creativity.

Sergey once said, “No one should be more than two hundred feet away from food,” but the real purpose of these microkitchens is to do the same thing Howard Schultz tried to create with Starbucks. Schultz saw the need for a “third place” beyond the home and office, where people could relax, refresh, and connect with one another. We try to do the same thing, by giving Googlers a place to meet up that looks and feels different from their desk. And we use the placement of these microkitchens to draw people from different groups together. Often they’ll sit at the border between two different teams, with the goal of having those people bump into one another. At minimum, they might have a great conversation. And maybe they’ll hit on an idea for our users that hasn’t been thought of yet.

Ronald Burt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, has shown that innovation tends to occur in the structural holes between social groups.

People with tight social networks, like those in a business unit or team, often have similar ideas and ways of looking at problems. Over time, creativity dies. But the handful of people who operate in the overlapping space between groups tend to come up with better ideas. And often, they’re not even original. They are an application of an idea from one group to a new group.

also try to constantly feed new thinking and ideas into the organization. Employees are encouraged to give Tech Talks, where they share their latest work with anyone who is curious. We also bring in star thinkers from outside.

Talks at Google, a speaker series where authors, scientists, business leaders, performers, politicians, and other thought-provoking figures are invited to campus to share their thoughts.

these visitors and conversations create an atmosphere of constant, bubbling creativity and stimulation, while also giving people a break from their day-to-day work to recharge their imaginations.

Find ways to say yes

no. But it’s the wrong answer because it shuts down both employee voice and the chance to learn something new.

Find ways to say yes. Employees will reward you by making your workplace more vibrant, fun, and productive.

Be there when your people most need you

one of the harshest but most reliable facts of life is that at some point half of us will be confronted with the death of our partner.

In 2011 we decided that if the unthinkable happened, the surviving partner should immediately receive the value of all the Googler’s unvested stock. We also decided to continue paying 50 percent of the Googler’s salary to the survivor for the next ten years. And if there were children, the family would receive an additional $1,000 each month until they turned nineteen, or twenty-three if they were full-time students.

There was no business benefit at all. It was just the right thing to do.

We decided that new parents would receive their full salary, bonus, and stock vesting for the entire time they were on leave. And any new parents receive a $500 bonus to help make life a bit easier by, for example, ordering home delivery of meals for the first few weeks.

Michele Krantz, the principal of La Mesa Junior High School in Santa Clarita, California. Michele is the kind of leader who kicks off the week by standing at the front gate greeting each student by name and with a handshake. She walks around “with front-of-the-lunch-line passes in my pocket to give to kids being awesome.” At her monthly staff meeting, her team presents Kudos granola bars to one another “to give them the opportunity to acknowledge each other.” They literally give one another kudos. She writes birthday cards for every employee.

the smallest investments of care and resources can have tremendous results.

Without realizing it, we are constantly nudged and buffeted by our environment, others, and even our own unconscious minds. Like deer wending through the woods by choosing the path of least resistance, we often rely on cues that operate below the conscious level to navigate our lives.

we are far less consistent, objective, fair, and self-aware in how we navigate the world than we think we are. And because of this, organizations can help people make better decisions.

Nudges are not mandates. Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”209 In other words, nudges are about influencing choice, not dictating it.

Just because something is done a certain way today, doesn’t mean it ought to be done that way. In fact, many nudges are changes to poorly chosen current conditions that result in less health, wealth, or happiness.