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

by Laszlo Bock

But nudges don’t need to be secret. At Google we believe in transparency as one of our cultural cornerstones. We typically don’t tell Googlers about our experiments as they are running, since that can change their behavior. After the experiment, however, we share what we found and how we intend to go forward.

we apply nudges to intervene at moments of decision in myriad ways.

you’re a small business or a large one. A sense of humanity compels us to be thoughtful, compassionate, and above all transparent when deploying nudges. The goal is not to supplant decision-making, but to replace thoughtlessly or poorly designed environments with structures that improve health and wealth without limiting freedom. Our guiding principle? Nudges aren’t shoves. Even the gentlest of reminders can make a difference. A nudge doesn’t have to be expensive or elaborate. It only needs to be timely, relevant, and simple to put into action.

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. People knew where they fell in the ranking, but didn’t know where anyone else fell.

this was in line with work showing the power of social comparisons.

It was curious and heartening to see how simply presenting information and then relying on each person’s nature—both competitive and altruistic—could transform a dysfunctional team.

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.

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.

But simply sending out these five steps to your managers isn’t enough. You have to send the checklist at the right time, make it meaningful, and make it easy to act on. We knew the email was timely, since it was going the night before someone started. We knew it was relevant, since the manager was probably wondering what the heck to do with this new person. Simple to put into action was trickier. We first had to make sure the data was credible, so we included academic citations, results from internal studies, and the underlying data in the email.

We then had to make sure there were unambiguous steps the manager could take. Our people are smart but busy. It reduces cognitive load if we provide clear instructions rather than asking them to invent practices from scratch or internalize a new behavior, and this lowers the chance that an extra step might discourage them from taking action.

By telling managers exactly what to do, we actually took one annoying item off their to-do list. They had less to think about and could focus instead on acting.

We then outline very specific steps—a checklist inside a checklist (it’s the turducken of checklists!)—followed by a link to a template and, for those too busy or lazy to click on the link, a few questions to get the manager started.

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: Ask questions, lots of questions! Schedule regular 1:1s with your manager. Get to know your team. Actively solicit feedback—don’t wait for it! Accept the challenge (i.e., take risks and don’t be afraid to fail… other Googlers will support you).

when you design for your users, you focus on what is the minimal, most elegant product required to achieve the desired outcome.

In almost every aspect of management practice and human relations, each of us believes we are in the top tail. And because we believe that, we continue designing ways to manage people based on gut instinct. The result is that we continue designing average-quality management systems that yield average results.

There’s an added benefit to giving Nooglers a nudge that complements what we do for managers. Even if the manager misses a checklist step, the Noogler picks it up. We’re borrowing a concept called poka-yoke or “mistake proofing.”

we want to minimize the number of mistakes we make in getting Nooglers productive, and the best way is to put a reminder on both sides of the process.

diet is one of the biggest controllable factors that affect health and longevity in the United States.

Googlers were willing to eat healthier, but not at the expense of choice.

We certainly eat because we’re hungry, but we also eat because it’s lunchtime or because people around us are eating. What if we removed some of the cues that caused us to eat? 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.

snacks like dried fruit and nuts were put in glass containers, and sweets were hidden in colored containers.

Our assessment of how much we eat and our satiation are heavily shaped by the size of the serving dish. The bigger the dish, the more we eat and the less satisfied we feel.

Whether you’re part of a large organization or a small one, you may as well be thoughtful about the environment you create. Our goal is to nudge in a direction that Googlers would agree makes their lives better, not by taking away choice but by making it easier to make good choices.

Recognize the difference between what is and what ought to be.

Any idea carried to an extreme becomes foolishness.

in an environment with such a focus on values, even the slightest perceived compromises are felt disproportionately by people in the organization.

We talk about values. A lot. And we’re daily confronted with new situations that test those values. We are held accountable by employees, our users, our partners, and the world. We aspire to make the right decisions every time, but ultimately we’re an aggregation of fifty thousand people. Sometimes some of those people make mistakes, and sometimes we as leaders make mistakes. We are far from perfect. The test of the company, and of the management style I’m advocating in this book, is not whether it delivers perfection. It’s whether we stay true to our values and continue to do the right thing even when tested. And whether we come through those challenges with a more refined commitment, shared among all Googlers, to our beliefs.

We believe we work better as a company if everyone can find out what everyone else is doing, Eric explained, which is why we share so much information among ourselves before any of it is publicly known. And it’s why he was sharing the blueprints with everyone that day. He declared that he trusted all of us to keep information confidential. It was clear that if you violated that trust, you were gone the next day.

Lots of people seeing lots of information inevitably means a few people screwing up. But it’s worth it because the costs of leaks end up being small relative to that openness we all enjoy.

Reject entitlement Entitlement, the creeping belief that just because you receive something you deserve it, is another risk in our approach. In a sense it’s unavoidable. We are biologically and psychologically inclined to habituate to new experiences. People quickly become accustomed to what is being offered, and it becomes a baseline expectation rather than something wonderful and delightful. This can create a spiral of increasing expectations and decreasing happiness. It’s part of why I like to bring new guests to Google, especially kids. It’s embarrassingly easy to forget how unusual it is to have free gourmet meals served each day, but seeing a child’s eyes light up when they realize they can get one of every dessert? That never grows old.

A system like ours, which relies on people to be good and provides benefit of the doubt, is susceptible to bad actors. My very public statement, underscored by the appalling words of a fellow employee, made transparent what was happening and made it socially acceptable for Googlers to nudge one another. Snatching four takeout boxes at once was now greeted with a gentle “You must be pretty hungry,” and people stockpiling snacks on Fridays were looked at askance.lxvii Another way to address the challenge of habituation is by being unafraid to change benefits once the original reasons for them disappear.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”

Each time we make changes to Google’s performance management system, two truths become self-evident: No one likes the system. No one likes the proposed change to the current system.

The experience underscored not just the importance of listening to our people, but also the need to have a reliable channel for opinions well before decisions are made.

Jonathan Rosenberg once told me, “A crisis is an opportunity to have impact. Drop everything and deal with the crisis.”

Innovation thrives on creativity and experimentation, but it also requires thoughtful pruning.

freedom is not absolute, and being part of a team, an organization, means that on some level you’ve agreed to give up some small measure of personal freedom in exchange for the promise of accomplishing more together than you could alone.

The key to balancing individual freedom with overall direction is to be transparent. People need to understand the rationales behind each action that might otherwise be viewed as a step down the slippery slope that leads you away from your values. And the more central your values are to how you operate, the more you need to explain.

WORK RULES…FOR SCREWING UP Admit your mistake. Be transparent about it. Take counsel from all directions. Fix whatever broke. Find the moral in the mistake, and teach it.

Ten steps to transform your team and your workplace

Give your work meaning Work consumes at least one-third of your life, and half your waking hours. It can and ought to be more than a means to an end.

even a small connection to the people who benefit from your work not only improves productivity, it also makes people happier.

Connect it to an idea or value that transcends the day-to-day and that also honestly reflects what you are doing.

As a manager, your job is to help your people find that meaning.

2. Trust your people If you believe human beings are fundamentally good, act like it. Be transparent and honest with your people, and give them a voice in how things work.

If you’re a small shop, regularly ask your employees what they would change to make things better, or what they would change if it was their company. Because that’s how you want them to behave. As if it were their company. And the only way for that to happen is if you give up a little bit of your authority, giving them space to grow into it.

3. Hire only people who are better than you Organizations often act as if filling jobs quickly is more important than filling jobs with the best people.

it is an error ever to compromise on hiring quality. A bad hire is toxic, not only destroying their own performance, but also dragging down the performance, morale, and energy of those around them.

Hire by committee, set objective standards in advance, never compromise, and periodically check if your new hires are better than your old ones. The proof that you are hiring well is that nine out of ten new hires are better than you are. If they’re not, stop hiring until you find better people. You’ll move more slowly in the short term, but you’ll have a much stronger team in the end.

Don’t confuse development with managing performance