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

by Laszlo Bock

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. Development conversations can more safely happen along the way to achieving a goal. Separate in space and time conversations about whether a goal has been achieved. Once a performance period has ended, then have a direct discussion about the goals that were set and what was achieved, and how rewards are tied to performance. But that conversation should be entirely about outcomes, not about process. Goals were either missed, met, or exceeded, and each of those states carries different rewards or encouragements. If you’re doing this well, the performance discussions will never be a surprise because you’ll have had conversations all along the way, and the employee will have felt your support at each step. In all cases, don’t rely solely on the manager to come up with an accurate picture of how people are doing. For development, solicit input from peers, even if it’s as simple as asking or sending out a short questionnaire. For performance evaluation, require managers to sit together and calibrate their assessments as a group to guarantee fairness.

Focus on the two tails Put your best people under a microscope. Through a combination of circumstance, skill, and grit they have figured out how to excel. Identify not just your best all-around athletes, but the best specialists. Don’t find the best salesperson; find the person who sells best to new accounts of a certain size. Find the person who excels at hitting golf balls at night in the rain. The more specific you can be in slicing expertise, the easier it will be to study your stars and discern why they are more successful than others. And then use them not just as exemplars for others by building checklists around what they do, but also as teachers. One of the best ways to learn a skill is to teach it. Enlisting stars as faculty, even if it’s just for a thirty-minute coffee talk, will force them to articulate how they do what they do, and this very process helps them grow as well. If you’re exposed to one of these people as a coworker, observe them closely, pepper them with questions, and use the opportunity to suck every bit of knowledge out of them. At the same time, have compassion for your worst performers. If you’re getting hiring right, most of those who struggle do so because you’ve put them in the wrong role, not because they are inept. Help them to learn or to find new roles. But if that fails, exit them immediately. It’s not mercy to keep them around—they’ll be happier in an environment where they aren’t the worst performers.

Be frugal and generous Most things we do for our people cost nothing. Have vendors bring services in-house or negotiate lunch delivery from a local sandwich shop. TGIF and guest speakers require only a room and a microphone. Yet they result in a Brownian abundance: Googlers are constantly bumping into a new service or intriguing discussion. Save your big checks for the times when your people are most in need, the moments of greatest tragedy and joy. Your generosity will have the most impact when someone needs emergency medical attention or when families are welcoming new members. Focusing on those most human moments underscores that your organization cares about each individual, personal...

My father founded an engineering firm that he led for over three decades. He cared deeply for each of his people, paying them not just in wages but in kind words and advice and mentorship. And when any of his team reached five years in tenure, he took them aside for a private conversation. He told them that the company had a pension plan, and at five years they were fully vested in it. In addition to whatever they’d been saving, he had also been putting money aside for each of them. Some cheered, some cried, some simply thanked him. He didn’t tell people e...

Pay unfairly

Ninety percent or more of the value on your teams comes from the top 10 percent. As a result, your best people are worth far more than your average people. They might be worth 50 percent more than your average people or fifty times more, but they are absolutely worth more. Make sure they feel it. Even if you don’t have the financial resources to provide huge differences in pay, providing greater differences will mean something.

Your B players might be a little unhappy about their rewards, but you can address that by being honest: Explain to them why their pay is different and what they can do to change it. At the same time, be generous in your public recognition. Celebrate the achievements of teams, and make a point of cheering failures where important lessons were learned.

N...

The single idea in this book with the most potential to tangibly improve the rest of your life is to change how...

Figure out what percent of your income you save today, and then save a little bit more from now on. It is never easy. It is always worth it.

We are all constantly nudged by our environment and nudging those around us. Use that fact to make yourself and your teams happier and more productive.

Share data about what is going right, such as the number of people volunteering with local charities, to encourage others to get involved. You’ll be surprised by how different the same place can feel.

9. Manage the rising expectations

You’ll trip up sometimes and need to take backward steps. Be prepared to eat your goji pie. Knowing that, tell people around you that you’ll be experimenting with ideas from this book before you start experimenting. That will help transform them from critics to support...

This isn’t a one-time effort. Building a great culture and environment requires constant learning and renewal. Don’t worry about trying to do everything at once. Experiment with one idea from this book or with a dozen, learn from the experiment, tweak the program, and try again.

specialize in is operating at scale, building systems that serve two billion users just as thoughtfully and reliably as they serve ten. Our people innovations have benefited from a set of prescient founders, fierce cultural guardians, thoughtful academic research, and creative companies and governments.

we’ve built People Operations around four underlying principles: Strive for nirvana. Use data to predict and shape the future. Improve relentlessly. Field an unconventional team.

to have the privilege of working on the cool, futuristic stuff, you had to earn the confidence of the organization.

nirvana, that blissful place where every Googler was growing seemingly without effort, as our programs worked behind the scenes to fill every job, create learning opportunities, and help Googlers be more productive, healthier, and happier.

I picked the graphic of blood cells to illustrate “HR that just works” to underscore the point that our programs are as ubiquitous, and need to be as reliable, as the body’s circulatory system. We must deliver the basics, flawlessly, every time. No errors in offer letters or bonuses, every job filled on time with a great candidate, smooth and fair promotion processes, speedy resolution of employee concerns, and so on.

failure to deliver the basics even once in a while will cause your business to withhold trust and authority when you want to take on more.

Our compensation team, for better and worse, always received tremendous attention from the management team. To make sure everything works and we stay ahead of management’s expectations, there’s a formal debrief after every process such as bonus planning, where we ask, “What should we do differently? What did we learn? What were we told to do that we will choose to ignore and not do?”

And then, when we run that process next time, the first conversation the compensation team has with Google’s leadership team starts with, “Here’s what we agreed to last time, and here’s what we did. Here’s the things you told us to do that we will not do, and here’s why. And now, let’s proceed.” The compensation team even developed a cheat sheet about each management team member, describing how best to work with him or her, so that new team members can work smoothly with our most senior leaders right from the start.

The notion of mass customization comes from author Stan Davis, who wrote a book called Future Perfect in 1987, describing a world where companies will produce goods and services to meet individual customers’ needs with near–mass production efficiency. And that’s what we try to do. The visual metaphor was a forest: every plant unique in size and shape, but nevertheless having more in common with the others than not.

We’ve always had a consistent philosophy underpinning our people processes, but tweak the details of each process based on what different parts of Google need.

our engineering promotion process, where potential promotions are reviewed by committee and ratified by a subsequent committee. If a Googler disagrees with the decision, there is an appeals committee, and if that decision isn’t well received there’s an appeal-of-appeals committee.

it works because these checks and balances ensure that processes are just, and that they’re as transparent as possible—qualities that matter deeply to engineers. In some sales teams, leaders may instead say, “You know what? We’re just going to make a call and the decision will be final,” and there’s not an appeals process. That’s viable as well, because in those cases People Operations works behind the scenes to ensure the processes are just as fair by enforcing the same talent standard across the company. Same standards behind the scenes but different manifestations on the front end, where Googlers see them. And then, in the spirit of transparency, we share data on the outcomes of each promotion process with Googlers, along with historic data.

People are happy when you give them what they ask for. People are delighted when you anticipate what they didn’t think to ask for.

Anticipation is about delivering what people need before they know to ask for it.

gives you $500 specifically for takeout meals. And new parents tell us they love it.

step one, and it’s a big step, is agreeing on a common set of definitions for all people data. Only then can you accurately describe what the company looks like. Analysis and insight are about slicing the data ever more finely to identify differences.

Google until a few years ago, celebrate promotions but do nothing to reach out to the people who just missed the cut. Which is madness. It takes an hour or two to spot the folks you think will be upset and talk to them about how to continue growing.

It’s more procedurally just, which helps people perceive the process as more open and honest. It’s far better for the company than having someone quit, losing their productivity while you look for a replacement, recruit someone, and then bring them up to speed. And, at a very vulnerable time in someone’s career, you’re helping him understand what happened and using a demotivating event to ignite his drive.

Hire a PhD or two in organizational psychology, psychology, or sociology fresh out of grad school. Or bring in a finance or operations person and challenge them to prove that your programs make a difference. Just make sure they are great with statistics and curious about people issues. Be open to crazy ideas. Find some way to say yes.

Then experiment.

an experiment run on five or ten people is better than nothing. Test an idea on just one team. Or try the idea on the whole company at once, but announce that it’s a test for just a month and then you’ll decide whether to make it permanent based on how people react.

Improve relentlessly

Virtually everything we do more than once is measured and improved over time.

We’ve accomplished this without outsourcing or increasing the use of consultants or vendors. In fact, we’ve brought more services in-house, which has two virtues. First, it’s often cheaper, especially for areas like recruiting and training. Second, there’s tremendously useful information to be gleaned by managing processes in-house.

running your HR department or team with the same standards of clear objectives, continuous improvement, and reliability that are used in the rest of your company will make your organization credible and trusted.

By applying our three-thirds model, we recruit a portfolio of capabilities: HR people teach us about influencing and recognizing patterns in people and organizations; the consultants improve our understanding of the business and the level of our problem solving; the analytics people raise the quality of everything we do. There is little in this book that we could have accomplished without this combination of talent. In the HR profession, it is an error to hire only HR people. Yet everyone in People Operations has a few traits in common. Each one is a gifted problem solver. Each has a dose of intellectual humility, which makes them open to the possibilities that they could be wrong and always have more to learn. And each is tremendously conscientious, caring deeply about Googlers and the company. They are a diverse group.