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Performance improved only when companies implemented programs to empower employees (for example, by taking decision-making authority away from managers and giving it to individuals or teams), provided learning opportunities that were outside what people needed to do their jobs, increased their reliance on teamwork (by giving teams more autonomy and allowing them to self-organize), or a combination of these.
They started out knowing how they wanted people to be treated.
Quixotic as it sounds, they both wanted to create a company where work was meaningful, employees felt free to pursue their passions, and people and their families were cared for.
Larry and Sergey always insisted that hiring decisions be made by groups rather than a single manager.
All successful organizations resemble one another as well. They possess a shared sense not just of what they produce, but of who they are and want to be.
My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society.
ways: by looking at its “artifacts,” such as physical space and behaviors; by surveying the beliefs and values espoused by group members; or by digging deeper into the underlying assumptions behind those values.
“do a barrel roll” next time you’re using Google.com
Adam Grant has an answer. In Give and Take, he writes about the power of purpose to improve not just happiness, but also productivity.50 His answer, like many brilliant insights, seems obvious once it’s pointed out. The big surprise is how huge the impact is. Adam looked at paid employees in a university’s fund-raising call center. Their job was to call potential donors and ask for contributions. He divided them into three groups. Group A was the control group, and just did their jobs. Group B read stories from other employees about the personal benefits of the job: learning and money. Group C
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Å møte folkene man hjelper øker resultatene av arbeidet med 400%
Having workers meet the people they are helping is the greatest motivator, even if they only meet for a few minutes. It imbues one’s work with a significance that transcends careerism or money.
But, I told them, those small business owners are reaching out because the problem that is easy for you is hard for them.
employee snippets
So we started seeking out candidates who had shown resilience and an ability to overcome hardship.
humility
conscientiousness.
Hiring is the most important people function you have, and most of us aren’t as good at it as we think. Refocusing your resources on hiring better will have a higher return than almost any training program you can develop.
WORK RULES…FOR HIRING (THE SHORT VERSION)
hire: someone just as motivated, clever, interesting, and passionate as you are about the new venture.
Each generation of hiring will therefore be a slightly poorer version of the hiring done by the prior generation. As you get bigger, there will also be more temptation to hire a friend or customer’s child to help them out or build the relationship. These are almost always a compromise of quality. The result is that you go from hiring stellar people as a small company or team to hiring average people as a big company.
clever
curious
But in 2010, our analyses revealed that academic performance didn’t predict job performance beyond the first two or three years after college, so we stopped requiring grades and transcripts except from recent graduates.
Aided recall is a marketing research technique where subjects are shown an ad or told the name of a product and asked if they remember being exposed to it.
Breaking down a huge question (“Do you know anyone we should hire?”) into lots of small, manageable ones (“Do you know anyone who would be a good salesperson in New York?”) garners us more, higher-quality referrals.
Great-performing people are happy and being amply rewarded where they are today. They don’t occur to people as referrals, because why would you bother referring someone who is happy at their current job? And they certainly don’t apply for jobs.
The last source of candidates that we, and most organizations, have used is job boards. These are websites where for a fee an employer can post a job and then receive a flood of applicants. Popular examples are Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, and Indeed. The Google experience has been that job boards generate many, many applicants and vanishingly few actual hires. Our hypothesis is that, since Google is fairly well known today, a more motivated candidate will show the modest initiative required to actually go to Google Careers and apply directly. A less motivated candidate will apply to lots of
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used is job boards. These are websites where for a fee an employer can post a job and then receive a flood of applicants. Popular examples are Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, and Indeed. The Google experience has been that job boards generate many, many applicants and vanishingly few actual hires. Our hypothesis is that, since Google is fairly well known today, a more motivated candidate will show the modest initiative required to actually go to Google Careers and apply directly. A less motivated candidate will apply to lots of jobs and lots of companies through job boards, which make it easy to
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Stillingsannonser på "job boards" gir mange søkere, men med lav kvalitet. Google sluttet å bruke "job boards" i 2012.
The first step to building a recruiting machine is to turn every employee into a recruiter by soliciting referrals.
someone objective make the hiring decision.
WORK RULES…FOR FINDING EXCEPTIONAL CANDIDATES
Get the best referrals by being excruciatingly specific in describing what you’re looking for. Make recruiting part of everyone’s job. Don’t be afraid to try crazy things to get the attention of the best people.
Based on the slightest interaction, we make a snap, unconscious judgment heavily influenced by our existing biases and beliefs. Without realizing it, we then shift from assessing a candidate to hunting for evidence that confirms our initial impression.
most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds.
You can (and should) offer a work sample test to someone applying to work in a call center or to do very task-oriented work,
Research shows that combinations of assessment techniques are better than any single technique. For example, a test of general cognitive ability (predicts 26 percent of performance), when combined with an assessment of conscientiousness (10 percent), is better able to predict who will be successful in a job (36 percent).
combining behavioral and situational structured interviews with assessments of cognitive ability, conscientiousness, and leadership.
Examples of interview questions include:
www.va.gov/pbi/questions.asp.
He found that four interviews were enough to predict whether or not we should hire someone with 86 percent confidence.
“wisdom of the crowds”
transparency
voice
“This is a great candidate—strong technical interview scores, clearly very smart and well-qualified—but sufficiently arrogant that none of the interviewers want him on their team...
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Until we hit about twenty thousand employees, most people in the company spent four to ten hours per week on hiring, and our top executives would easily spend a full day each week on it, which worked out to between eighty thousand and two hundred thousand hours per year spent on hiring.
In 2013, with roughly forty thousand people, the average Googler spent one and a half hours per week on hiring, even though our volume of hiring is almost twice what it was when we had twenty thousand people.
But by far the best recruiting technique is having a core of remarkable people.
Set a high bar for quality. Before you start recruiting, decide what attributes you want and define as a group what great looks like. A good rule of thumb is to hire only people who are better than you. Do not compromise. Ever.
Find your own candidates.
Assess candidates objectively.
Give candidates a reason to join.
