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

by Laszlo Bock

Google hires only several thousand per year,6 making Google twenty-five times more selective than Harvard,7 Yale,8 or Princeton.

We deliberately take power and authority over employees away from managers.

it might be possible that your worst person is better than my best person, in which case you should promote everyone and I should promote no one.

the default leadership style at Google is one where a manager focuses not on punishments or rewards but on clearing roadblocks and inspiring her team.

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.

WORK RULES…FOR BECOMING A FOUNDER Choose to think of yourself as a founder. Now act like one.

three defining aspects of our culture: mission, transparency, and voice.

Google’s mission is the first cornerstone of our culture. Our mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Google’s mission is distinctive both in its simplicity and in what it doesn’t talk about. There’s no mention of profit or market. No mention of customers, shareholders, or users. No mention of why this is our mission or to what end we pursue these goals. Instead, it’s taken to be self-evident that organizing information and making it accessible and useful is a good thing.

The most talented people on the planet want an aspiration that is also inspiring. The challenge for leaders is to craft such a goal.

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.

If you believe people are good, you must be unafraid to share information with them

Transparency is the second cornerstone of our culture.

Fundamentally, if you’re an organization that says “Our people are our greatest asset” (as most do), and you mean it, you must default to open. Otherwise, you’re lying to your people and to yourself. You’re saying people matter but treating them like they don’t.

Voice is the third cornerstone of Google’s culture. Voice means giving employees a real say in how the company is run.

Over the coming decades the most gifted, hardest-working people on the planet will gravitate to places where they can do meaningful work and help shape the destiny of their organizations.

WORK RULES…FOR BUILDING A GREAT CULTURE Think of your work as a calling, with a mission that matters. Give people slightly more trust, freedom, and authority than you are comfortable giving them. If you’re not nervous, you haven’t given them enough.

People approach hiring the way Garrison Keillor describes the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average.” We all think we are great at it, but we never go back to check if we are, and so we never get better.

It’s almost impossibly difficult to take an average performer and through training turn them into a superstar.

which of the following situations would you rather be in? We hire 90th percentile performers, who start doing great work right away. We hire average performers, and through our training programs hope eventually to turn them into 90th percentile performers.

We spend more than twice as much on recruiting, as a percentage of our people budget, as an average company. If we are better able to select people up front, that means we have less work to do with them once they are hired.

The worst case with a 90th percentile candidate is that they have an average year. They are unlikely to become the worst performer in the company. An average candidate, however, will not only consume massive training resources, but is also just as likely to end up performing well below average as above average.

Only 10 percent of your applicants (at best!) will be top performers, so you go through far more applicants and interviews.

I say at best, because in fact the top performers in most industries aren’t actually looking for work, precisely because they are top performers who are enjoying their success right where they are. So your odds of hiring a great person based on inbound applications are low.

as Alan Eustace, our SVP of Knowledge, often says, “A top-notch engineer is worth three hundred times or more than an average engineer.… I’d rather lose an entire incoming class of engineer...

WORK RULES…FOR HIRING (THE SHORT VERSION) Given limited resources, invest your HR dollars first in recruiting. 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.

To get there, we start with the 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 people who apply for jobs each year, which means we hire about 0.25 percent of the people we consider. As a point of comparison, Harvard University in 2012 extended offers to 6.1 percent of its applicants

Along the way, we noticed something startling. The very best people aren’t out there looking for work. 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.

but they would have to move to Redmond. The engineers said ‘No way.’ So we swooped in, ran some aggressive hiring efforts, and said, ‘Work from Aarhus, start a new office for Google, build great things.’ We hired the entire team and it’s this group that built the JavaScript engine in Chrome.”

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.

The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent).

The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive ability (26 percent).

We have a strong bias against leaders who champion themselves: people who use “I” far more than “we” and focus exclusively on what they accomplished, rather than how.

The third key difference in our approach, therefore, is to have a subordinate interview a prospective hire. It sends a strong signal to candidates about Google being nonhierarchical, and it also helps prevent cronyism, where managers hire their old buddies for their new teams.

WORK RULES…FOR SELECTING NEW EMPLOYEES Set a high bar for quality. Find your own candidates. Assess candidates objectively. Give candidates a reason to join.

Without instruction, discussion, or even conscious thought, we make room for our “superiors.”

“Jim Barksdale, the legendary CEO of Netscape, in one of these management meetings said, ‘If you have facts, present them and we’ll use them. But if you have opinions, we’re gonna use mine.’ ”

One of the core principles of Google has always been “Don’t politick. Use data.”

before implementing the change for billions of users. In 2010 alone, we conducted 8,157 A/B tests and more than 2,800 one-percent tests. Put another way, every single day in 2010 we ran more than thirty experiments to uncover what would best serve our users. And this was just for our search product.

That’s not fair, argued the engineers, because the first person received $20,000 in bonus, while the second had contributed the same impact but was paid only $18,000. So, at their request, we changed the basis for bonus calculation from actual salaries to the median salary of all people in that job. That ensured that both people received a bonus commensurate with their impact.

What managers miss is that every time they give up a little control, it creates a wonderful opportunity for their team to step up, while giving the manager herself more time for new challenges.

If you’re achieving all your goals, you’re not setting them aggressively enough.

spending thousands of hours every three months assigning ratings that were ludicrously precise but that weren’t an accurate basis for determining pay.

Before this draft rating becomes final, groups of managers sit down together and review all of their employees’ draft ratings together in a process we call calibration.

“Traditional performance management systems make a big mistake. They combine two things that should be completely separate: performance evaluation and people development. Evaluation is necessary to distribute finite resources, like salary increases or bonus dollars. Development is just as necessary so people grow and improve.”

Fourth, split reward conversations from development conversations. Combining the two kills learning. This holds true at companies of any size.