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

by Laszlo Bock

In every interview I’ve ever had with another company, I’ve met my potential boss and several peers. But rarely have I met anyone who would be working for me. Google turns this approach upside down. You’ll probably meet your prospective manager (where possible—for some large job groups like “software engineer” or “account strategist” there is no single hiring manager) and a peer, but more important is meeting one or two of the people who will work for you. In a way, their assessments are more important than anyone else’s—after all, they’re going to have to live with you. 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. We find that the best candidates leave subordinates feeling inspired or excited to learn from them.

Fourth, we add a “cross-functional interviewer,” someone with little or no connection at all to the group for which the candidate is interviewing. For example, we might ask someone from the legal or the Ads team (the latter design the technology behind our advertising products) to interview a prospective sales hire. This is to provide a disinterested assessment: A Googler from a different function is unlikely to have any interest in a particular job being filled but has a strong interest in keeping the quality of hiring high.

Sixth, we rely on disinterested reviewers. In addition to using structured interviews and the hiring attributes, we deliberately include at least three layers of review for each candidate. The hiring committee takes a first look, recommending whether

The most common reason for rejection at this stage in the process? Culture.xxxi While Googlers possess the gamut of political views, the cultural values of transparency and voice are widely held and core to how we operate.

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. LinkedIn, Google+, alumni databases, and professional associations make it easy. Assess candidates objectively. Include subordinates and peers in the interviews, make sure interviewers write good notes, and have an unbiased group of people make the actual hiring decision. Periodically return to those notes and compare them to how the new employee is doing, to refine your assessment capability. Give candidates a reason to join. Make clear why the work you are doing matters, and let the candidate experience the astounding people they will get to work with.

“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.’ ” The tone of Barksdale’s comment is both funny and on the edge of tyrannical, but it captures well how most successful managers think. After all, they (ideally) became managers because they demonstrated good judgment, so why shouldn’t we rely on their judgment?

“Relying on data helps out everyone. Senior executives shouldn’t be wasting time debating whether the best background color for an ad is yellow or blue. Just run an experiment. This leaves management free to worry about the stuff that is hard to quantify, which is usually a much better use of their time.”

In addition to stripping leaders of the traditional tools of power and relying on facts to make decisions, we give Googlers uncommon freedom in shaping their own work and the company. Google isn’t the first to do so. For over sixty-five years, 3M has offered its employees 15 percent of their time to explore: “A core belief of 3M is that creativity needs freedom. That’s why, since about 1948, we’ve encouraged our employees to spend 15% of their working time on their own projects.

employee responses are anonymous (to eliminate sycophancy) and managers’ results are not factored into performance ratings or pay decisions. We want employees to be scathingly honest, and managers to be open to improvement rather than defensive.

Some will argue that this kind of mass empowerment leads to anarchy, or to a situation where, since everyone’s opinion is valued, anyone can object and derail an effort—an environment where ten thousand people can say no but no one can say yes. The reality is that every issue needs a decision maker. Managed properly, the result of these approaches is not some transcendent moment of unanimity. Rather, it is a robust, data-driven discussion that brings the best ideas to light, so that when a decision is made, it leaves the dissenters with enough context to understand and respect the rationale for the decision, even if they disagree with the outcome.

This advice may seem out of place, given that I’ve just devoted much of this chapter to explaining why managers should not have authority. But hierarchy in decision-making is important. It’s the only way to break ties and is ultimately one of the primary responsibilities of management. The mistake leaders make is that they manage too much. As Olivier Serrat of the Asian Development Bank wrote, “Micromanagement is mismanagement.… [P]eople micromanage to assuage their anxieties about organizational performance: they feel better if they are continuously directing and controlling the actions of others—at heart, this reveals emotional insecurity on their part. It gives micromanagers the illusion of control (or usefulness). Another motive is lack of trust in the abilities of staff—micromanagers do not believe that their colleagues will successfully complete a task or discharge a responsibility even when they say they will.”108 Instead, decisions should be made at the lowest possible level of an organization. The only questions that should rise up the org chart are ones where, Serrat continues, “given the same data and information,” more senior leaders would make a different decision than the rank and file.

In 1999 we were serving a financial services company and doing one of the first e-commerce projects our firm had ever done. (Remember “e-commerce”?) I brought a draft report to him and instead of editing it, he asked, “Do I need to review this?” I knew deep down that while my report was good, he would surely find some room for improvement. Realizing this, I told him it wasn’t ready and went back to refine it further. I came back to him a second time, and a second time he asked, “Do I need to review this?” I went away again. On my fourth try, he asked the same question and I told him, “No. You don’t need to review it. It’s ready for the client.” He answered, “Terrific. Nice work.” And sent it to the client without even glancing at it. If you expect little, that’s what you’ll get.

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.

In other words: Performance management as practiced by most organizations has become a rule-based, bureaucratic process, existing as an end in itself rather than actually shaping performance. Employees hate it. Managers hate it. Even HR departments hate it.

In the early 2000s, Google board member John Doerr introduced us to a practice he had seen Intel use with much success: OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results. The results must be specific, measurable, and verifiable; if you achieve all your results, you’ve attained your objective.

“If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.”

We assembled steering committees, advisory committees, and even put some questions to a popular vote.

The goal is the same: to remove sources of individual bias. Even if you’re a small company, you’ll have better results, and happier employees, if assessments are based on a group discussion rather than the whims of a single manager.

As an employee, I want to be treated fairly. I don’t mind someone being paid more than me if they are contributing more. But if we’re doing the same work and they’re being paid way more, I’ll be mighty unhappy. A just rating system means I don’t have to worry about that. It also means that if someone does exceptional work, they’ll be seen not just by their manager, but by lots of managers in the calibration meeting,

Be a good coach. Empower the team and do not micromanage. Express interest/concern for team members’ success and personal well-being. Be very productive/results-oriented. Be a good communicator—listen and share information. Help the team with career development. Have a clear vision/strategy for the team. Have important technical skills that help advise the team. List of the 8 Project Oxygen attributes from Google. © Google, Inc.

“What are your goals for this meeting?” “How do you think each client will respond?” “How do you plan to introduce a difficult topic?” We’d conduct the meeting, and on the drive back to our office he would again ask questions that forced me to learn: “How did your approach work out?” “What did you learn?” “What do you want to try differently next time?”

Every meeting ended with immediate feedback and a plan for what to continue to do or change for next time.

I can’t tell you whether the best way to teach is in person or remotely, through self-study or group classes. That will depend on how your people learn best, and whether they are trying to learn job-specific skills, such as a new programming language, or more general skills, such as how to work better together as a team. I can, however, tell you exactly where to find the best teachers. They are sitting right next to you. I promise you that in your organization there are people who are expert on every facet of what you do, or at least expert enough that they can teach others. We’re all familiar with the concepts of maximum and minimum. In theory, you want the best person, the one with the maximum expertise, to be delivering training.

A learning organization starts with a recognition that all of us want to grow and to help others grow. Yet in many organizations, employees are taught and professionals do the teaching. Why not let people do both?

Recruiting, you’ll recall, always comes first, because if you’re hiring people who are better than yourself, most other people issues tend to sort themselves out.

Pay unfairly. Celebrate accomplishment, not compensation. Make it easy to spread the love. Reward thoughtful failure.

Why would a company design a system that makes the best and highest-potential people quit? Because they have a misconception of what is fair and lack the courage to be honest with their people. Fairness in pay does not mean everyone at the same job level is paid the same or within 20 percent of one another. Fairness is when pay is commensurate with contribution.liv As a result, there ought to be tremendous variance in pay for individuals.

Compensation systems are based on imperfect information and administered by imperfect people. They will inevitably have some errors and injustice in the margins. The way we ran the program focused too much attention on the money, which then naturally led to questions of whether the process was just, and to unhappiness.

We also shifted these programs from providing monetary awards to experiential awards.

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.

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. Many companies allow employees to nominate an employee of the month, and some allow employees to give modest peer bonuses, with approval from HR or management. At Google, any employee can give anyone else a $175 cash award, with no management oversight or sign-off required.

And if people shoot for the stars and only hit the moon, don’t treat them too harshly. Ease the pain of failure to leave room for learning. As Larry often says: If your goals are ambitious and crazy enough, even failure will be a pretty good achievement.

We use our people programs to achieve three goals: efficiency, community, and innovation.

These cost Google nothing, because we don’t pay for them. Entrepreneurs want to provide these services and require only our permission to come on our site. Googlers pay for the services (though in some cases we are able to negotiate volume discounts on their behalf). And in some cases, such as grocery delivery, Googlers themselves organize the services.

Our “Meatless Monday” pilot stopped serving land-based meat in two cafés on Mondays for one month. Attendance at one of the cafés dropped off, and the primary reason people gave for avoiding it was that they didn’t like having choices made for them. As we’ll discuss in the next chapter, there were much, much stronger reactions as well. Googlers also told us they valued options.

But to me it felt like I’d failed. I thought the obligation to dissent required me to speak up, so it was all the more gut-wrenching to see my concerns brushed aside. The more vigorously the firm proclaimed its values, the more acutely I and my peers felt the gaps between the values as they were espoused and as they were lived.

In the introduction, I posited that there are two extreme models of how organizations should be run. The heart of this book is my belief that you can choose what type of organization you want to create, and I’ve shown you some of the tools to do so. The “low-freedom” extreme is the command-and-control organization, where employees are managed tightly, worked intensely, and discarded. The “high-freedom” extreme is based on liberty, where employees are treated with dignity and given a voice in how the company evolves. Both models can be very profitable, but this book presumes that the most talented people on the planet will want to be part of a freedom-driven company. And freedom-driven companies, because they benefit from the best insight and passion of all their employees, are more resilient and better sustain success.

Work consumes at least one-third of your life, and half your waking hours. It can and