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

by Laszlo Bock

The effect has been profound.

We’ve been able to anticipate areas where attrition might go up and keep employee turnover consistent and low, through good times and difficult ones.

“Code health”

refers to maintaining the overall sustainability and scalability of code to minimize this problem.

It requires regularly researching and creating techniques to reduce complexity, and integrating an ethos of simplification into our code development process.

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 fo...

This approach almost alw...

When it fails, there’s a simple rule to follow: Escalate to the next layer of the comp...

If they can’t decide, esca...

This advice may seem out of place, given that I’ve just devoted much of this chapter to explaining why mana...

But hierarchy in decision-making is important. It’s the only way to break ties and is ultimately one of the primar...

The mistake leaders make is that they ma...

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.

You don’t need to have Google’s size or analytical horsepower to unleash the cr...

As a leader, giving up status symbols is the most powerful message you can send that you care about...

Managers find many reasons not to trust their people. Most organizations are designed to resist change and enfeeble employees.

fight the petty seductions of management and the command-and-control impulses that accompany seniority.

Organizations put tremendous effort into finding great people but then restrict their ability to have impact on any area but their own tasks.

Our first twenty years are spent being compared to others.

It’s no wonder, then, that as adults we re-create those same conditions when we design our work environments.

It’s what w...

The major problem with performance management systems today is that they have become substitutes for the vital act of actually managing people.

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.

The focus on process rather than purpose creates an insidious opportunity for sly employee...

In fact, no one is happy about the current state of performance management.

The response in vogue today is to surrender.

Intuitively, this sounds appealing. Employees are unhappy, so throw out the system they don’t like. Simple. And isn’t receiving feedback in real time better than waiting for a year?

But there’s no evidence that the systems people use to do this work either.

The academic research suffers from inconsistent measurement, where “real time” can mean anything from ...

Most real-time feedback systems quickly turn into “attaboy” systems, as people only like tell...

The two primary complaints were that it took too much time and the process wasn’t transparent enough, which raised concerns about fairness.

Google’s performance management system has always started with goal setting.

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...

It’s important to have both a quality and an efficiency measure, because otherwise engineers could just solve for one at the expense of the other.

We deliberately set ambitious goals that we know we won’t be able to achieve in all cases. If you’re achieving all your goals, you’re not setting them aggressively enough.

So at the beginning of each quarter, Larry sets OKRs for the company, triggering everyone else to make sure their own personal OKRs roughly sync with Google’s.

We don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

In addition, everyone’s OKRs are visible to everyone else in the company on our internal website, right next to their phone number and office location.

Larry’s OKRs, followed by his quarterly report on how the company has performed, set the standard for transparency in communication and an appropriately high bar for our goals.

On the topic of goals, the academic research agrees with your intuition: Having goals improves performance.

Spending hours cascading goals up and down the company, however, does not.114 It takes way too much time and it’s too hard ...

We have a market-based approach, where over time our goals all converge, because the top OKRs are known and e...

Teams that are grossly out of alignment stand out, and the few major initiatives that touch everyone are ...

The science on rating systems is inconclusive.

There’s no strong evidence to suggest that having three or five or ten or fifty rating points makes a difference.