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

by Laszlo Bock

As attendees file in, they leave the head seat vacant. It illustrates the subtle and insidious nature of how we create hierarchy. Without instruction, discussion, or even conscious thought, we make room for our “superiors.”

Managers have a tendency to amass and exert power. Employees have a tendency to follow orders. What’s mind-blowing is that many of us play both roles, manager and employee, at the same time. We each have experienced the frustration of a controlling manager, and we have each experienced the frustration of managing people who just won’t listen. At this point you’re probably thinking, Wow, things got pretty dark all of a sudden. There is hope. “Does your manager trust you?” is a profound question. If you believe people are fundamentally good, and if your organization is able to hire well, there is nothing to fear from giving your people freedom.

One of the nobler aspirations of a workplace should be that it’s a place of refuge where people are free to create, build, and grow. Why not let the inmates run the asylum?

Eliminate status symbols

For example, as a practical matter there are really only four meaningful, visible levels at Google: individual contributor, manager, director, and vice president. There’s also a parallel track for technical people who remain individual contributors throughout their careers. Progression through these levels is a function of a person’s scope, impact, and leadership. People of course care about promotions, and promotions to director and executive are very big deals.

If you want a nonhierarchical environment, you need visible reminders of your values. Otherwise, your human nature inevitably reasserts itself. Symbols and stories matter.

Make decisions based on data, not based on managers’ opinions

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

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.”

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Promotions are another area where myths arise.

When we implemented our Upward Feedback Survey (a periodic survey about manager quality—more on this in chapter 8), we ran an A/B test to see if Googlers were more likely to give feedback to their managers if the email announcing the survey was signed by an executive or a generic “UFS Team” email alias. We saw no difference in response rates, so we opted to use the generic alias, simply because it’s easier to write one email than to ask each executive to write one of his or her own. Almost any major program we roll out is first tested with a subgroup.

Every office, every team, every project is an opportunity to run an experiment and learn from it. This is one of the biggest missed opportunities that large organizations have, and it holds just as true for companies made up of hundreds, not thousands. Too often, management makes a decision that applies unilaterally to the entire organization. What if management is wrong? What if someone has a better idea? What if the decision works in one country but not another? It’s crazy to me that companies don’t experiment more in this way! Why not carve out ten or fifty or a hundred people and try something different? Or try something first with a small group? As they used to say, “If you’re not careful, you may learn something before you’re done.”

Find ways for people to shape their work and the company

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 ...

Post-it Notes famously came out of this program, as did a clever abrasive material, Trizact, which somehow sharpens itself as it’s used.

More typically, a successful project starts with 5 or 10 percent of someone’s time, and as it demonstrates impact it consumes more and more time (and attracts more and more volunteers) until it becomes a formal product. The use of 20 percent time has waxed and waned over the years, humming along at about 10 percent utilization when we last measured it. In some ways, the idea of 20 percent time is more important than the reality of it.

Ryan Tate of Wired wrote the best summary of it I’ve seen:104 Here is what [20 percent time] is not: A fully fleshed corporate program with its own written policy, detailed guidelines, and manager. No one gets a “20 percent time” packet at orientation, or pushed into distracting themselves with a side project. Twenty percent time has always operated on a somewhat ad hoc basis, providing an outlet for the company’s brightest, most restless, and most persistent employees—for people determined to see an idea through to completion, come hell or high water. For example, engineer Paul Buchheit worked on Gmail for two and half years before he finally persuaded company brass, who worried about stretching Google too far beyond search, to launch the thing.

Googlegeist is distinctive because it is written not by consultants but by Googlers with PhD-level expertise in everything from survey design to organizational psychology, all results (both good and bad) are shared back with the entire company within one month, and it is the basis for the next year of employee-led work on improving the culture and effectiveness of Google.

Critically, Googlegeist focuses on outcome measures that matter.

Most employee surveys focus on engagement,106 which as Prasad Setty explains, “is a nebulous concept that HR people like but doesn’t really tell you much. If your employees are 80 percent engaged, what does that even mean?”xl The Corporate Executive Board found that “The meaning of employee engagement is ambiguous among both academic researchers and among practitioners.

Engagement doesn’t tell you precisely where to invest your finite people dollars and time.

Googlers continue to feel the company is innovative and that they can contribute to our mission. But compared to five years ago, Googlers are 20 percent more confident that their career goals can be met at Google, 25 percent happier with the pace of decision-making (which can slow dramatically as bureaucracy creeps into larger organizations), and feel 5 percent more treated with respect (it’s hard to improve much when some baseline scores are already above 90 percent).

In 2012, we received 1,310 ideas and over 90,000 votes on them. The top twenty were implemented.

Expect little from people, get little. Expect a lot …

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 approach almost always works. When it fails, there’s a simple rule to follow: Escalate to the next layer of the company and present the facts. If they can’t decide, escalate again. In our company, eventually Larry Page will break the tie.

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.

You don’t need to have Google’s size or analytical horsepower to unleash the creativity of your people. As a leader, giving up status symbols is the most powerful message you can send that you care about what your teams have to say.

Most organizations are designed to resist change and enfeeble employees. When I tell CEOs that many Googlers can nominate themselves for promotion, or that they can ask our CEO any question, the most common response is that it sounds great in theory but would never work at their company: People won’t focus on their real work; gathering all those facts would just slow us down (!); the lawyers won’t let us do it; people (the very ones that are their “most important asset”) won’t make good decisions; I like my special parking space. … But it does work. You just need to fight the petty seductions of management and the command-and-control impulses that accompany seniority.

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.

7 ................ Why Everyone Hates Performance Management, and What We Decided to Do About It Improve performance by focusing on personal growth instead of ratings and rewards

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Throwing in the towel

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

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. The focus on process rather than purpose creates an insidious opportunity for sly employees to manipulate the system.

In fact, no one is happy about the current state of performance management. WorldatWork and Sibson Consulting surveyed 750 senior HR professionals and found that 58 percent of them graded their own performance management systems as C or worse. Only 47 percent felt the system helped the organization “achieve its strategic objectives,” and merely 30 percent felt that employees trust the system.

Adobe, Expedia, Juniper Networks (a computer hardware manufacturer), Kelly Services (a temporary worker agency), and Microsoft have all eliminated performance ratings.

“We came to a fairly quick decision that we would abolish the performance review, which meant we would no longer have a one-time-of-the-year formal written review,” says Morris. “What’s more, we would abolish performance rankings and levels in order to move away from people feeling like they were labeled.” In place of the traditional performance review, Adobe introduced The Check-In—an informal system of ongoing, real-time feedback—in the summer of 2012.112

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 “immediately” to “days later.” Most real-time feedback systems quickly turn into “attaboy” systems, as people only like telling each other nice things.

Setting goals

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

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.

On the topic of goals, the academic research agrees with your intuition: Having goals improves performance.113 Spending hours cascading goals up and down the company, however, does not.114

Measuring performance

For all the time we spent on assigning ratings, when it came time to set raises or bonuses, managers or later reviewers changed the pay outcomes two-thirds of the time. Our managers were spending thousands of hours every three months assigning ratings that were ludicrously precise but that weren’t an accurate basis for determining pay. The same goes for measuring performance four times per year.

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Ultimately, three things were clear: Consensus was impossible. In the absence of clear evidence, everyone became an expert and there were constituencies arguing for every possible variation. People had strong opinions about questions like whether five or six performance categories are best. Even when making changes to the least popular process at Google, it was impossible to find a solution that made everyone happy. It seemed that even though many people disliked the current system, they disliked every other option even more! People took performance management seriously. For example, we polled Googlers about what to label our performance categories, and more than 4,200 votes were cast. The clearest trend was a desire for seriousness and clarity, not whimsy. Experimentation was vital. In the absence of external evidence, we had to develop our own, working with the leaders of each part of Google to help them test their ideas. At YouTube they tried sorting everyone into a rank order of most to least effective, regardless of level, and found that one of the two most effective people was a mid-level employee, who was then rewarded with one of the biggest stock grants at YouTube.

Based on our experiments, in early 2013 we stopped doing quarterly ratings, in favor of every six months. There was some kvetching but no harm done. An instant time savings of 50 percent.

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We were relieved to see that the loss of “precision” didn’t hurt us.