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

by Laszlo Bock

Googlers’ survey responses revealed what we’d suspected all along: The forty-one points created only an illusion of precision. Most Googlers admitted that for many ratings it wasn’t possible to distinguish within plus or minus 0.1.

When we stopped offering guidance about what the right rating distribution ought to be, we saw four distinct rating patterns emerge that better reflected the actual performance characteristics of different teams and individuals. We also saw that managers doubled their usage of the extremes of the rating system. Expanding the proportion of people receiving the top rating better reflected their actual performance (skip ahead to chapter 10 to see why that’s true). And reducing the stigma of being in the bottom performance category made it easier for managers to have direct, compassionate conversations with their struggling employees about how to improve.

Ensuring fairness

Google’s rating system was (and is) distinctive in that it isn’t just the direct manager making the decision. A manager assigns a draft rating to an employee—say, “exceeds expectations”—based on nailing OKRs but tempered by other activities, like the volume of interviews completed, or extenuating circumstances such as a shift in the economy that might have affected ad revenues.xlivBefore 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. Calibration adds a step. But it is critical to ensure fairness. A manager’s assessments are compared to those of managers leading similar teams, and they review their employees collectively: A group of five to ten managers meet and project on a wall their fifty to a thousand employees, discuss individuals, and agree on a fair rating. This allows us to remove the pressure managers may feel from employees to inflate ratings. It also ensures that the end results reflect a shared expectation of performance, since managers often have different expectations for their people and interpret performance standards in their own idiosyncratic manner—just like in school, where some teachers were easy graders and others were tough. Calibration diminishes bias by forcing managers to justify their decisions to one another. It also increases perceptions of fairness among employees.117 The power of calibration in assessing people for ratings is not ...

When lots of other companies are abandoning ratings altogether, why do we stick with the system? I think it’s about fairness. Ratings are tools, simplifying devices to help managers make decisions about pay and promotion. 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, who together create and promulgate a consistent standard across the company. Ratings also make it easier for people to move across the company. As a manager, I can trust that someone who “strongly exceeds expectations” does great work, whether her last job was working on Chrome or in Sales. As an employee, I can have confidence that people are being promoted based on merit, not politics. For a small team, you don’t need this infrastructure—you know everyone. But once you have more than a few hundred people, employees are more comfortable trusting a reliable system than individual managers. Not because managers are necessarily bad or biased, but because a rating process that includes calibration actively weeds out badness and bias.

Avoid defensiveness and promote learning with one simple trick

A fair process for ratings gets you only so far. As a manager, you want to tell people not only how they did, but also how to do better in the future. The question is: What is the most effective way to deliver those two messages? The answer: Do it in two distinct conversations. Intrinsic motivation is the key t...

Workplaces that permit employees more freedom tap into that natural intrinsic motivation, which in turn helps employees feel even more autonomous and capable.

As a manager, my incentive is to rate my employees fairly and honestly, so that the company’s systems work. As an employee, my incentive is certainly to perform well, but it’s also rational for me to argue, argue, argue with my manager to drive up my rating (as long as I don’t push so hard my manager gets angry). It costs my manager nothing, save perhaps a little integrity (alas), and for me as an employee a higher rating means more money and opportunity. And I can afford to spend several hours a week preparing my arguments, while my manager not only doesn’t have the time to do so for each of his employees, but will never have as much information as I do because he’s not with me all day. As long as ratings are directly linked to pay and career opportunities, every employee has this incentive to exploit the system.

mollified

appaiser calmer

As Prasad Setty explains, “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.” 121 If you want people to grow, don’t have those two conversations at the same time. Make development a constant back-and-forth between you and your team members, rather than a year-end surprise.

The wisdom of crowds … it’s not just for recruiting anymore!

We learned in chapter 5 that we make better hiring decisions about potential employees by relying on input from a crowd of people. The same principle holds for...

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aumone / document a distribuer

Putting it all together for promotions

A new hope

The only companies I’ve seen that spend as much time on performance management and promotions as we do are colleges and firms run like partnerships.

Google’s revenues and headcount have grown roughly 20 to 30 percent in each of the past five years. We do our best to hire people who have a proven aptitude for learning, and then do everything we can to help them grow as fast as they can. Making sure our people are developing is not a luxury. It’s essential for our survival.

8 ................ The Two Tails The biggest opportunities lie in your absolute worst and best employees

In fact, human performance in organizations follows a power law distribution for most jobs. Herman Aguinis and Ernest O’Boyle of Indiana University and the University of Iowa explain that “instead of a massive group of average performers dominating … through sheer numbers, a small group of elite performers [dominate] through massive performance.” 130 Most organizations undervalue and underreward their best people, without even knowing they are doing it. In chapter 10 I’ll explain why and suggest a better way to manage and pay people.

Help those in need

What most organizations miss is that people in the bottom tail represent the biggest opportunity to improve performance in your company, and the top tail will teach you exactly how to realize that opportunity.

At Google, we regularly identify the bottom-performing 5 percent or so of our employees. These individuals form the bottom tail of our performance distribution. Note that this happens outside our formal performance management process. We’re not looking to fire people: We’re finding the people who need help.

“skimmers,”

ecumoir / skim ecremer

Our goal is to tell every person in the bottom 5 percent that they are in that group. That is not a fun conversation to have. But it’s made easier by the message we give these people: “You are in the bottom 5 percent of performers across all of Google. I know that doesn’t feel good. The reason I’m telling you this is that I want to help you grow and get better.”

even “Neutron Jack,” as Welch was called due to the layoffs and firings that characterized much of his tenure as CEO, mellowed in his description of the process in later years. In 2006, he elaborated on his approach to “rank-and-yank” sorting of employees: The “yank” myth of differentiation says the bottom 10% are summarily fired. In reality, that’s rare. More typically, when a person has been in the bottom 10% for a sustained period of time, the manager starts a conversation about moving on. Occasionally, of course, an underperformer doesn’t want to go. But confronted with the cold reality of how the organization views them, most people leave of their own accord and very often end up at companies where their skills are a better fit and they are more appreciated.133 He then argues that it’s kinder to be direct with an employee: Compare that with companies where managers, in the name of kindness, allow people, and particularly underperformers, to plod along for years. Then a downturn occurs. Middle-aged underperformers are always the first to get the ax. One by one, their manager calls them in for a conversation that usually goes like this: “Joe, I’m afraid you have to leave.” “What! Why me?” “Well … you were never very good.” “I’ve been here 20 years. Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Why not indeed? The employee, years earlier, might have been able to find a job with a future. Now, at age 45 or 50, he must enter a job market more competitive than ever. That’s cruel.134

Put your best people under a microscope

top performers live in a virtuous cycle of great output, great feedback, more great output, and more great feedback. They get so much love on a daily basis that the extra programs you might offer can’t actually make them much happier.

In 2008, Jennifer Kurkoski and Brian Welle cofounded the People and Innovation Lab (PiLab), an internal research team and think tank with the mandate to advance the science of how people experience work.

Engineers at Google deeply believed that managers don’t matter. On the face of it, that may sound preposterous. But you have to understand how much engineers hate management. They don’t like managers and they certainly don’t want to become managers. Engineers generally think managers are at best a necessary evil, but mainly they get in the way, create bureaucracy, and screw things up. It was such a deeply held belief that in 2002 Larry and Sergey eliminated all manager roles in the company. We had over three hundred engineers at the time, and anyone who was a manager was relieved of management responsibilities. Instead, every engineer in the company reported to Wayne Rosing. It was a short-lived experiment. Wayne was besieged with requests for expense report approvals and for help in resolving interpersonal conflicts, and within six weeks the managers were reinstated.138

grotesque

Googlers with the best managers did 5 to 18 percent better on a dozen Googlegeist dimensions when compared to those managed by the worst manager.

Teams working for the best managers also performed better and had lower turnover. In fact, manager quality was the single best predictor of whether employees would stay or leave, supporting the adage that people don’t quit companies, they quit bad managers.

Engineers are free to change project teams throughout the year, but had no way of knowing whether a prospective manager was among the “best” or “worst.”

We now knew who our best and worst managers were, but we didn’t know what they did differently.

The research showed eight common attributes shared by high-scoring managers and not exhibited by low-scoring managers: List of the 8 Project Oxygen attributes from Google. © Google, Inc.

Gawande then argued that the field of medicine was entering the same stage, where complexity outstripped human capacity and checklists would save lives. Reading this, I realized that management too is phenomenally complex. It’s a lot to ask of any leader to be a product visionary or a financial genius or a marketing wizard as well as an inspiring manager. But if we could reduce good management to a checklist, we wouldn’t need to invest millions of dollars in training, or try to convince people why one style of leadership is better than another. We wouldn’t have to change who they were. We could just change how they behave.

The most visible, a semiannual Upward Feedback Survey, asks teams to give anonymous feedback on their managers: Sample Upward Feedback Survey manager questionnaire from Google. © Google, Inc. The survey itself is the checklist. If you perform every behavior on the list, you’ll be an amazing manager.

And if managers need help getting better in a specific area, and the checklist isn’t doing the trick, they can sign up for the courses we’ve developed over time for each of the attributes. Taking “Manager as Coach” improves coaching scores an average of 13 percent. Taking “Career Conversations” improves career development ratings by 10 percent, in part by teaching the manager to have a different kind of career conversation with employees.

Managing your two tails

Have the people who are best at each attribute train everyone else. We ask our Great Manager Award recipients to train others as a condition of winning the award.

addressing the two tails is where you’ll see the biggest performance improvements:

Studying your strongest people closely and then building programs to measure and reinforce their best attributes for the entire company changes the character of your company.

9 ................ Building a Learning Institution Your best teachers already work for you. … Let them teach!

American companies spent $156,200,000,000 on learning programs in 2011,141 a staggering sum. A hundred and thirty-five countries have GDPs below that amount. Roughly half the money went to programs put on by the companies themselves, and the other half was paid to outside vendors. The average employee received thirty-one hours of training over the year, which works out to more than thirty minutes each week. Most of that money and time is wasted. Not because the training is necessarily bad, but because there’s no measure of what is actually learned and what behaviors change as a result.

You learn the best when you learn the least

It turns out that’s the best way to learn. K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, has studied the acquisition of expert-level skill for decades. The conventional wisdom is that it takes ten thousand hours of effort to become an expert. Ericsson instead found that it’s not about how much time you spend learning, but rather how you spend that time. He finds evidence that people who attain mastery of a field, whether they are violinists, surgeons, athletes,144 or even spelling bee champions,145approach learning in a different way from the rest of us. They shard their activities into tiny actions, like hitting the same golf shot in the rain for hours, and repeat them relentlessly. Each time, they observe what happens, make minor—almost imperceptible—adjustments, and improve.

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decharger

It’s difficult to keep learning and stay motivated when the road stretching ahead of you looks exactly like the road behind you.

Build your faculty from within

The local maximum is the highest value within a more constrained range of values. The largest number is infinity, but the largest number between one and ten is ten.