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

by Laszlo Bock

By turning to that person to teach others rather than bringing in someone from the outside, you not only have a teacher who is better than your other salespeople, but also someone who understands the specific context of your company and customers.

The best at each skill should be teaching it.

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove made the same point over thirty years ago: Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours of preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training results in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.146

It is generally far better to learn from people who are doing the work today, who can answer deeper questions and draw on current, real-life examples.

mindfulness. Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor emeritus of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, defines it as “paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”148

Meng went on to write a book on the topic and found the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which he manages while working part-time at Google (“only … 40 hours a week,” he jokes).149 His course, book, and institute all work to “develop effective, innovative leaders using science-backed mindfulness and emotional intelligence training.”

Bill describes business as a “machine made out of people” and mindfulness as “WD-40 for the company, lubricating the rough spots among driven Googlers.”

We have a broader program, called G2G or Googler2Googler, where Googlers enlist en masse to teach one another. In 2013, 2,200 different classes were delivered to more than 21,000 Googlers by a G2G faculty of almost three thousand people. Some classes are offered more than once, and some have more than one instructor. Most Googlers took more than one class, resulting in total attendance of over 110,000.

The content ranges from the highly technical (search algorithm design; a seven-week mini-MBA) to the simply entertaining (tightrope walking; fire breathing; history of the bicycle). Some of the most popular: MindBody Awareness: Amy Colvin, one of our massage therapists, teaches a thirty-minute class that moves through a dozen qigong (a Chinese practice related to tai chi) poses followed by seated meditation.

Note that this is not an HR program, though we manage the administration of it. As Shannon Mahon, the program manager, points out: “The secret sauce is that engineers really own this, not People Operations.” Googlers created this for one another.

Over the years, Becky has partnered with a number of Fortune 500 technology companies to help them launch their own Guru programs.

Organizations always seem to have more demand for people development than they can satisfy, and Google is no different.

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Only invest in courses that change behavior

For the past forty-plus years, HR professionals have measured how time is spent, asserting that 70 percent of learning should happen through on-the-job experiences, 20 percent through coaching and mentoring, and 10 percent through classroom instruction.152 Companies as diverse as Gap,153 the consultancy PwC,154 and Dell155 describe their 70/20/10 development programs on their corporate websites.li But the 70/20/10 rule used by most learning professionals doesn’t work.

“Tell lots of jokes and lots of stories. Grad students love stories.”

if the environment you are returning to is unchanged, the new knowledge will be extinguished.

The ideal way of assessing behavioral change is not just to ask the student, but to ask the team around them.

Your homework

“the best way to learn is to teach.” 158 He was right. Because to teach well, you really have to think about your content. You need mastery of your subject and an elegant way to convey it to someone else.

But there’s a deeper reason to have employee-teachers. Giving employees the opportunity to teach gives them purpose. Even if they don’t find meaning in their regular jobs, passing on knowledge is both inspiring and inspirational.

A learning organization starts with a recognition that all of us want to grow ...

10 ................ Pay Unfairly Why it’s okay to pay two people in the same job completely different amounts

This ostentation aversion is as much a reflection of the historic engineering culture of Silicon Valley as anything special about Google. New York Times journalist David Streitfeld traces it back to the “founding” of Silicon Valley in 1957,159 when Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Eugene Kleiner, and five others started Fairchild Semiconductor and developed a way to mass-produce silicon transistors.160 Streitfeld describes it as a “new kind of company … one that was all about openness and risk. The rigid hierarchy of the East was eliminated. So was the conspicuous consumption.” “The money doesn’t seem real,” Noyce would later tell his father. “It’s just a way of keeping score.” 161 The ethos in the Valley has long been “Work hard, but don’t show off.”

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It came down to four principles: Pay unfairly. Celebrate accomplishment, not compensation. Make it easy to spread the love. Reward thoughtful failure.

caveat:

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Pay unfairly: Your best people are better than you think, and worth more than you pay them In a misguided attempt to be “fair,” most companies design compensation systems that encourage the best performers and those with the most potential to quit. The first and most critical principle requires you to turn your back on received practice—and it might feel uncomfortable at first.

economist Edward Lazear of Stanford University has argued that people are on average underpaid relative to their contribution early in their careers, and overpaid later in their careers.169 Internal pay systems don’t move quickly enough or offer enough flexibility to pay the best people what they are actually worth.

For those who are learning and growing most quickly and those performing at the highest level, the one way to make sure your pay is in line with the value you create is to leave the monopolistic internal market and enter the free market. That is, look for a new job, negotiate based on what you are truly worth, then leave. And that’s exactly what you see in the labor market.

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.

In fact, most performers are below average: 66 percent of researchers are below average in the number of published articles. 84 percent of Emmy-nominated actors are below average in total number of nominations. 68 percent of US representatives are below average in the number of terms they have served. 71 percent of NBA players are below average in the number of points scored.

In other words, they found that the top 1 percent of workers generated ten times the average output, and the top 5 percent more than four times the average.

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Celebrate accomplishment, not compensation

Compensation systems are based on imperfect information and administered by imperfect people.

Cash is evaluated on a cognitive level. A cash award is valued by calculating how it compares to your current salary, or to what you could buy with it. Is it as big as a paycheck or smaller? Can it buy a cellphone or will it help me get a new car? And because money is fungible, as often as not it’s spent on staples rather than splurging on a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes or a massage, and fades from memory. Non-cash awards, whether they are experiences (a dinner for two) or gifts (a Nexus 7 tablet), trigger an emotional response. Recipients focus on the fact of what they get to experience, rather than calculating values.186

Despite telling us they would prefer cash over experiences, the experimental group was happier. Much happier.

We’ve added a strong emphasis on accumulating experiences, rather than just money. We recognize publicly through experiential awards and reward privately through substantial differentiation in bonus and stock. And Googlers are happier as a result.

Make it easy to spread the love

It makes sense, therefore, to encourage peers to reward each other. gThanks (pronounced “gee-thanks”) is a tool for making it easy for people to recognize great work.

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. Why is this any better than sending them an email? Because kudos are posted publicly for other people to see and can be shared via Google+.

Simple, public recognition is one of the most effective and most underutilized management tools.

At Google, any employee can give anyone else a $175 cash award, with no management oversight or sign-off required. In many organizations this would be viewed as madness.

Reward thoughtful failure

The team had worked for two years on this product, putting in countless hours in an effort to transform how people communicated online. They took a massive, calculated risk. And failed. So we rewarded them.

The biggest lesson was that rewarding smart failure was vital to support a culture of risk-taking.

Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure. … [T]hey become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.192

Your leap of faith: putting the four principles into practice