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

by Laszlo Bock

In every environment, there were more exceptional people than you would expect based on normal performance management curves.

At the same time, when you do reward people, make sure to sprinkle in experiences, not just cash.

Few people look back on their lives as a series of paychecks. They remember the conversations, lunches, and events with colleagues and friends. Celebrate success with actions, not dollars.

11 ................ The Best Things in Life Are Free (or Almost Free) Most of Google’s people programs can be duplicated by anyone

Most people assume Google spends a fortune on doing special things for our employees. Aside from our cafés and shuttles, we don’t.lvi Most of the programs we use to delight and care for Googlers are free, or very close to it.

Encouraging efficiency in your professional and personal lives

All we needed to provide was the culture, where Googlers knew they could suggest new programs and shape their own workplaces.

There is also a concierge team of five people who support our more than fifty thousand employees by helping with travel planning, finding plumbers and handymen, ordering flowers and gifts, and otherwise saving Googlers an hour or two of time as they can. To

A community that spans Google and beyond

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dorloter

Fueling innovation

Sergey once said, “No one should be more than two hundred feet away from food,” but the real purpose of these microkitchens is to do the same thing Howard Schultz tried to create with Starbucks. Schultz saw the need for a “third place” beyond the home and office, where people could relax, refresh, and connect with one another. We try to do the same thing, by giving Googlers a place to meet up that looks and feels different from their desk. And we use the placement of these microkitchens to draw people from different groups together. Often they’ll sit at the border between two different teams, with the goal of having those people bump into one another. At

Burt has a delicious way of putting it: “People who stand near the holes in a social structure are at higher risk of having good ideas.”

Burt explains: “The usual image of creativity is that it’s some sort of genetic gift, some heroic act. … But creativity is an import-export game. It’s not a creation game. … Tracing the origin of an idea is an interesting academic exercise, but it’s largely irrelevant. … The trick is, can you get an idea which is mundane and well known in one place to another place where people would get value out of it.”

Find ways to say yes

Be there when your people most need you

In 2011 we decided that if the unthinkable happened, the surviving partner should immediately receive the value of all the Googler’s unvested stock. We also decided to continue paying 50 percent of the Googler’s salary to the survivor for the next ten years. And if there were children, the family would receive an additional $1,000 each month until they turned nineteen, or twenty-three if they were full-time students. We didn’t tell anyone about the change, not even Googlers.

Put another way, the average US company spends 4 percent a year on salary increases: roughly 3 percent for annual increases and 1 percent for promotions.

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faire ereur

12 ................ Nudge … a Lot Small signals can cause large changes in behavior. How one email can improve productivity by 25 percent

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Using nudges to help people become healthy, wealthy, and wise: wisdom first

In the pilot, managers received just-in-time emails the Sunday before a new hire started. Like the Project Oxygen checklist, which showcased the eight behaviors of successful managers, the five actions were almost embarrassing in their simplicity: Have a role-and-responsibilities discussion. Match your Noogler with a peer buddy. Help your Noogler build a social network. Set up onboarding check-ins once a month for your Noogler’s first six months. Encourage open dialogue. And as with Project Oxygen, we saw a substantial improvement. Nooglers whose managers took action on this email became fully effective 25 percent faster than their peers, saving a full month of learning time.

If you want people to change behavior, you don’t give them a fifty-page academic paper or *ahem* a four-hundred-page book.

Using nudges to help people become healthy, wealthy, and wise: becoming wealthier

Using nudges to help people become healthy, wealthy, and wise: Mens sana in corpore sano

In 2013, HR leader Todd Carlisle told a crowd at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco that the ultimate recruiting slogan would be “Work at Google and live longer.” He wasn’t joking.

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Design deliberately and with intent

Nudges are an incredibly powerful mechanism for improving teams and organizations. They are also ideally suited to experimentation, so can be tested on smaller populations to fine-tune their results.

13 ................ It’s Not All Rainbows and Unicorns Google’s biggest people mistakes and what you can do to avoid them

McKinsey & Company’s website lists “uphold the obligation to dissent” as a core value.249 Marvin Bower, who became McKinsey’s managing director in 1950, is credited with documenting and shaping the firm’s values in a way that allowed McKinsey to serve its clients with integrity for more than fifty years.250 For years, new associates were given an internally published copy of his book, Perspective on McKinsey. By

Every associate bore the obligation to dissent, to speak up if they thought an idea was bad, wrong, or did a disservice to the client or the firm.

The price of transparency

Reject entitlement

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irascible

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”

hantiseb / gnome

Each time we make changes to Google’s performance management system, two truths become self-evident: No one likes the system. No one likes the proposed change to the current system.

Jonathan Rosenberg once told me, “A crisis is an opportunity to have impact. Drop everything and deal with the crisis.”

Treasure the weird

wacky,

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Put more wood behind fewer arrows

These products were discontinued between 2006 and 2009. They were among the more than 250 products Google has launched over the past fifteen years, most of which not even I have heard of.

In fact, we’d rediscovered a principle we knew to be true in our earliest days: Innovation thrives on creativity and experimentation, but it also requires thoughtful pruning.

freedom is not absolute, and being part of a team, an organization, means that on some level you’ve agreed to give up some small measure of personal freedom in exchange for the promise of accomplishing more together than you could alone.

And the more central your values are to how you operate, the more you need to explain.

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A most political dessert, or “You can’t please all of the people all of the time”

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