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

by Laszlo Bock

Now reflect on the last training program you went to. Perhaps there was a test at the end, or maybe you were asked to work as a team to solve a problem. How much more would you have internalized the content if you’d been given specific feedback and then had to repeat the task three more times?

Building this kind of repetition and focus into training might seem costly, but it’s not.

most organizations measure training based on the time spent, not on the behaviors changed. It’s a better investment to deliver less content and have people retain it, than it is to deliver ...

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

Every meeting ended with immediate feedback and a plan for what to continue to do or change for next time.

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.

Sending your salespeople to the most expensive sales seminars, led by someone who sold products for someone else, is unlikely to revolutionize your sales performance, because the specifics of what your company does matter.

having actual practitioners teaching is far more effective than listening to academics, professional trainers, or consultants.

Google’s Career Guru program at a Career Development Summit that they hosted and thought it might be a simple, scalable answer to the challenge [of offering 1:1 career advice globally]. We experimented with small groups to validate the idea and then leveraged a grassroots effort already existing in our finance organization. Over the next few months, it grew in popularity and went global.”

Our challenge is to figure out together how to help our Googlers teach themselves.

It’s easy to measure how training funds and time are spent, but far more rare and difficult to measure the effect of training.

70/20/10 rule used by most learning professionals doesn’t work.

First, it doesn’t tell you what to do.

Second, even if you know what you’re supposed to do, how do you measure it?

saying 70 percent of learning happens on the job is a cop-out. It’s convenient hand waving that allows HR departments to say that people are learning without proving that they are.

Third, there’s no rigorous evidence that allocating learning resources or experiences in this way even works.

model that prescribed four levels of measurement in learning programs: reaction, learning, behavior, and results.

Level one—reaction—asks the student for her reaction to the training.

But how students feel about your class tells you nothing about whether they have learned anything. Moreover, the students themselves are often unqualified to provide feedback on the quality of the course.

Level two—learning—assesses the change in the student’s knowledge or attitude, typically through a test or survey at the end of the program.

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

third level of assessment—behavior—is where his framework becomes powerful. He asks to what extent participants changed their behavior as a result of the training.

Assessing behavioral change requires waiting for some time after the learning experience, ensuring lessons have been integrated into long-term memory,

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

Finally, level four looks at the actual results of the training program.

just compare how identical groups perform after only one has received training.

What can be counterintuitive and frustrating about this experimental approach is that if you have a problem, you want to fix it for everyone, now.

But putting everyone through a solution that you think will work doesn’t mean it will. A thoughtfully designed experiment, and the patience to wait for and measure the results, will reveal reality to you.

can accelerate the rate of learning in your organization or team by breaking skills down into smaller components and providing prompt, specific feedback.

Giving employees the opportunity to teach gives them purpose.

Pay unfairly. Celebrate accomplishment, not compensation. Make it easy to spread the love. Reward thoughtful failure.

Pay unfairly: Your best people are better than you think, and worth more than you pay them

let’s imagine you’re doing great work and contributing a lot to your company as a top salesperson, a brilliant accountant, or a clever engineer. In your first year you might get a 10 percent raise, but the next year you’ll get 7 percent, and then perhaps 5 percent, and soon enough you’re either getting the same increases as an average performer or you’ve been “red circled” (as the HR people call it) and you won’t get salary increases at all! And similar limits apply to how bonuses and stock awards are managed in most places. A well-timed promotion can buy you a bit more time, but you’ll soon hit the limit at the next job level.

Why would a company design a system that makes the best and highest-potential people quit? Because they have a misconception of what is fair and lack the courage to be honest with their people. 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.liv

The only reason your organization or places like GE have normal performance rating distributions is because HR and management force them to look that way. Companies have expected performance distributions, and raters are trained to hew to them.

“Ten percent of productivity comes from the top percentile and 26% of output derives from the top 5% of workers.” 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.

make these kinds of extreme rewards work, you need two capabilities. One is a very clear understanding of what impact is derived from the role in question (which requires a complementary awareness of how much is due to context: Did the market move in a lucky way? How much of this was a result of a team effort or the brand of the company? Is the achievement a short-or long-term win?). Once you can assess impact, you can look at your available budget and decide what the shape of your reward curve ought to be. If the best performer is generating ten times as much impact as an average performer, they shouldn’t necessarily get ten times the reward, but I’d wager they should get at least five times the reward.180 If you’re adopting a system like this, the only way to stay within budget is to give smaller rewards to the poorer performers, or even the average ones. That won’t feel good initially, but take comfort in knowing that you’ve now given your best people a reason to stay with you, and everyone else a reason to aim higher. The other capability is having managers who understand the reward system well enough that they can explain to the recipient, and to others who might ask if word were to get out, exactly why a reward was so high and what any employee can do to achieve a similar reward.

Celebrate accomplishment, not compensation In

It’s essential that extreme reward systems have both distributive and procedural justice.

shifted these programs from providing monetary awards to experiential awards.

People think about experiences and goods differently than about monetary awards. 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

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

Make it easy to spread the love

Giving employees the freedom to recognize one another is important. Many companies allow employees to nominate an employee of the month, and some allow employees to give modest peer bonuses, with approval from HR or management.

trusting people to do the right thing generally results in them doing the right thing.

Reward thoughtful failure

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.

Your leap of faith: putting the four principles into practice