More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We use our people programs to achieve three goals: efficiency, community, and innovation. Every one of our programs exists to further at least one of these goals, and often more than one.
Encouraging efficiency in your professional and personal lives
community that spans Google and beyond
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. “Pooh?” he whispered. “Yes, Piglet?” “Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s hand. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
Fueling innovation
need for a “third place” beyond the home and office, where people could relax, refresh, and connect with one another.
People with tight social networks, like those in a business unit or team, often have similar ideas and ways of looking at problems. Over time, creativity dies. But the handful of people who operate in the overlapping space between groups tend to come up with better ideas. And often, they’re not even original. They are an application of an idea from one group to a new group.
But creativity is an import-export game. It’s not a creation game.
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.”
nudges are about influencing choice, not dictating
If the choices I make are a product of my environment and history, are any of my choices truly free?”).
Using nudges to help people become healthy, wealthy, and wise: wisdom first
simply presenting information and then relying on each person’s nature—both competitive and altruistic—could transform a dysfunctional team.
But what if we could get a team off to the right start and avoid its becoming dysfunctional?
A newly hired person actually destroys value.
it takes time until his productivity exceeds his cost. He also consumes training resources and the time of the people around him whom he’s pestering for advice.
managers were already busy and took a variety of approaches to acclimating new people to their teams, with no consensus about what worked best.
We decided to prompt managers with a reminder about the very small tasks they could perform that would have the biggest impact on their Nooglers, and therefore the highest return on an investment of their valuable time.
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.
simply sending out these five steps to your managers isn’t enough. You have to send the checklist at the right time, make it meaningful, and make it easy to act on.
employees don’t sit idly by, waiting for someone to “onboard them.” Rather, they onboard themselves by reaching out to coworkers, seeking out resources, asking questions, and setting up lunches to build their networks. People who demonstrate this scrappy, proactive behavior become fully effective faster and perform better on tests of acculturation.
fifteen-minute segment to Noogler orientation for some people that explained the benefits of being proactive, provided five specific actions Nooglers could take to find the things they needed,
Ask questions, lots of questions Schedule regular 1:1s with your manager. Get to know your team. Actively solicit feedback-don’t wait for it Accept the challenge (i.e., take risks and don’t be afraid to fail … other Googlers will support you). Two weeks later, they received a follow-up email reminding them of the five actions.
when you design for your users, you focus on what is the minimal, most elegant product required to achieve the desired outcome.
nudges to help people become healthy, wealthy, and wise: becoming wealthier
Organizations make decisions about how to structure their workspaces, teams, and processes. Every one of these decisions nudges us to be open or closed, healthy or ill, happy or sad.
be thoughtful about the environment you create. Our goal is to nudge in a direction that Googlers would agree makes their lives better, not by taking away choice but by making it easier to make good choices.
The “low-freedom” extreme is the command-and-control organization, where employees are managed tightly, worked intensely, and discarded. The “high-freedom” extreme is based on liberty, where employees are treated with dignity and given a voice in how the company evolves.
if you want to become a high-freedom environment, here are the ten steps that will transform your team or workplace: Give your work meaning. Trust your people. Hire only people who are better than you. Don’t confuse development with managing performance. Focus on the two tails. Be frugal and generous. Pay unfairly. Nudge. Manage the rising expectations. Enjoy! And then go back to No. 1 and start again.
everyone wants their work to have purpose. Connect it to an idea or value that transcends the day-to-day and that also honestly reflects what you are doing.
If you believe human beings are fundamentally good, act like it. Be transparent and honest with your people, and give them a voice in how things work.
you are part of a team, make this plea to your boss: Give me a chance. Help me understand what your goals are, and let me figure out how to achieve them.
Hire only people who are better than you
is an error ever to compromise on hiring quality. A bad hire is toxic, not only destroying their own performance, but also dragging down the performance, morale, and energy of those around them. If being down a person means everyone else has to work harder in the short term, just remind them of the last jerk they had to work with.
Hire by committee, set objective standards in advance, never compromise, and periodically check if your new hires are better than your old ones.
Make developmental conversations safe and productive by having them all the time, just like my manager used to do when we’d leave every meeting. Always start with an attitude of “How can I help you be more successful?” Otherwise, defenses go up and learning shuts down.
Development conversations can more safely happen along the way to achieving a goal. Separate in space and time conversations about whether a goal has been achieved.
don’t rely solely on the manager to come up with an accurate picture of how people are doing. For development, solicit input from peers, even if it’s as simple as asking or sending out a short questionnaire. For performance evaluation, require managers to sit together and calibrate their assessments as a group to guarantee fairness.
Focus on the two tails
The more specific you can be in slicing expertise, the easier it will be to study your stars and discern why they are more successful than others.
use them not just as exemplars for others by building checklists around what they do, but also as teachers.
have compassion for your worst performers. If you’re getting hiring right, most of those who struggle do so because you’ve put them in the wrong role, not because they are inept. Help them to learn or to find new roles. But if that fails, exit them immediately. It’s not mercy to keep them around—they’ll be happier in an environment where they aren’t the worst performers.
Be frugal and generous
Save your big checks for the times when your people are most in need, the moments of greatest tragedy and joy.
Pay unfairly
performance follows a power law distribution in most jobs,
