More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Even if you don’t have the financial resources to provide huge differences in pay, providing greater differences will mean something. Your B players might be a little unhappy about their rewards, but you can address that by being honest: Explain to them why their pay is different and what they can do to change it. At the same time, be generous in your public recognition. Celebrate the achievements of teams, and make a point of cheering failures where important lessons were learned.
people tend not to change their savings rate. Figure out what percent of your income you save today, and then save a little bit more from now on. It is never easy. It is always worth it.
Manage the rising expectations
Building a great culture and environment requires constant learning and renewal. Don’t worry about trying to do everything at once. Experiment with one idea from this book or with a dozen, learn from the experiment, tweak the program, and try again.
People Operations around four underlying principles: Strive for nirvana. Use data to predict and shape the future. mprove relentlessly. Field an unconventional team.
you’re an HR practitioner, you must constantly ask yourself whether the principle underpinning each rule is relevant to the case at hand, and fearlessly abandon practice and policy when the situation merits it.
As you think about creating your own french fry moments, keep in mind that they are thankless. You rarely get praised for avoiding a problem. It’s why in politics you can never win points by arguing “But the recession would have been so much worse if not for my policies!” But you’ll know, and your team will know. And your company will run better. And people will be happier.
So step one, and it’s a big step, is agreeing on a common set of definitions for all people data.
Most companies, including Google until a few years ago, celebrate promotions but do nothing to reach out to the people who just missed the cut. Which is madness. It takes an hour or two to spot the folks you think will be upset and talk to them about how to continue growing. It’s the way you would want to be treated. It’s more procedurally just, which helps people perceive the process as more open and honest.
It takes time to build this kind of capability, but it’s easy to begin, regardless of the size of your organization. Start small.
Be open to crazy ideas. Find some way to say yes.
Then experiment. One of the virtues of size is that it creates more opportunities for playing around with the information we’ve gathered.
Improve relentlessly
Virtually everything we do more than once is measured and improved over time.
we’ve brought more services in-house, which has two virtues. First, it’s often cheaper, especially for areas like recruiting and training. Second, there’s tremendously useful information to be gleaned by managing processes in-house.
Field an unconventional team
that the profession doesn’t have the right mix of talent in it, which creates a vicious cycle where the most talented people, who want to work with other talented people, shy away from the field.
“three-thirds” hiring model. No more than one-third of our hires in People Operations come from traditional HR backgrounds. The core HR expertise they bring is irreplaceable.
One-third of our hires are recruited from consulting, and specifically from top-tier strategy consultancies, not HR consultancies. I prefer strategy consultants because they have a deep understanding of business and excel at figuring out how to approach and then solve difficult problems.
The final third of hires are deeply analytic, holding at least a master’s degree in analytical fields ranging from organizational psychology to physics. They keep us honest. They hold our work to a high research standard, and teach the entire team techniques that would otherwise be out of reach for a traditional HR team,
The consultants and analysts are also a tremendous source of industry knowledge, familiar with a wide range of other companies and academia,
And then, of course, we mix the groups. Regardless of background, everyone has the opportunity to work in every job, making their days more stimulating, their careers more fulfilling, our team stronger, and our products better.
HR people teach us about influencing and recognizing patterns in people and organizations; the consultants improve our understanding of the business and the level of our problem solving; the analytics people raise the quality of everything we do.
everyone in People Operations has a few traits in common. Each one is a gifted problem solver. Each has a dose of intellectual humility, which makes them open to the possibilities that they could be wrong and always have more to learn. And each is tremendously conscientious, caring deeply about Googlers and the company.
Chapter 1 WORK RULES … FOR BECOMING A FOUNDER Choose to think of yourself as a founder. Now act like one. Chapter 2 WORK RULES … FOR BUILDING A GREAT CULTURE Think of your work as a calling, with a mission that matters. Give people slightly more trust, freedom, and authority than you are comfortable giving them. If you’re not nervous, you haven’t given them enough. Chapter 3 WORK RULES…FOR HIRING (THE SHORT VERSION) Given limited resources, invest your HR dollars first in recruiting. Hire only the best by taking your time, hiring only people who are better than you in some meaningful way, and
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
