Work Rules Laszlo

[Hadi Sapre]

You shouldn't aspire to be exactly like any other company, even mega-successes like Google. Yet, it's well worth reflecting on how you can take parts of what they do, and adapt them to fit your company.

I recently read Laszlo Bock's new book, "Work Rules: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead". As you might expect, there were a number of things that felt unique to Google (i.e.- few of us have multi-million dollar stock grants we can offer employee #10,000+), or seem like ideas that could backfire (like Chapter 10's subject, "Pay Unfairly" leading to this scandal).

However, the exceptions shouldn't prevent you from learning and applying some of the amazing lessons and research shared in this book. Any leader can benefit from some of Laslzlo Bock's Rules. Consider these lessons below as battle-tested, scientific approaches you can apply at your workplace at your discretion.

Google is a company with an extremely engineering-driven culture. The benefit of this is that they've taken rigorous scientific approaches to everything in their workplace. And at their scale (50,000+ employees), they have statistically significant findings. The majority of their best, most universally applicable lessons come from these studies, and these 5 lessons just scratch the surface of this 365 page book.

Bock and Google were careful to try to avoid forcing any changes on Google employees, so most changes were described as "temporary experiments." This made it safer to roll back or change a new initiative relatively quickly depending on the reaction of Googlers.

It also helped reduce what Bock described as "entitlement" issues. With regular experiments, it was easier to ensure people didn't take too many of the Google perks for granted and expect them as the status quo.

One such example was when Google developed Google Shopping Express. They gave Googlers $25 to try it, and a number of times thereafter. However, each time Bock reported, "we explained it was a test, so there was never any expectation that each month you'd get a free $25."

When they then stopped giving out the free credits, Bock reported they had no complaints. If they had made it a permanent perk and then eliminated it, you can imagine a non-zero amount of their 50,000+ employee workforce would have complained.

Another underrated aspect of making a new perk, policy, or investment in your team an experiment is that it changes the mindset of those rolling it out. It's easy to think once you roll out a policy, your work is done. However, when you make it an experiment, now you need to measure the results and actively make a decision to keep, kill, or alter the program.

In an effort to make their employees eat healthier, especially for between meal snacks, Google redesigned their snack kitchens. Healthy snacks like dried fruits and nuts were prominently displayed in clear containers, while candy was placed in containers with small labels in harder to reach areas.

Unfortunately, not all experiments were as big a success as the snack kitchen changes. Attempting to jump on a trend of reducing meat consumption due to the resources required to raise animals, Google stared a "Meatless Mondays" in some of their cafeterias. While some vegetarians rejoiced, other Googlers were outraged.

In a very prominent form of protest, a bunch of Googlers held a barbeque in the office parking lot. Others simply voted with their feet as attendance at the "meatless" cafes dropped. The lesson they learned from surveys afterwards was that "they didn't like having choices made for them."

In a number of other experiments this insight came up repeatedly. You can nudge people with information and the structure of your work area or cafeteria, but when you remove choice, people get very upset. Therefore, if you're looking to change behavior at your company, consider how you can highlight the desired choice, while still allowing people to opt for an alternative.

Google wanted to know what the difference was between their good managers and bad managers. After extensive surveying and analyzing results of good and bad managers, they found a series of key behaviors were important for good performance and happy teams. This led to the reported findings of their Project Oxygen group which found 8 key attributes of good managers:

It's unlikely any manager can do all of those off the bat. If managers are not rewarded and measured against them, they'd probably never fit all of those characteristics. That's why Google then developed a special survey they use twice a year to allow team members to evaluate their managers against those top 8 areas with the following questions:

The results? In two years, overall manager scores went up from 83 percent to 88 percent favorable, and their worst managers rose from 70 percent to 77 percent favorable. As Bock put it, "It's actually become harder to be a bad manager."

Google has found that many businesses would like to sell to Google's employees. So they use their bargaining power as a source of 50,000 employees potential customers to get discounts. They also often ask employees to pay for using the perk as you can see in the image for things like dry cleaning, bike repairs, and hair salons.

Now, you probably don't have the leverage of 50,000 employees, but for a local, small business, a potential 50 or 100 customers coming to them is likely to get a solid discount you can pass along to your people. Don't believe Bock? Think about how companies like AnyPerk exist or how your average discount on group health insurance works.

Google has developed a number of interesting practices to improve their hiring as they grew explosively and wanted to maintain a high bar for hires. The have applied a few key rules that has helped them in their data-driven approach to hiring the right people:

This last insight is particularly interesting. Google takes the scores of every interviewer equally and then averages the scores to decide whether to hire someone. After extensive research, they found that the average score of this ideal group of 4 interviewers yielded an 86% hiring accuracy rate. This was better than all but 1 uber-impressive employee ever at Google who was a major outlier in their ability to evaluate candidates.

Most companies have not hired nearly as many people as Google so their insights here, thanks to their commitment to data, analysis, and iteration is valuable to us all. They devote an entire chapter to many more fascinating hiring insights worth learning about and considering adding to your processes.

While at times it feels like Laszlo Bock is expecting you to emulate everything at Google, I don't think you should expect anything less from their head of People; he should be a major cheerleader of what they've accomplished.

The real lesson is that every company is different in what makes them great, but all great leaders are inspired by others. Work Rules provides helpful insights into how Google has succeeded and you're bound to find a few ideas you can bring to your company.

My wait was over, and it was now time to sink my teeth into the book that Daniel Coyle calls, "an all-access backstage pass to one of the smartest organizations on the planet." High praise indeed. Did it measure up? Was the book a playbook of sorts for others to learn from, and follow?

This global cadre want to be in high-freedom companies, and talent will flow to those companies. And leaders who build the right kind of environments will be magnets for the most talented people on the planet.

These two paragraphs encapsulate the overarching thought leadership found throughout the book. Laszlo defends the rights of employees, arguing persuasively that they deserve to "run the asylum" - a place of refuge, as he reminds us. Employees are smart and they need not be coddled, commanded or controlled by power monger managers. "This is why we (Google)," he writes, "take as much power away from managers as we can." Laszlo (and Google) believe employees will seek out organizations that provide an open, collaborative and innovative environment, so why not make the organizational culture one where "power" is held by the masses versus the few.

The word "freedom" is arguably the subliminal message hidden within the book. Indeed, Laszlo pushes you to think about reshaping your organization as a "high-freedom environment." A perfect example is surfaced when on the topic of "code health." As an engineering company, Google has thousands of engineers and millions of lines of software code. "We could have set company-wide goals for code health," Bock writes, "or our CEO could have just mandated that everyone had to focus on code health for the next month."

In the case of "code health", Laszlo recalls how a group of engineers got together (on their own) to sort out a means to remedying the problem of "code health". This manifested after a problem was highlighted in their internal feedback and engagement survey, called "Googlegeist."

As a result of the employees getting together, a number of opportunities for improvement were brainstormed and eventually implemented across Google, including Tech Talks, embedding "code health" into performance management practices and promotions, as well as "Citizenship Awards," which were inaugurated to recognize peers and leaders of healthy software code.

Engineers at Google are now 34% "more confident that time spent improving code health will be rewarded." It's but one example of many that Bock highlights around what I thought to be the underlying message of "high-freedom environment."

There are fourteen chapters in the book, where the rules are nested. Bock runs the gamut, waxing lyrical through 370 pages on traditional HR topics such as compensation, recruitment, learning and performance management and non-traditional (to some) rules on concepts such as culture, health, community and what I felt to be a very refreshing rule and chapter, "It's Not All Rainbows and Unicorns."

Bock uses this chapter to highlight the fact Google (and any organization) is going to make mistakes. The chapter is replete with examples of human misbehaviour (at Google, no less) that have to do with entitlements, performance, values, ethics and transparency. In the end, Bock reminds the reader that humans are prone to mistakes, but "it's in the organizations with the strongest values" where mistakes are learned from, not used as a basis for shutting down the "high-freedom environment" quest. It's a wonderful rule, one that reminds me of a similar thought we've embedded into our culture at TELUS, echoed by our Executive Chair, Darren Entwistle: "There is tuition value in mistakes."

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