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143 reviews for:
Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
Laszlo Bock
4.03 AVERAGE
143 reviews for:
Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
Laszlo Bock
4.03 AVERAGE
There's a lot of interesting background and history for many of G's practices here, and the balance of statistics feels good, but somehow it just doesn't make for particularly gripping reading.
A very good insight into how Google seeks to recruit and retain talent, by far its largest asset. There are some sections that were revelatory (e.g. performance on brainteasers in interviews has no correlation with employee performance, impact of cash vs. non-cash bonuses) but others that should be quite obvious (employees performance differs so their pay should also).
Reading the book one gets the impression that Google is some sort of über-employer where employees all love their work, are treated fairly and paid extremely well. Yet turnover at Google for software engineers is average/slightly higher than average for the industry with software developers staying on average 2.5 years (see https://hackerlife.co/blog/tech-employees-turnover/San-Francisco-Bay-Area-CA). Maybe this is because Google has such an amazing culture it can hire and underpay talent until they eventually are lured away by higher paying rivals? In this case, maybe underpaying staff is a winning strategy for higher corporate profits. Or maybe it is because it has become more political as it has sprawled resulting in some employees getting trapped in dead end projects/teams? I don't know the answer. However it was a little nauseating to continually read about how amazing Google is over the course of 400 pages, when the outcomes for the employees are clearly not that awesome. If they were, they would stay.
Reading the book one gets the impression that Google is some sort of über-employer where employees all love their work, are treated fairly and paid extremely well. Yet turnover at Google for software engineers is average/slightly higher than average for the industry with software developers staying on average 2.5 years (see https://hackerlife.co/blog/tech-employees-turnover/San-Francisco-Bay-Area-CA). Maybe this is because Google has such an amazing culture it can hire and underpay talent until they eventually are lured away by higher paying rivals? In this case, maybe underpaying staff is a winning strategy for higher corporate profits. Or maybe it is because it has become more political as it has sprawled resulting in some employees getting trapped in dead end projects/teams? I don't know the answer. However it was a little nauseating to continually read about how amazing Google is over the course of 400 pages, when the outcomes for the employees are clearly not that awesome. If they were, they would stay.
One of the few management books that I'd put stock in. Full of good advice and accounts of well-reasoned and justified decisions that the Google HR team have made. Loses a star for laying it on incredibly heavily with the Google promotion, but otherwise a strong recommendation from me.
Work Rules gives heaps of insight into the way people management works at Google. Along with that, it's a great inspirational piece about what work can mean in a healthy environment. Finding and creating the right kind of support for your organization can be completely in your hands - if you allow it.
Highly recommend for folks in People Operations/HR, or any type of management position.
Highly recommend for folks in People Operations/HR, or any type of management position.
Aggressively OK.
Google's Head of People (ie HR) gives insights into how Google's company culture has developed and best practices that have worked for them.
This is probably a decent read for an HR Manager. And to be fair, there were some nuggets for team leaders and non-HR managers in here as well.
It just wasn't as useful to me as it could have been. This may have been down to the fact that Google is a juggernaut and outlier in many respects. It would probably be prudent to asterisk any advice that comes out of there.
But at the same time, Google has done a lot of things right. They've also redefined the concept of the "workplace", so there is lots to learn from them.
As with any book, I guess the hard part was filtering the dross from the gems.
Google's Head of People (ie HR) gives insights into how Google's company culture has developed and best practices that have worked for them.
This is probably a decent read for an HR Manager. And to be fair, there were some nuggets for team leaders and non-HR managers in here as well.
It just wasn't as useful to me as it could have been. This may have been down to the fact that Google is a juggernaut and outlier in many respects. It would probably be prudent to asterisk any advice that comes out of there.
But at the same time, Google has done a lot of things right. They've also redefined the concept of the "workplace", so there is lots to learn from them.
As with any book, I guess the hard part was filtering the dross from the gems.
In this book, Google’s ex head of HR (or People Operations, as they call it) shared the key lessons he learnt about building a more effective organisation centred on people satisfaction, focusing on helping employees find meaning, feel trusted and taken care of by the company in order to do their best work. I think most people could agree that Google seems like quite an attractive place to work (at least from outside perception), so it was interesting to dig deeper into the behind the scene processes that made that happen.
In general, I felt that some of the points shared in the book seemed like “common sense” e.g. the following will make employees happier:
- giving employees meaning in their work
- really trusting your employees
- supporting your employees during the hard times
- examining existing people processes to find choke points and solving them
- making employee’s lives easier by taking care of their meals and making it easier for them to get their life chores done on campus
- optimising environments to encourage behaviours
Who would have thought??
With that said though, most companies don’t even do these things well at the moment, so I guess listing them out clearly in the form of a checklist (a la Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto) along with concrete examples is a good way to remind people how important they actually are.
What was new to me were the following insights:
1. How hiring is actually the most important thing to get right when determining how much value an individual will eventually bring to the team. It is hence more efficient to spend more time and resources on getting the process right as it will bring more benefit than any amount of post-hire training ever will. It is also worth it to wait for a good hire despite a resource crunch
2. How we should separate development and performance discussions: When we tell people about their weaknesses/improvement points together with their compensation, it inevitably results in people turning defensive and trying to justify what they have done and why they deserved more. It is better to give developmental feedback more regularly and in advance of compensation discussions, so that people could still have time to change their behaviour and final performance outcome. And by the time it comes to the money talk, most people should already have a sense of where they stand and there will be less “nasty surprises”
3. How talent distribution follows the power rule instead of normal distribution: We should pay unfairly to retain top talent (i.e. pay should also follow the power rule instead of normal distribution) and encourage others to strive for excellence. We should leverage on the top talent by observing what they do and turn them into checklists that can be followed by others in the team, as well as encourage them to share their knowledge and best practices with others (in the process also honing their own knowledge, as you learn by teaching others). We should also focus on the low performers, see whether they are in the wrong role and whether they are truly suited elsewhere. If they still struggle after all interventions, exiting them as soon as possible is actually the best thing to do for them, as it frees them to seek for a new career that they can thrive instead of languishing needlessly in your company
4. How to build a data driven HR team: The three thirds rule, where HR should actually be made up of a multidisciplinary group of people to deliver most value - one third who are career HR professionals, another third who are consulting/business professionals adept at solving business problems, and the last third who are data people who can harness the power of data. It is also helpful to combine all people data scattered across the organisation into one place to generate better people insights. HR should also standardise definitions for people data (e.g. different departments in a company might have a different definition for how many headcount a company has, but this lead to confusion and misalignment when making people related decisions)
5. The Laszlo’s hierarchy of needs: How getting the basics right is most important and eventually evolving to anticipate what people need in advance of them actually requesting them
6. How to test initiatives and roll them back/tweak them if they are no longer relevant or unpopular: The key is in communicating upfront to people that these are tests and encourage them to participate and provide feedback on how it is working
Reasons why this is three stars:
1. The book could have been shorter and more concise: Some parts were quite repetitive and could have done without so many examples
2. I found the part on encouraging freedom of speech yet trying to “nudge” people towards the right behaviours fairly oxymoronic: They all rely on someone somewhere deciding what is “right” and what is “not”, and who’s to say that person is right? Anyway this is more of a criticism to the current climate of the world but this book is a microcosm of that
In general, I felt that some of the points shared in the book seemed like “common sense” e.g. the following will make employees happier:
- giving employees meaning in their work
- really trusting your employees
- supporting your employees during the hard times
- examining existing people processes to find choke points and solving them
- making employee’s lives easier by taking care of their meals and making it easier for them to get their life chores done on campus
- optimising environments to encourage behaviours
Who would have thought??
With that said though, most companies don’t even do these things well at the moment, so I guess listing them out clearly in the form of a checklist (a la Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto) along with concrete examples is a good way to remind people how important they actually are.
What was new to me were the following insights:
1. How hiring is actually the most important thing to get right when determining how much value an individual will eventually bring to the team. It is hence more efficient to spend more time and resources on getting the process right as it will bring more benefit than any amount of post-hire training ever will. It is also worth it to wait for a good hire despite a resource crunch
2. How we should separate development and performance discussions: When we tell people about their weaknesses/improvement points together with their compensation, it inevitably results in people turning defensive and trying to justify what they have done and why they deserved more. It is better to give developmental feedback more regularly and in advance of compensation discussions, so that people could still have time to change their behaviour and final performance outcome. And by the time it comes to the money talk, most people should already have a sense of where they stand and there will be less “nasty surprises”
3. How talent distribution follows the power rule instead of normal distribution: We should pay unfairly to retain top talent (i.e. pay should also follow the power rule instead of normal distribution) and encourage others to strive for excellence. We should leverage on the top talent by observing what they do and turn them into checklists that can be followed by others in the team, as well as encourage them to share their knowledge and best practices with others (in the process also honing their own knowledge, as you learn by teaching others). We should also focus on the low performers, see whether they are in the wrong role and whether they are truly suited elsewhere. If they still struggle after all interventions, exiting them as soon as possible is actually the best thing to do for them, as it frees them to seek for a new career that they can thrive instead of languishing needlessly in your company
4. How to build a data driven HR team: The three thirds rule, where HR should actually be made up of a multidisciplinary group of people to deliver most value - one third who are career HR professionals, another third who are consulting/business professionals adept at solving business problems, and the last third who are data people who can harness the power of data. It is also helpful to combine all people data scattered across the organisation into one place to generate better people insights. HR should also standardise definitions for people data (e.g. different departments in a company might have a different definition for how many headcount a company has, but this lead to confusion and misalignment when making people related decisions)
5. The Laszlo’s hierarchy of needs: How getting the basics right is most important and eventually evolving to anticipate what people need in advance of them actually requesting them
6. How to test initiatives and roll them back/tweak them if they are no longer relevant or unpopular: The key is in communicating upfront to people that these are tests and encourage them to participate and provide feedback on how it is working
Reasons why this is three stars:
1. The book could have been shorter and more concise: Some parts were quite repetitive and could have done without so many examples
2. I found the part on encouraging freedom of speech yet trying to “nudge” people towards the right behaviours fairly oxymoronic: They all rely on someone somewhere deciding what is “right” and what is “not”, and who’s to say that person is right? Anyway this is more of a criticism to the current climate of the world but this book is a microcosm of that
Fine! "Joy at Work" is way better, and on the same topic.
I really enjoyed reading this and thinking about different ways to be a manager and deal with HR issues. We'll see how much of it I get to use at my next place of employment. I do need to go back through it and take out highlights so I can think about how to actually execute some of them.
You might think the book is asking the impossible of employers, but it really isn't. Any business can afford to be a bit more like Google, and the advice on this books and the data behind it, gives you a clear road map.
One of the more interesting business book. Much of it makes a lot of sense and yet not a lot of it is followed in most companies.