By: Laszlo Bock

  LISTEN

  READ

Laszlo Bock is the head of people operations at Google. How he got there is a testament to how differently Google thinks about the management of their people.

His roles before Google include working in a deli, a restaurant, a library, a bit acting part in Baywatch, running a startup devoted to helping troubled teens, and finally management consulting at McKinsey.

When he joined Google, they had 6,000 employees, and they now have almost sixty thousand. They receive two million applications a year, and hire only a few thousand each year, making it 25 times more selective than Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.

They focus just as much attention on how to turn those few thousand recruits into long-term Googlers, and today you’ll learn the 10 rules Bock applies to help Google retain their status as one of the world’s best workplaces.

1. Give your work meaning

This one isn’t anything new, as you’ll recognize this nugget from many other business books published in the last few years - particularly Drive, by Dan Pink.

Give your team a paycheque and they’ll give you their hands. Give them a purpose and they’ll give you their hearts and minds as well.

Bock suggests connecting work at your company to an idea or value that transcends the day-to-day tasks your team works on. Just make sure that you actually do what you are talking about.

For instance, the mission at Google is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

When you compare this mission to the ones you usually find from other companies, you'll find something interesting - that it's a "moral" goal rather than a "business" goal.

One of the best ways you can keep your team engaged with your goal is to have meet the people they are serving.

In his book Give and Take, Adam Grant pointed out that giving meaning to the work your people will do will not only make people happier, it will also increase their productivity.

As it turns out, creating a compelling purpose is also good for business.

2. Trust your people.

Part of the benefit of a rigorous hiring process is that you end up with people you trust. If you feel like you need to continuously babysit the people on your team, you are either a bad manager, or you have hired the wrong people (usually both).

Part of trusting your people is having a culture that is open and transparent. Of course, those are two buzzwords that have almost been made meaningless by their overuse and misuse. So, stay away from the jargon and let your employees know you trust them by sharing as much information about what's going on in the business as possible.

Of course, once people start getting more information about what's going on, they'll have opinions about what should be done differently or better. Humans are funny that way.

Rather than granting authority to your team members once they’ve earned it, try granting them that authority and trusting that they will grow into it.

Luckily for you, this is happens to be good for business. As Ethan Burris from the University of Texas tells us, "research on voice has shown positive effects of employees speaking up on decision quality, team performance, and organizational performance."

Start small, and always acknowledge the feedback your team gives you.

You’ll be amazed at the results.

3. Hire only people who are better than you.

If your immediate reaction to this one is that “there is nobody better than me”, you are probably filling your open positions too quickly.

Finding people better than you takes more time than simply filling open spots as soon as you find somebody who seems “adequate.” But in the long run, you’ll ensure that your team is constantly getting better, and you’ll be building a culture where the best performers want to be.

They found that three things work incredibly well in finding this talent.

First, by getting referrals. The trick here is to be excruciatingly specific in describing what you are looking for so you get what you are looking for.

Second, by making recruiting part of everybody's job. Smart and talented people tend to hang out with one another, so asking your current team to find your future team works well.

Third, by doing crazy things to get the attention of the best people. Your employees won't know ALL of the best people, so sometimes you need to pull some crazy stunts that attract the type of people you are looking for. Thinking like a marketer in these situations really helps.

4. Don’t confuse development with managing performance.

At Google, they separate discussions about the ongoing development of their employees and managing their performance.

There is a time and place for discussing what your team can do to get better at their job, and a time and place for discussing the results they did or didn’t produce.

At Google they use a system called OKR - objectives and key results - to manage performance across the company. The leaders at the company set their own OKRs, and then everybody down the line sets their own to match up to the direction of the company.

They take hitting these goals very seriously, but even more importantly, they separate these discussions from discussions about development.

In development discussions, your mindset should always be “how can I help you be more successful”. It’s not the time and place to criticize an employee’s performance. You want your team to feel safe in these discussions so they can ask for help in areas where they are struggling.

If you have these discussions consistently, there should be no surprises when it comes time to review their performance to the standards you set for the month, quarter, or year.

5. Focus on the two tails.

Focus on the top 10% and the bottom 10% of your talent pool. This was a favourite tactic of Jack Welch when he was at GE, although how it’s applied at Google has more of a positive spin.

In particular, you want to put your best people under a microscope, and learn everything you can about how they do what they do. Then, if possible, have them teach that skill to the entire team.

It not only helps the rest of your team learn what they need to do to get better, it also helps your star-performers to grow as well.

At Google they've developed something called G2G (Googler2Googler) where fellow employees deliver training to one another. In 2013, 2,200 classes were delivered to over 21,000 Google employees alone.

So that's how you should be treating your top employees. On the flip side, be compassionate with your bottom performers. Do whatever it takes to help them improve, but don’t keep them in a role where it’s clear that they can’t (or won’t) climb out of the bottom 10%.

6. Be frugal and generous.

Bock points out something that we all know intuitively, but forget to practice on a regular basis - most things we do for our people cost nothing.

At Google, they offer a lot of things to their employees that cost the company absolutely no money. For instance, they work with other companies to bring a lot of services to their campuses like dry cleaning ,on site washing machines and car washes (paid for by the employee) so that when they go home, they have less "little things" to worry about.

There are literally hundreds of these little perks that you enjoy as part of the Google family.

This allows them to save their biggest people investments for the times of greatest tragedy or joy. For instance, when there are emergency medical issues or when a team member is welcoming a new member into the family - these are the times when most people remember acts of generosity.

For example, when a Google employee passes away, they have some incredible benefits for the surviving family members. They pay 50% of the salary to the family for the next ten years, and the family gets an additional $1,000 per month for each child until they turn nineteen, or twenty-three if they were full time students.

Taking care of your employees like this is the right thing to do, but it's also a great way to attract new employees into the fold.

Be frugal where you can so you can be generous when it matters most.

7. Pay unfairly.

Not all people deserve to be paid the same amount. You would’t expect a star athlete to be paid the same as somebody who warms the bench, but for some reason a sense of “equality” has infected the workplace.

As Bock points out, your best people are worth far more than your average people.

This might not be true in an environment where you employ manual labour, have limited technology and have strict standards for minimum and maximum production. But that probably doesn't describe your company.

At Google, he says, they have situations where two people doing the same work can have a hundred times difference in their impact. And there have been situations where one person received a stock award of $10,000 and another in the same area received $1,000,000.

If you want your star performers to stick around, you'll need to make sure they feel like a star. And while pay doesn't count for everything, it certainly counts for something - especially if it ends up being a tie-breaker.

Your B players are not going to like it, so be ready to discuss why their pay is different, and what they can do to change it.

8. Nudge.

How much thought have you put into creating the environment where you are actively promoting the behaviours you want in your employees?

If you want your team to communicate more, have you created a physical environment where people can easily see and connect with their teammates?

If you want your team to eat healthy snacks, are they at eye level in the refrigerator?

If you want your team to be positive and upbeat, are you sending emails that fit the bill?

Everything you do, and everything that surrounds your team, is either nudging them towards or away from the behaviours you want to see. Make sure you are nudging them in the right direction.

9. Manage the rising expectations.

Once you start implementing some of the changes you hear on this summary (and read in the book), your people will start to expect more out of you.

Manage these expectations by letting people know ahead of time that you’ll be trying some of these things, and that some of them might not work perfectly the first time around.

You’ll buy yourself some latitude when things invariable don’t work out exactly like you expected them to.

10. Enjoy (and then go back to #1)

Most importantly, enjoy the journey. Make sure you are consciously creating a work environment you’d love to work in for the rest of your life.

You will ultimately attract some of the most talented people on the planet to join your team, you’ll love the work you do on a day-to-day basis, and you’ll come home every day thinking “man, I can’t believe I get to do this for a living!”

And that is the best gift of all.