"This book is the story of how we [Google] think about our people, what we’ve learned over the past fifteen years, and what you can do to put people first and transform how you live and lead."
- Work Rules!, page 6
"We don’t have all the answers, but we have made some fascinating discoveries about how best to find, grow and keep people in an environment of freedom, creativity, and play."- Work Rules!, page 15
Bock’s foundational belief upon which his ten work rules are built comes down to this: you either believe people are good or you don’t. And if you believe people are good, you will agree that they should be free. Often, work is far less meaningful and enjoyable than it could be because leaders don’t believe that their people are good. They build immense bureaucracies to control people because they don’t trust them.
Bock, in contrast, in his search for the most talented people on the planet, assumes that they will want to be a part of a freedom-driven company. And such companies, because they benefit from the best insight and passion of all their employees, are more resilient and better able to sustain success. Treating your employees well is both a means to an end and an end in itself. In doing good, you do well!
Here are the ten steps that will transform your team:
"Take power from your managers and trust your people to run things."- Work Rules!, page 118
At Google, they want their people to feel, think and act like owners rather than employees. One strategy to achieve this is to remove as much power from managers as they can. The team creates greater innovation with less formal authority.
So what do their managers do? What’s the difference between the best managers and the rest? Google identified eight attributes shared by high-scoring managers (not seen in the low-scoring ones). To make the attributes actionable, they created a checklist and promise that if you perform every behavior on the list, you’ll be an amazing manager.
"Hiring is the single most important people activity in any organization"- Work Rules!, page 54
Hiring is an expensive and risky process. At Google they front-load their people investment by spending the majority of their time and money attracting, assessing and cultivating new hires.
Just one of the Insights he shares after discussing how to hire, what to ask, what process to follow, is what to do with a new hire. Google created a checklist for managers with five things to do with ‘Nooglers’ (new hires).
An email is sent to the manager the Sunday before the new hire starts. In the email are five actions that are almost embarrassing in their simplicity:
The managers who acted on this email were rewarded with new hires who became fully effective 25 percent faster than others, saving a full month of learning time. Bock admits he was shocked at how profound the result was. Do you remember Atul Gawande’s TED talk advocating the increased use of checklists in medicine? Bock says, “It turns out checklist really do work, even when the list is almost patronizingly simple”.
He cautions however that sending a checklist isn’t enough. It needs to be meaningful, sent at the right time and easy to act on. And it needs to have a reminder. Two weeks after that checklist, managers received a follow-up email reminding them of the five actions.
Bock feels the most important idea he can impart is the importance of thinking like an owner. As such, what would you do to transform your workplace, one little idea at a time?
Laszlo Bock leads Google’s people function, responsible for attracting, developing, retaining, and delighting “Googlers.” Bock’s earlier experience spans executive roles at the General Electric Company, management consulting at McKinsey & Company, start-ups, non-profits, and acting.
