Work Rules!, by Laszlo Bock

Google became one of the technology companies that software engineers wanted to work for. Compensation and benefits helped build that reputation, along with the chance to work on products used around the world.

That reputation drew applicants from many countries. Bock’s account describes an unusually selective process and asks what the company hoped to learn from it.

In Work Rules!, Laszlo Bock draws on his time leading Google’s People Operations. He starts with the company’s early hiring and follows the decisions that shaped how people were selected, managed, and motivated after they joined.

The book is unusually detailed about experiments and mistakes. Human resources teams can read it for ideas, while applicants can read it for a clearer sense of what a company may be trying to find out during a long interview process.

Hiring and developing people

The chapters move from selecting candidates to working with them after they are hired. Here is an outline of the ideas the book takes up.

Contents

1. Thinking like a founder
2. How culture shapes what a strategy can achieve
   1. Giving work a purpose
   2. Making information available
   3. Giving people a say in what happens to them
   4. What happens when a culture is put to the test
   5. The effects of giving employees more freedom
3. Hiring people who raise the standard
   1. Spending on hiring and on training
   2. Taking the time to hire
   3. Looking for people who can do things you cannot
   4. Using evidence to check instinct
4. Searching for stronger candidates
   1. The company its two founders started
   2. Why the process moved slowly
   3. Casting a wide net
   4. The limits of the networks employees already have
5. Questioning a first impression
   1. What research can tell an interviewer
   2. Choosing interview questions
   3. Reviewing how hiring works
   4. Keeping the standard high
   5. Finding the right people for the work
6. Giving employees a role in running the business
   1. Removing visible signs of rank
   2. Using evidence in decisions
   3. Letting people make choices about their work
   4. Setting ambitious expectations
7. Why performance reviews frustrate people
   1. Recognizing what went wrong
   2. Setting goals
   3. Measuring performance
   4. Making reviews fair
   5. Learning a few practical habits
   6. Where multiple perspectives help
   7. Using evidence in promotion decisions
   8. Reasons to try another approach
8. Looking at both ends of the performance range
   1. Identifying people who need support
   2. Learning from the strongest performers
   3. Working with both ends of the range
9. Designing training programs
   1. Focusing practice on a specific skill
   2. Asking experienced colleagues to teach
   3. Looking for changes in behavior
   4. Learning and teaching together
10. Varying rewards with contribution
    1. When pay understates a person’s contribution
    2. Recognizing an achievement
    3. Making recognition easy to share
    4. Recognizing a well-considered failure
    5. Trust as a starting point
11. Benefits that make a difference
    1. Helping people manage work and life
    2. Widening a sense of community
    3. Making room for new ideas
    4. Looking for a way to say yes
    5. Helping people when it matters most
12. Giving people a small prompt
    1. Helping employees make more informed choices
    2. Helping people improve their finances
    3. Supporting better health
    4. Designing changes with a clear intention
13. When things go wrong
    1. The risks of sharing information
    2. When to turn down a perk
    3. When consistency gets in the way
    4. Making room for unusual people
    5. Paying attention to the decisions that matter
    6. Living with disagreement
    7. Trust in the people doing the work
14. Changes you can try tomorrow

Why give employees freedom?

The book broadly divides into finding people and deciding how to work with them once they join. The first half is concerned mainly with hiring.

Bock begins, though, with the case for giving people latitude. One example in the Korean edition describes a clothing factory where workers’ performance improved when they had more control over their work.

The book also makes a case for paying people fairly. Bock draws a parallel with Henry Ford’s views about what workers ought to receive for their labor.

When people have room to make decisions and feel fairly rewarded, Bock argues, they can start to act as though the future of the company is partly their responsibility.

How a culture encourages people to think like founders

Bock sees three elements at work: a mission, transparency, and the ability to have a voice in decisions. A strategy is hard to carry out if the culture works against it.

An ambitious purpose helps. So does giving employees information they need to act on it. In the Google Bock describes, sharing information depended on trust built inside the company.

Why did Google spend so long hiring?

Google’s process became known for its length. Bock explains why a company might put so much work into learning about someone before making an offer.

A baseball club can draw on years of numbers when considering a player. A player’s record provides a starting point that an employer in another industry rarely has.

A résumé is often written by the person applying. Bock argues that spending more effort on finding reliable evidence before hiring may pay off later in training and performance.

What Google learned about four interviews

The book describes some hiring processes that went on for twenty-five interviews. An internal analysis found that four interviews were generally enough to anticipate the hiring decision in the data studied, with little gain from each additional interview.

An employee’s question about the cost of the old process prompted the study. Bock reports that the shorter approach also helped reduce how long candidates waited for a decision.

I did not apply to Google, but I went through four interviews at Apple after an initial application review. The similarity made me curious, although the two companies may have arrived at their processes in different ways.

Bock regards recruiting exceptional people as worth sustained effort. He describes trying to hire people with abilities the team lacked and continuing a conversation with one candidate for years.

What Bock says Google looked for

Ability mattered, along with curiosity, intellectual humility, and the willingness to work with others. Bock describes a person who can do a job well and help colleagues do theirs.

The company initially gave weight to elite universities. As it found strong candidates from elsewhere, it drew on more kinds of evidence, including referrals and references from people who had worked with an applicant.

Experiments in finding candidates

A billboard with a mathematical puzzle attracted attention from the press. Bock says it did not produce a hire.

An internal effort called Sourcing Jam gathered names from employees. The lesson was that many of the people Google wanted were already doing work they liked and were not actively looking.

Recruiters also used an internal system called gHire to keep track of people over time and reduce reliance on outside agencies.

The book describes some of the places they looked for candidates and evidence of their work.

• LinkedIn for finding people in a field
• The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for viewing past versions of sites someone helped build
• Google Careers, the company’s own recruiting site
• Recruiting firms, including for some senior and local searches
• Job sites such as Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, and Indeed

Google sometimes recruited a team together. Bock gives the example of a group in Aarhus, Denmark, that built the JavaScript engine used in Chrome.

A high standard for hiring

Bock traces the emphasis on hiring to the company’s founders. It reminded me of Steve Jobs’s insistence that a team should make time to find outstanding colleagues.

• Related reading on Steve Jobs What Steve Jobs meant by an “A player”

The book summarizes three ways to put that emphasis into practice.

1. Describe the person you need clearly enough that colleagues can make specific referrals.
2. Give employees a role in identifying people they would want to work with.
3. Be willing to try an unusual approach to get a promising candidate’s attention.

What happened to Google’s strange interview questions?

The Manhattan gas station question is the sort of puzzle that became associated with Google. Bock says the company tried to reduce its reliance on puzzles that took up interview time without revealing much about the work.

He gives more weight to work samples, which ask candidates to do something similar to the job itself. The book cites research linking them to later performance.

Measures of general cognitive ability can also help predict aspects of performance. Bock discusses the evidence alongside that for other methods.

Structured interviews use a set of questions and a clear standard for judging the answers. The book distinguishes two forms.

• Behavioral questions ask for an example of something the candidate has already done.
• Situational questions ask how the candidate would handle a hypothetical problem related to the job.

Writing good questions takes work. Google built an internal tool called qDroid to help interviewers draw from a set of examples.

The prompts below convey the kind of conversation the tool was intended to support.

• Describe something you did that helped a team. Explain the original goal, your plan, and how your colleagues responded.
• Describe how you led a team toward a goal. What did you contribute yourself, how did you work with each person, and what did you learn?
• Describe a difficult working relationship. What made it hard, what did you try, and what might you do differently?

What a candidate takes away from an interview

Bock wants a candidate to leave feeling that the interview was worth their time and that the interviewers took their interests seriously. Candidates tell other people about the experience. They also deserve that treatment regardless of the outcome.

The book describes a follow-up survey called VoxPop, which gathered feedback on the interview process.

Four qualities used in hiring

Bock describes four areas Google assessed.

1. General cognitive ability, including how the candidate had tackled difficult problems in practice
2. Emergent leadership, or the ability to step forward when needed and let others lead when appropriate
3. Googleyness, which Bock associates with intellectual humility, curiosity, and comfort with ambiguity
4. Role-related knowledge, considered alongside the ability to learn beyond a specialty

Revisiting rejected applications

In the program Bock describes, Google took a second look at some applications rejected in 2010. The review eventually led to offers for people the company had initially passed over.

Adapting the process to local circumstances

Hiring staff also considered local context. Bock gives Japan as an example of a market where the company did not interpret university grades in the same way as it did elsewhere.

Here is the sequence he describes for the period covered by the book.

How the hiring process worked

1. The candidate applies.
2. A reviewer considers the résumé and whether other roles may be a good fit.
3. An initial interview takes place by phone or video. 
4. A manager, potential colleagues or reports, and sometimes someone from a different team interview the candidate.
5. The company gathers structured feedback and checks references.
6. A hiring committee reviews the case and passes its recommendation up the chain for approval.
7. The recruiter communicates the decision and makes an offer if approved.

One detail I found interesting was the role of people outside the immediate team. Bock also describes prospective direct reports taking part in a manager’s interview.

Reviewers without a direct stake could raise questions about whether a candidate would work well with colleagues. The book describes a strong candidate who was rejected over concerns about their conduct.

In the period Bock describes, Larry Page reviewed hiring decisions. A lack of evidence for a candidate’s abilities or creativity could send a recommendation back.

What helped the process find stronger candidates?

The company tracked how much time its employees devoted to hiring and tried to reduce it without losing useful evidence. Bock gives four principles for deciding what to keep.

1. Set a demanding standard.
2. Find candidates through more than inbound applications.
3. Assess people against evidence.
4. Explain what makes the work worth joining.

Bock also describes a culture in which people could exercise judgment without a title doing all the talking. His account distinguishes four broad roles.

• Individual contributor
• Manager
• Director
• Executive

In the account, reducing status perks is one way to keep decisions from turning on the rank of the person making the case.

Sharing information about promotion was another way to show employees what the process considered.

Time to work on an idea

Bock discusses the practice of giving engineers some time to develop ideas related to the company. Google’s version was known as “20 percent time,” a counterpart to the shorter allowance described at 3M.

How bonuses were calculated

Bock describes one approach in which employees doing comparable work were assessed against a shared salary reference point. That was meant to prevent a person’s existing salary from having too much influence on the bonus.

Googlegeist, an employee survey

Before Googlegeist, the People Operations team experimented with smaller surveys of employee satisfaction.

The survey Bock describes asked a wide range of employees for feedback each year and tracked what changed afterward.

Some responses included information such as work location or product area without asking for a name. Other responses were anonymous.

Employees helped write the questions. The results, including difficult ones, were shared inside the company so managers could act on problems that might otherwise stay out of sight.

Bock says the results helped the company find teams where people were struggling and take a closer look at what was happening.

Rewarding the health of a codebase

Volume of code can be easier to count than quality. Engineers organized around ways to make maintenance and quality visible in performance and promotion decisions.

1. Explain why a healthy codebase matters.
2. Work with People Operations to account for it in reviews and promotions.
3. Build tools that help check the quality of the code.
4. Recognize employees whose work makes the codebase better for other people.

Listening for ideas inside the company

The book describes a process in which employees submitted ideas and voted. The most popular proposals could receive time or resources to develop.

The expectations people work toward

Bock draws on Edwin Locke and Gary Latham’s research on goal setting. Specific, challenging goals can give people a clearer idea of what to work toward than an instruction to do their best.

A team needs enough information to understand why the goals matter. It also needs room to make decisions about how to get there.

How a manager can pass on authority

Bock offers several ways to give teams more room to act.

• Remove unnecessary signs of rank.
• Ask for evidence and check the facts behind a decision.
• Let people make choices about their work and contribute to decisions about the company.
• Trust people with demanding work.

When reviews become a procedure

A performance review can become a routine that absorbs time without helping anyone improve.

Bock looks at companies that changed their review systems. At Google, employees complained about how much time reviews took and how little they could see of the process.

The company moved to a twice-yearly review in 2013 and replaced finely divided numerical scores with five categories.

1. Needs improvement
2. Consistently meets expectations
3. Exceeds expectations
4. Strongly exceeds expectations
5. Superb

Two conversations with different purposes

Bock recommends discussing professional development separately from pay and bonuses. In the example he gives, Google held the two conversations about a month apart so that compensation would not overwhelm the feedback.

Principles for reviewing work

In Bock’s account, employees recorded their own work, and people they worked with also contributed feedback. Those accounts could inform promotion decisions.

His advice on making evaluations more useful can be summarized as follows.

1. Agree on clear goals.
2. Ask colleagues for evidence and feedback.
3. Calibrate reviews across teams.
4. Discuss compensation separately from development.
5. Give people a fair assessment and show them how they can improve.

Looking at both ends of the range

Bock argues that managers should pay attention to people who are having particular difficulty and to people whose work offers something others can learn from.

He cites work by Herman Aguinis and Ernest O’Boyle Jr. on how a relatively small group of very high performers can account for a large share of measurable output.

At the lower end, Bock says the first question is what support would help. Some people improve in their role, while others find work elsewhere that suits them better.

Studying what the strongest people do is also useful. It gives the company a way to recognize their work and pass on what they know.

Working with both ends of the range

1. Keep trying to improve how the organization works.
2. Compare performance and survey responses across teams and look for reasons the results differ.
3. Ask teams regularly what support they are getting from managers.
4. Have people who excel at particular management practices teach others.

What makes a manager effective?

Google’s research team set out to test how much managers mattered. The differences between teams gave them reasons to look at what effective managers did.

Eight habits of effective managers

1. Coach people.
2. Delegate and give people room to work.
3. Take an interest in people’s success and well-being.
4. Help the team get results.
5. Listen and share information.
6. Support employees’ career development.
7. Set a clear direction for the team.
8. Know enough about the work to give useful advice.

Training that changes what someone can do

The book recommends deliberately practicing a particular skill with a clear idea of what better performance would look like.

Bock uses Tiger Woods’s practice in difficult conditions as an example of what it means to work on a specific weakness.

A workshop Bock attended at McKinsey offered another example. Practicing how to respond to an angry client gave him something concrete to draw on at work.

When colleagues become teachers

Google gave some employees a way to volunteer as instructors or advisers. Bock saw value in letting people learn from a colleague who already understood the work they were trying to do.

How to evaluate a training program

The book draws on Donald Kirkpatrick’s model of four levels for evaluating training.

1. Reaction: ask how participants experienced the training. 
2. Learning: assess what changed in their knowledge or skills.
3. Behavior: look for changes in how they do their work.
4. Results: examine the effect on the outcomes the training was meant to improve.

How Google recognized employees

Bock describes how the company used equity and developed principles for compensation and recognition as it grew.

1. Let rewards reflect differences in contribution.
2. Recognize achievements in ways people will remember.
3. Make it easy for colleagues to thank one another.
4. Give people credit for taking a considered risk even when it fails.

The internal tool gThanks helped people recognize colleagues. The book also describes a modest peer bonus that an employee could nominate a colleague to receive.

Benefits included meals and other services at work. They were part of what the company offered after asking people to go through a demanding hiring process.

A daily benefit can change what it feels like to come to work, even when its financial value is small next to a salary.

Bock ends with ideas that employers can consider without trying to recreate Google.

Principles for working with people

1. Give people a purpose they can see in their work.
2. Trust them with information and choices.
3. Look for colleagues who can teach you something.
4. Make time for development separately from performance ratings.
5. Give attention to people having the most difficulty and to people who excel.
6. Spend carefully and be generous where it counts.
7. Reward people in keeping with their contribution.
8. Use small changes that make good choices easier.
9. Be honest about what employees can expect.
10. Leave room to enjoy the work, then ask what you can improve next.

What a long account of hiring can tell us

The book is a history of how Google’s approach to people changed during Bock’s tenure. It is most interesting when it describes an experiment and tells you what the company learned from it.

I found the argument about keeping hiring standards particularly persuasive. What makes it credible in the book is the attention given to evidence and to checking the process itself.

Candidates can also learn something from the account. Even when another employer uses a different process, it helps to understand what an interviewer is trying to find out.

I had read the book before and put off reviewing it because there was so much I wanted to remember. Coming back to it gave me a chance to collect the points I might still want to look up later.

Book details

Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

Author

Laszlo Bock

Korean edition published

August 16, 2021

ISBN13

9788925579825

View the book on YES24

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