home » Directory » Review: “Work rocks! why most people want to work at google”, Laszlo Bok. “Work rocks! Why do most people in the world want to work at Google? Laszlo Bock Laszlo Bock works hard

Review: “Work rocks! why most people want to work at google”, Laszlo Bok. “Work rocks! Why do most people in the world want to work at Google? Laszlo Bock Laszlo Bock works hard

Laszlo Bock

VP of Human Resources at Google. In 2010 he was recognized as the best HR manager according to professional edition HR Executive Magazine. For 15 years of his work, the number of employees of the company has grown from 6 thousand people to 50 thousand.

This book is a story about what we have learned over the past 15 years, and what you can do to put people at the forefront, changing both your life and your leadership positions in it.
Laszlo Bock

Google can be called an integral part of our life. We google, watch YouTube videos, carry Android smartphones, chat on Hangouts… And sometimes we dream of working there. Why? After all, it's not just a big salary.

Working at Google differs from working at many other companies primarily in what Laszlo Bock calls " a high degree freedom" - when employees independently decide how to act in a given situation.

Another significant difference is that leaders or managers cannot make some decisions alone. For example, the decision to fire an employee, how to evaluate his performance, who to promote up the career ladder. Working at Google is a team effort. Therefore, each such decision is made by colleagues or a group of independent experts. In general, no traditional "sticks" and "carrots".

Google understands how important freedom is for a person.

And in order to be humane to the people who work for you, your company does not have to bring huge profits. And it is possible, and vice versa: if employees believe in themselves and their work, then the company will prosper. Therefore, the advice from the book "Work rules" will apply to both large and small organizations. The right approach to workflow can make your company that dream job.

About the book

Laszlo Bock's book is voluminous, which is not surprising: it outlines 15 years of work of a man who was looking for the best of the best. From the book you will learn about dozens of techniques, non-standard solutions, mistakes and amazing finds. A total of 15 chapters, each of which is devoted to a specific aspect of hiring employees and their motivation, plus additional materials for HR fans.

Where does change begin

If you want to create conditions for "big freedom", like at Google, you need to translate the idea into action. Laszlo Bock offers 10 specific recommendations that can be applied in any company to achieve the desired result.

1. Make your work meaningful

Work has value not because it brings money, but largely because of the sense of belonging to a common useful cause. Help people understand the importance of what you do.

2. Trust your people

3. Only hire people who are better than you.

We should strive not to fill vacancies, but to look for really excellent employees. Bad employees are slow poison for a company.

4. Do not confuse the concepts of "development" and "performance management"

You need to talk to employees. And an open dialogue is possible only if the employees are sure that they will not be punished or fined for their mistake. Support employees, do not kill their desire to learn.

5. Focus on the "two tails"

"Two tails" - the best and lagging employees. You need to learn from the best, and create conditions for learning from those who are lagging behind.

6. Be frugal and generous

Do not waste money on nonsense like never-ending corporate parties. It is better to leave them for a rainy day, but do not spare money in special cases (for example, if someone in the employee’s family falls ill or an addition appears). Employees should know that the company will support them - in sorrow and in joy.

7. Don't pay fair

Remember, the best ones cost more than the average ones. Therefore, there should be a difference in salaries for different employees. And this difference must be earned.

8. Push

The conditions must match the goals. Do you want employees to collaborate more with each other? Tear down the partitions between the tables!

9. Manage Rising Expectations

If you want to experiment with the suggested tips, first let your subordinates know about it. You need people's support.

10. Have fun!

And remember that a great work environment is a good motivator in itself.

Who is this book for?

For HR managers. Recruiters definitely have a lot to learn from Laszlo Bock.

For entrepreneurs and those who want to become one. Here you will find extremely valuable tips on organizing work, building a strong team and defining the mission of the company.

For employees who care about their job and want to do their own workplace better. Change doesn't always come from above. Sometimes all you have to do is offer, and you'll see that positive changes start small.

From the editor. Laszlo Bock is one of the most significant figures in the field of personnel management. He became VP of HR at Google in 2006, when the company employed several thousand people, and left in 2016, when the number of employees grew to 70 thousand. It was Bok who brought scientific approach to Google's HR practice. In particular, he implemented the Oxygen research project to identify the traits inherent in the most successful Google executives. In 2015, Laszlo Bock released the bestselling book Work Rules! (“Work rocks!”), which has been translated into 25 languages. Two years ago, along with fellow Googler Wayne Crosby, Bok launched HUMU, a startup that raised over $40 million in funding. The idea behind the Bock and Crosby project is to use scientific data and technology to optimize the relationship between business and people, make employees happy and at the same time increase their productivity. True, the founders have not yet spoken about what exactly the startup does, who its customers are and how the HUMU business model works. At the forum held in Berlin SAP Success Connect Laszlo Bock explained why employees need freedom, trust and “light pushes” to be vital. We publish the most interesting fragments from his speech.

On Google I had simple mission- to find the best shots, grow them and keep them. When I joined the company, the most difficult thing was that people around me thought that everyone knew better than me: how to work successfully, manage correctly, and plan succession. It was difficult to convince them of anything. We found a way out - we decided that we would rely on scientific data.

Only a third of employees consider their work meaningful and meaningful. This conclusion was reached by Yale University professor Amy Rozinski, who conducted research related to the search for meaning in various types works. For some professions, such as lawyers, the results are easily explained. I am surprised that even a third of them consider their work meaningful. But there are professions where, it would seem, everything should be the other way around: doctors, nurses, clergy. But here the ratio is the same. A clergyman friend of mine once observed that even if you have dedicated your life to other people, it is all too easy to remember duty while forgetting joy. However, there is a way to return this joy.

In order to survive and prosper, in order to be happy, a person needs to find meaning in his work. This increases both productivity and business profitability. Adam Grant (Professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania - approx. ed. ) conducted research at a call center whose job is to collect donations (for example, for scholarships for children to study in college). On average, people collected $1,300 a week. But how would their productivity change if they made their work more meaningful? Grant found donated alumni and asked them to write about how their studies helped them in their lives. Many noted that the college helped them find Good work. The call center staff read their essay, but nothing happened. Adam was very upset: it was a bad result. Then he asked the students to write differently - about what learning meant to them personally. Someone, for example, admitted that thanks to college he read the whole of Shakespeare for the first time in his life, and this gave him strength, inspiration and a deeper understanding of not only in English but also human nature. After the call center staff read the new essays, their productivity increased and they were able to collect $3,100 a week. And when former scholarship holders began to regularly come to the company and tell how the college helped them, people were already collecting $5,000 a week. That is, the increase was almost 400%. This is, of course, an outstanding example. On average, for different professions, giving work significance leads to an increase in productivity by about 20%.

There are two ways to give meaning to your business. First, define your organization's mission statement that is appealing to everyone and a bit unattainable. Mission is not about value for consumers or shareholders. The mission is to inspire. This is something that cannot be achieved definitively, something universal, close to many people. The second way is to find people who work in your organization and are radiant with joy, able to lead and empathize. Those who care about what they do. Ask them what they are doing differently today and why they are doing their job at all. You will learn from them stories that do not leave people indifferent. When you get an answer, retell it over and over again and you will see how employees who do not see their mission will find it.

It is important for all of us to feel that we are trusted, to feel strong and independent. But trust in the context of business comes down to a fundamental question - are people generally good or bad? It seems like the answer is simple. Of course, people in general are usually nice. However, terrible things happen in the world from time to time. If you want to be a leader, to build a strong company, you will have to choose one of two options. I believe that people are very, very deep down good. Look at the purest people in the world - the children. Of course, they can fight over a toy. But they are good. If one child falls on the playground, other children go to him and console him. This is our natural human instinct. But then we grow up and go to work. In the organizations where we work, there are rules, procedures that must be followed. All of them are aimed at limiting individual freedom and restraining the good that asks to come out. The abnormality is that people create such systems with the best of intentions. Consider this paradox.

The best leader is the one who leads the least. Deep down, every employee wants their boss to leave them alone. Let him guide, support and organize learning a little. If you are a manager, you want employees to do what they are assigned on time and correctly, so you look after them and intervene in all the details. The paradox is that we are all workers and managers at the same time. What kind of environment do we want to create? MIT professor Richard Lock conducted the experiment in Mexico. He found two exactly the same factories where women, for the most part, poorly educated, sew Nike T-shirts. One factory was traditionally run and produced about 80 T-shirts a day. And at another factory, the professor suggested that the employees themselves set the shift schedule. As a result, at the second enterprise, productivity increased from 80 to 150 T-shirts per day, the cost of the product decreased from 18 to 11 cents. As women were paid to work, their income increased. It amazes me that the ideas came from the employees themselves, and not from some consulting firm. The consultants would say: “Let's define the initial data, include everyone in the mailing list, implement best practics and we'll study, study, study." And here they simply suggested to people: do your job as you see fit.

Don't blindly follow Google, don't offer free food, charter buses, volleyball courts. It's all too much. Instead, just give your people a little more freedom. If you think that people are bad, then you will command them, tell them what they should do. And time after time you will get worse results. If you think people are good, you give them opportunities to grow and they will find them. I once started my career at McKinsey & Company with an e-commerce project. I didn't know anything about the industry and prepared the document in PowerPoint because all consultants do is prepare presentations. I got incomparable graphics, with a lot of details, everywhere there were footnotes with explanations. I went to the manager and asked him to take a look before sending it off to the client. And he said, “Do I have to watch it now?” I apologized, promised to come back later and brought a new version. This was repeated several more times. After my fourth or fifth visit, the manager refused to look at the document, and I sent it to the client. The leader made me feel freedom and trust, he made me responsible for the result, and my final product got better. It was not his project and not someone else's, but mine, he lay on my shoulders.

Large-scale changes in organizations are most conveniently carried out with the help of the so-called "light push". The term was coined by two professors, Nobel laureate Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago and his colleague Cass Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard. They proved that small interventions made at the right time can have a disproportionate impact on employee behavior, in particular, facilitate right choice. For example, in a grocery store near the cash register there is always all sorts of rubbish: chips, sweets, chewing gum. That's the easy push: the store encourages you to buy harmful stuff and makes good money from it. Or another example. Giant refrigerators are popular in the US. You open the door and right in front of you is the main shelf. That's where people usually store juice, milk, and maybe containers of prepared food that don't fit anywhere else. If you are hungry or thirsty, all this is right in front of you, although it will not bring you much benefit. If you want to change your behavior or lose weight, change the location of the food. We did this at home and put in a prominent place a plate of fruit, which we used to keep somewhere in the corner. And a miracle happened! Two out of three children began to eat fruit. The third one is already 15 years old, she will no longer touch the fruit. But the other two liked it, it's just amazing.

Look for areas in your organizations where you can step in and make a "soft push". At Google, we once calculated that it takes an average of nine months for a new hire to reach full productivity. We began to study those who quickly reached the peak of productivity, and identified five types of behavior in them. For example, they were always looking for feedback, literally from the first week. Few people on new job goes to the boss in the early days and asks: “Do I need to correct something? Do I understand correctly what the essence of my work is? Am I responding correctly? It is also important that newcomers have at least two new social connections. The company can easily arrange this. For example, appoint a special person who will go to the bar with people after work. We identified what successful newbies do and decided to push things a little. For example, on Monday you go to Google and immediately get a message: “Do these five things. Ask for feedback. Find two social contacts, etc.” And on Friday, on the eve of the release of a newcomer, we pushed the manager - sent him a message that says: “On Monday, new employee. Make sure he does those five things." Of course, not everyone reads this. I'm even sure that no one reads the message to the end. But with the introduction of even such a tool, the average time for a person to reach full productivity has been reduced from nine months to six. In addition, according to our calculations, the increase in productivity was 2%. Good result for two messages: it is equal to receiving one free worker for every 50 hired. And all thanks to a light push.

Four billion people work on planet Earth, and for many of them, work is a means to an end. You have to pay bills, feed your family. It does not make us nobler, stronger, does not elevate us. Scientific evidence shows that people spend more time on work than on anything else. Once you were a child, grew up, learned that there are other people, and somewhere your special person is waiting for you. You meet this person, start a family, life is great, but you spend too much time with "those idiots" in the office, and not with the one you care about. But there is a way to change this. This requires science machine learning plus it's important to add some love to the work.

Two years ago I founded my own company - HUMU. HUMU is not very visible yet, but our mission is to do a better job. When we first launched our site, it was terrible: an image of a fish and a "submit resume" button. But in the first week, we received about one resume per minute. And all because we promised to bring love to the workplace.

A lot of people are desperate for work today, so I think that in the next 50 or 100 years it will still be possible to mistreat people and still build a profitable business. There are many places in the world where you can constantly change workers, grind them up and spit them out, because new ones are already in line. But the idea of doing a better job everywhere and for everyone is very powerful, and we are engaged in it.

Recorded by Yulia Fukolova

Information about how they work with people at Google is first-hand.

“We spend most of our time at work. And the work experience should not be demotivating or unpleasant,” says Laszlo Bock, vice president of human resources at Google. This book is a manifesto that can change the way you work and recruit.

Based on psychology and the latest developments in behavioral economics, examples from the experience of Google and small successful companies, Laszlo Bock tells how to create a company where employees are valued and listened to, and in which they dream of working.

From the book you will learn that:

You need to learn not only from your best employees, but also from your worst ones;
You need to pay "unfairly";
It is worth hiring those who are smarter than you - even if you have to search for a very long time;
Big data is more reliable than your intuition;
If you don't feel bad about giving a lot of freedom to your employees, then you haven't given much freedom.

Since I entered the company, Google's staff has grown from 6,000 to almost 50, and there are more than 70 offices in more than 40 countries around the world. Fortune magazine has named Google the "Best Company to Work for" 5 times in the US and many times in countries around the world. According to LinkedIn, the most people in the world want to work for Google; we receive about 2 million resumes annually from candidates with a wide range of experience and education from all over the world. Of all applicants, Google accepts only a few thousand a year, that is, the company is 25 times more selective than Harvard, Yale or Princeton.

So, I can say that instead of the professional suicide that my colleagues predicted, my time at Google has become for me swimming in the turbulent waters of experimentation and creativity. I was sometimes deadly tired, sometimes discouraged, but I always moved forward on the path of creating an organization in which freedom, purposefulness and creativity reign.

This book is a story about what we have learned over the past 15 years, and what you can do to put people at the forefront, changing both your life and your leadership positions in it.

Information about how they work with people at Google is first-hand.

From the book you will learn that:

You need to learn not only from your best employees, but also from your worst ones;
. You need to pay "unfairly";
. It is worth hiring those who are smarter than you - even if you have to search for a very long time;
. Big data is more reliable than your intuition;
. If you don't feel bad about giving a lot of freedom to your employees, then you haven't given much freedom.

From the author

This book is a story about what we have learned over the past 15 years, and what you can do to put people at the forefront, changing both your life and your leadership positions in it.

Expand description Collapse Description

Around Google many myths are created. They are especially concentrated around hiring, internal corporate and organizational culture. Laszlo Bock's book lifts the veil of secrecy and talks about how internal HR processes are actually organized at one of the most attractive employers in the world.

The book turned out great complete guide, and I think that it can become a desktop for everyone involved in HR. We can safely say that the practice in all areas of work within the company is collected here. The best-selling author consistently covers the basics and shares specific case studies that are used in one of the best multinational companies.

It was very interesting to learn about the biography of Laszlo Bock himself, the current Vice President of Human Resources at Google - who he was before, how he developed, how he ended up in the company, how he created his team, what experience is important for him when choosing potential employees.

The system at Google is based on data management: if you can't count something, then you can't manage it. At the heart of all management decisions there are internal studies and conclusions, confirmed by calculations, and not just someone's opinion. Great importance is attached to internal automation - after all, it helps to make routine operations less labor-intensive, and ultimately allows you to get an array of data that you can work with and make decisions in the future.

The company pays special attention to high-quality search and selection of specialists. The author is sure that it makes no sense to invest in "average" employees. It is better to spend money on a better recruitment procedure: not to “plug holes”, but to look for really suitable people. The book provides a detailed analysis of how the recruitment process at Google works.

Many people have watched the film “Cadres decide everything”, where one of the most striking scenes was an interview via Skype. During the interview, the main characters were asked to answer a non-standard question: “You shrunk to the size of a coin and fell to the bottom of the blender, what are your actions?”. A few years ago, William Poundstone's book, Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?, was published, which collected such original tasks for interviews. Laszlo Bock says that the company subsequently abandoned the use of these tests and explains why. He goes on to admit that experimenting with the sensational story about placing shields with a task for programmers did not lead to the result that the company expected at all.

Through an organized system of data collection, the author provides the readership with many examples of management within the company. I will only talk about a few of them.

Referral programs have played a special role in attracting talented employees for Google - when existing employees offer their friends for consideration. The company managed to achieve the maximum effectiveness of such programs not by increasing financial gratitude to the recommenders, but by organizing a more transparent process and constant feedback for those who recommend.

Most the best solution about hiring is a group decision, emphasizes Laszlo Bock.

Google has identified 4 main factors that contribute to further success in the company: general cognitive ability, leadership, "googling" and knowledge.

The best recruiting tools in a company are: proficiency testing (a task from a job similar to the one you are looking for), structured interviews, testing general cognitive ability and an assessment of conscientiousness.

The book contains 10 basic rules adopted by Google for building an effective personnel management system. And also - a lot of useful information and life hacks that can be useful when organizing work in any company.

The principles of work, which Laszlo Bock spoke about, are applicable in almost all areas of business and corporate structures. In fact, this is really the most tsimes of useful advice that affect literally all HR processes.

Spiridonova Natalia.