Breaking the rules

With Laszlo Bock as Senior Vice President of People Operations, Google has been voted best company to work for more than 30 times and received more than 100 awards as a top employer. What can HR professionals learn from this approach?

 

What key messages does your book, Work Rules!, send to the HR industry?

We spend more time working than doing anything else – more time than with our loved ones and more time than sleeping – but, for most people, work is still just a means to an end. At Google, we’ve learned that it’s important to connect people to a meaningful mission and that if you give people freedom, it drives productivity as well as happiness.

Also, we are far worse at making decisions than we think, so we’re actually not very good at interviewing. And finally, that you can nudge people to be happier and more productive. For example, when we put the sugary snacks in our New York office’s kitchens into opaque containers, employees consumed 3.1 million fewer calories over seven weeks.

How does Google balance creativity and structure?

There’s an element of structure that all our operations need to work well. We also do a lot of science, but that’s really a tool, not an end in itself. But creativity is so essential because, at the end of the day, humans are way more complicated than machines and algorithms. We provide a tremendous amount of freedom for people to try new things, and that’s absolutely essential.

Why do other companies struggle to do the things the way Google does?

Early on, I chose to hire highly analytical people, so we were able to test and prove and demonstrate what works. But there are other companies doing things to make their people happy: John Lewis in the UK, Wegmans in the US, Brandix in Sri Lanka. And most of the things that make people happy don’t cost anything.

For example, a weekly all-hands meeting where people can ask their leaders anything – that makes people feel like owners instead of employees. Most companies don’t do that, but it’s free.

So I think the reason most companies end up not doing this stuff is that CEOs don’t ask for it. Also, as professionals, we focus too much on policy and consistency and not enough on freedom and experimentation. It’s important to just say “Yes” to people. We changed the way we cover lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered compensation, because in the US, tax is treated differently for married people and gay marriage was not legal. So an employee said “That’s not fair,” and we said, “You’re right,” and started giving people in those situations extra money to offset the tax.

When it comes to diversity, what is the overarching driver at Google now?

One big thing is unconscious bias and diversity. In the privileged strata we occupy as Fortune 500 and global Fortune 1000 companies, we don’t see a lot of overt sexism, racism or homophobia, but you do see discrimination, and it’s an outcome of people unconsciously being biased against one another.

We gravitate to people like ourselves – that’s how we’ve evolved. When you make people aware of this, they pause to reflect before they talk and act, and they behave differently. Also, a lot of discussion on diversity has put the onus on the people who are in the minority to change their behaviour and act a certain way. But the responsibility should be on those in the majority.

Are you experiencing a shortage in the IT skills you need?

If you look at the scale of hiring in the industry and the volume of graduates, it just doesn’t match. Specifically, demographically, there aren’t enough women, or African Americans, Hispanics and other minority groups. There are just not enough people studying this field to meet the demand over the next ten years. There’s also a huge variation in terms of the quality of educational programmes across different countries. There’s a lot of need for educational improvement in this space.

If you enjoyed the above blog then you might also appreciate these other articles, which also originally appeared in the Hays Journal:

• Making a breakthrough
• A complex relationship
• The fruits of knowledge
• Training at the top
• Why talented Chinese graduates are aiming high in Dubai
• Establishing an effective middle management tier
• Managing external resources