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Becoming a Founder
Choose to think of yourself as a founder. Now act like one.
Google operates from a belief that people are fundamentally good—and treats people like owners instead of machines. Machines do their jobs; owners do whatever is needed to make their companies and teams successful.
Larry Page co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998, and they had ambitions beyond developing a great search engine. They both wanted to create a company where work was meaningful, employees felt free to pursue their passions, and people and their families were cared for.
All successful organizations possess a shared sense not just of what they produce, but of who they are and want to be.
“Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”
Think of your work as a calling, with a mission that matters. Give people slightly more trust, freedom, and authority than you are comfortable giving them. If you’re not nervous, you haven’t given them enough. If you give people freedom, they will amaze you.
“Fun” is in fact the most common word Googlers use to describe our culture. Fun is an important part of Google, creating an opportunity for unguarded exploration and discovery. Yet fun is an outcome of who we are, rather than the defining characteristic. It doesn’t explain how Google works or why we choose to operate the way we do. To understand that, you have to explore the three defining aspects of our culture: mission, transparency, and voice.
A Mission that Matters
Google’s mission is the first cornerstone of our culture. Our mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” This kind of mission gives individuals’ work meaning, because it is a moral rather than a business goal. The most powerful movements in history have had moral motivations, whether they were quests for independence or equal rights.
Transparency
If you believe people are good, you must be unafraid to share information with them Transparency is the second cornerstone of our culture. “Default to open” is a phrase sometimes heard in the open-source technology community. Chris DiBona, leader of Google’s open-source efforts, defines it like this: “Assume that all information can be shared with the team, instead of assuming that no information can be shared. Restricting information should be a conscious effort, and you’d better have a good reason for doing so. In open source, it’s countercultural to hide information.”
Large organizations often have groups doing redundant work without knowing it, wasting resources. Information sharing allows everyone to understand the differences in goals across different groups, avoiding internal rivalry. The case against this approach is made by companies that foster internal rivalry and obscure information across teams.
Voice
All of us want control over our destinies. Voice means giving employees a real say in how the company is run.
Ethan Burris of the University of Texas at Austin found that “Getting employees to voice ideas has long been recognized as a key driver of high-quality decisions and organizational effectiveness. Research on voice has shown positive effects of employees speaking up on decision quality, team performance, and organizational performance.”
Time and again, we’ve let our cultural cornerstones of mission, transparency, and voice anchor us in tackling difficult and divisive issues, debating them, and resolving them into clear strategies: Our culture was shaping our strategy, and not the other way around.
My personal and professional experience is that if you give people freedom, they will surprise, delight, and amaze you.
Lake Wobegon, Where All the New Hires Are Above Average
Given limited resources, invest your HR dollars first in recruiting. Hire only the best by taking your time, hiring only people who are better than you in some meaningful way, and not letting managers make hiring decisions for their own teams.
People approach hiring the way Garrison Keillor describes the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average.” There’s ample data showing that most assessment occurs in the first three to five minutes of an interview (or even more quickly), with the remaining time being spent confirming that bias; that interviewers are subconsciously biased toward people like themselves; and that most interview techniques are worthless.
We have two paths to assembling phenomenal talent. You can find a way to hire the very best, or you can hire average performers and try to turn them into the best. Companies continue to invest substantially more in training than in hiring, according to the Corporate Executive Board. Per employee Training spend: $606.36 while Hiring spend: $456.44. Training takes 18.3% of HR expenses while hiring takes 13.6%. The presence of a huge training budget is not evidence that you’re investing in your people. It’s evidence that you failed to hire the right people to begin with.
At Google, we front-load our people investment. This means the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires. We spend more than twice as much on recruiting, as a percentage of our people budget, as an average company.
You do have to make two big changes to how you think about hiring. The first change is to hire more slowly. Only 10 percent of your applicants (at best!) will be top performers, so you go through far more applicants and interviews. But it’s worth the wait because, as Alan Eustace, our SVP of Knowledge, often says, “A top-notch engineer is worth three hundred times or more than an average engineer.… I’d rather lose an entire incoming class of engineering graduates than one exceptional technologist.”
My simple rule of thumb—and the second big change to make in how you hire—is: “Only hire people who are better than you.” Every person I’ve hired is better than me in some meaningful way.
In addition to being willing to take longer, to wait for someone better than you, you also need managers to give up power when it comes to hiring. I should disclose up front that newly hired managers at Google hate this! Managers want to pick their own teams. But even the best-intentioned managers compromise their standards as searches drag on.
When Google was small and hiring just a few hundred people a year, it was easy and efficient to hire only people with sterling pedigrees: graduates of Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and similar schools who had worked at only the most highly regarded companies. As we grew to need thousands of new employees each year, we learned that many of the best people didn’t go to those schools. We started seeking out candidates who had shown resilience and an ability to overcome hardship. We now prefer to take a bright, hardworking student who graduated from the top of her class at a state school over an average or even above-average Ivy League grad. The pedigree of your college education matters far less than what you have accomplished.
You obviously want to hire the best people, but “best” isn’t defined by a single attribute like intelligence or expertise.
Hiring is the most important people function you have, and most of us aren’t as good at it as we think.
Searching for the Best
Get the best referrals by being excruciatingly specific in describing what you’re looking for. Make recruiting part of everyone’s job. Don’t be afraid to try crazy things to get the attention of the best people.
Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel and a board member, concluded: “What’s most impressive is that your team has built the world’s first self-replicating talent machine. You’ve created a system that not only hires remarkable people, but also scales with the company and gets better with every generation.”
We start with the 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 people who apply for jobs each year, which means we hire about 0.25 percent of the people we consider. As a point of comparison, Harvard University in 2012 extended offers to 6.1 percent of its applicants (2,076 admitted out of 34,303 applicants). It’s a very hard place to get into, but almost twenty-five times easier than getting hired by Google.
If you start a company or team, you know exactly what you are looking for in a new hire: someone just as motivated, clever, interesting, and passionate as you are about the new venture.
In 2010, our analyses revealed that academic performance didn’t predict job performance beyond the first two or three years after college, so we stopped requiring grades and transcripts except from recent graduates. Along the way, we noticed something startling. The very best people aren’t out there looking for work. Great-performing people are happy and being amply rewarded where they are today, so the first step to building a recruiting machine is to turn every employee into a recruiter by soliciting referrals. But you need to temper the natural bias we all have toward our friends by having someone objective make the hiring decision.
Don’t Trust Your Gut
Set a high bar for quality. Find your own candidates. Assess candidates objectively. Give candidates a reason to join.
Research shows that immediate impressions based on a handshake and brief introduction predicted the outcome of a structured employment interview. The problem is, these predictions from the first ten seconds are useless. They create a situation where an interview is spent trying to confirm what we think of someone, rather than truly assessing them. Psychologists call this confirmation bias, “the tendency to search for, interpret, or prioritize information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses.”
Unstructured interviews can explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance. Structured interviews, where candidates are asked a consistent set of questions with clear criteria to assess the quality of responses, improve to 26 percent.
To help interviewers, we’ve developed an internal tool called qDroid, where an interviewer picks the job they are screening for, checks the attributes they want to test, and is emailed an interview guide with questions designed to predict performance for that job. We then score the interview with a consistent rubric. The US Department of Veterans Affairs has a site with almost a hundred sample questions at www.va.gov/pbi/questions.asp. Use them. You’ll do better at hiring immediately.
Remember too that you don’t just want to assess the candidate. You want them to fall in love with you. Really. You want them to have a great experience, have their concerns addressed, and come away feeling like they just had the best day of their lives.
At Google we expect that over a team’s life, different skills will be needed at different times, so various people will need to step into leadership roles, contribute, and—just as important—recede back into the team once the need for their specific skills has passed. We have a strong bias against leaders who champion themselves: people who use “I” far more than “we” and focus exclusively on what they accomplished, rather than how.
In the beginning, Google would average 25 interviews per candidate. Todd Carlisle, now the HR leader for one of our business teams but at the time a PhD analyst on our staffing team, looked at the question of whether having up to twenty-five interviews per candidate was actually helpful or not. He found that four interviews were enough to predict whether or not we should hire someone with 86 percent confidence. Every additional interviewer after the fourth added only 1 percent more predictive power. Making that change shaved our median time to hire to 47 days, compared to 90 to 180 days in the past, and saved employees hundreds of thousands of hours.
We also have a subordinate interview a prospective hire. It sends a strong signal to candidates about Google being nonhierarchical, and it also helps prevent cronyism, where managers hire their old buddies for their new teams. We find that the best candidates leave subordinates feeling inspired or excited to learn from them. Then, we add a “cross-functional interviewer,” someone with little or no connection at all to the group for which the candidate is interviewing, which provides a disinterested assessment: A Googler from a different function is unlikely to have any interest in a particular job being filled but has a strong interest in keeping the quality of hiring high.
If we followed a more traditional process, it’s likely we could hire people in a week or two instead of the six weeks it takes today. So far, the greater speed doesn’t materially improve candidate experience or the rate at which candidates accept our offers, so our focus remains on finding ways to hire people we might overlook rather than on moving faster.
If you’re committed to transforming your team or your organization, hiring better is the single best way to do it.
Let the Inmates Run the Asylum
Eliminate status symbols. Make decisions based on data, not based on managers’ opinions. Find ways for people to shape their work and the company. Expect a lot. Take power from your managers and trust your people to run things.
We are profoundly suspicious of power, and the way managers historically have abused it. “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” When Lord Acton wrote those words in 1887, he recognized that those in authority must be held to even higher standards than the rest.
Each year, when we surveyed Googlers they told us that the promotion process wasn’t fair because of all the favoritism shown to certain offices, projects, and jobs. We recognized that a more effective and long-lasting approach would be simply to share all the promotion data with Googlers. It’s a lot of work, but essential to demonstrate that our processes are unbiased. It would have been easy to keep asserting that the process worked. But far better to bust the myths once and for all with facts, and then make those facts freely available to anyone.
In addition to stripping leaders of the traditional tools of power and relying on facts to make decisions, we give Googlers uncommon freedom in shaping their own work and the company. Google isn’t the first to do so. For over sixty-five years, 3M has offered its employees 15 percent of their time to explore: “A core belief of 3M is that creativity needs freedom. That’s why, since about 1948, we’ve encouraged our employees to spend 15% of their working time on their own projects. To take our resources, to build up a unique team, and to follow their own insights in pursuit of problem-solving.”
Google’s use of 20 percent time has waxed and waned over the years, humming along at about 10 percent utilization when we last measured it. In some ways, the idea of 20 percent time is more important than the reality of it. It operates somewhat outside the lines of formal management oversight, and always will, because the most talented and creative people can’t be forced to work. Ryan Tate of Wired wrote the best summary of it I’ve seen:, “Here is what [20 percent time] is not: A fully fleshed corporate program with its own written policy, detailed guidelines, and manager. No one gets a ‘20 percent time’ packet at orientation, or pushed into distracting themselves with a side project. Twenty percent time has always operated on a somewhat ad hoc basis, providing an outlet for the company’s brightest, most restless, and most persistent employees—for people determined to see an idea through to completion, come hell or high water.”
Be transparent with your people and give them a voice in shaping your team or company. You’ll be stunned by what they accomplish.
Why Everyone Hates Performance Management, and What We Decided to Do About It
Set goals correctly. Gather peer feedback. Use a calibration process to finalize ratings. Split rewards conversations from development conversations. Improve performance by focusing on personal growth instead of ratings and rewards.
Performance management as practiced by most organizations has become a rule-based, bureaucratic process, existing as an end in itself rather than actually shaping performance. Employees hate it. Managers hate it. Even HR departments hate it.
Many companies, like Adobe, are abandoning tranditional performance management systems and processes. “We came to a fairly quick decision that we would abolish the performance review, which meant we would no longer have a one-time-of-the-year formal written review,” says Morris. “What’s more, we would abolish performance rankings and levels in order to move away from people feeling like they were labeled.” In place of the traditional performance review, Adobe introduced The Check-In—an informal system of ongoing, real-time feedback—in the summer of 2012.
In the early 2000s, Google board member John Doerr introduced us to a practice he had seen Intel use with much success: OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results. The results must be specific, measurable, and verifiable; if you achieve all your results, you’ve attained your objective. It’s important to have both a quality and an efficiency measure, because otherwise engineers could just solve for one at the expense of the other. If you’re achieving all your goals, you’re not setting them aggressively enough.
In late 2013, we piloted a new approach with more than 6,200 Googlers, representing almost 15 percent of the company, moving from our engineering-based 41-point rating scale to a 5-point rating scale: needs improvement, consistently meets expectations, exceeds expectations, strongly exceeds expectations, and superb. Similar to the labels we had before, but with fewer discrete ratings. Googlers had worried that the loss of the precision conveyed by a 41-point rating scale would mean that our ratings would become less useful and meaningful. Instead, Googlers’ survey responses revealed what we’d suspected all along: The forty-one points created only an illusion of precision. It resulted in a wider performance distribution. As we shed performance rating categories, managers became more likely to use the extreme ends of the rating system.
When we stopped offering guidance about what the right rating distribution ought to be, we saw four distinct rating patterns emerge that better reflected the actual performance characteristics of different teams and individuals. After much debate and consternation, we’d replaced a rating system that was imprecise and wasteful with a brand-new one that was simpler, more accurate, and required the same amount of time to calibrate ratings. Before this draft rating becomes final, groups of managers sit down together and review all of their employees’ draft ratings together in a process we call calibration. A manager’s assessments are compared to those of managers leading similar teams, and they review their employees collectively: A group of five to ten managers meet and project on a wall their fifty to a thousand employees, discuss individuals, and agree on a fair rating. This allows us to remove the pressure managers may feel from employees to inflate ratings. Calibration diminishes bias by forcing managers to justify their decisions to one another. It also increases perceptions of fairness among employees.
When lots of other companies are abandoning ratings altogether, why do we stick with the system? I think it’s about fairness. Ratings are tools, simplifying devices to help managers make decisions about pay and promotion.
Promotion decisions, like rating decisions, are made by committees. They review people who are up for promotion and calibrate them against promoted people from prior years and well-defined standards, to ensure fairness. Googlers working in engineering or product management can nominate themselves for promotion.
Interestingly enough, we found that women are less likely to nominate themselves for promotion, but that when they do, they are promoted at slightly higher rates than men. Girls tend to wait to be certain, even though they are right as often as boys, if not more often. We also found that with a small nudge (an email from Alan Eustace to all technical Googlers describing this finding), women then nominate themselves in the same proportion as men.
If you are not promoted, the committee provides feedback on what to do to improve your chances next time.
The Two Tails
The biggest opportunities lie in your absolute worst and best employees. Help those in need. Put your best people under a microscope. Use surveys and checklists to find the truth and nudge people to improve. Set a personal example by sharing and acting on your own feedback.
Most organizations undervalue and underreward their best people, without even knowing they are doing it. What most organizations miss is that people in the bottom tail represent the biggest opportunity to improve performance in your company. Our goal is to tell every person in the bottom 5 percent that they are in that group. That is not a fun conversation to have. But it’s made easier by the message we give these people: “You are in the bottom 5 percent of performers across all of Google. I know that doesn’t feel good. The reason I’m telling you this is that I want to help you grow and get better.”
A colleague once described it as “compassionate pragmatism.” Poor performance is rarely because the person is incompetent or a bad person. It’s typically a result of a gap in skill (which is either fixable or not) or will (where the person is not motivated to do the work). This cycle of investing in the bottom tail of the distribution means your teams improve… a lot. People either improve dramatically or they leave and succeed elsewhere.
If you believe people are fundamentally good and worthy of trust, you must be honest and transparent with them. That includes telling them when they are lagging behind in their performance. Most people who are performing poorly know it and want to get better. It’s important to give them that chance.
We recognized the importance of front-line managers and took a very simple approach to finding out what the best and worst managers did differently: We asked them. Research showed eight common attributes shared by high-scoring managers and not exhibited by low-scoring managers:
- Be a good coach.
- Empower the team and do not micromanage.
- Express interest/concern for team members’ success and personal well-being.
- Be very productive/results-oriented.
- Be a good communicator—listen and share information.
- Help the team with career development.
- Have a clear vision/strategy for the team.
- Have important technical skills that help advise the team.
Unexpectedly, we found that technical expertise was actually the least important of the eight behaviors across great managers. Make no mistake, it is essential. An engineering manager who can’t code is not going to be able to lead a team at Google. But of the behaviors that differentiated the very best, technical input made the smallest difference to teams.
For Google, we have seen a steady improvement in manager quality. From 2010 to 2012, the average score of managers at Google has improved to 88 percent favorable from 83 percent. Even our lowest-performing managers have gotten better, improving to 77 percent favorable from 70 percent. And since we know that manager quality drives performance, retention, and happiness, it means the company will perform better over time.
Building a Learning Institution
Your best teachers already work for you.… Let them teach! Engage in deliberate practice: Break lessons down into small, digestible pieces with clear feedback and do them again and again. Have your best people teach. Invest only in courses that you can prove change people’s behavior.
Most corporate learning is insufficiently targeted, delivered by the wrong people, and measured incorrectly. It is generally far better to learn from people who are doing the work today, who can answer deeper questions and draw on current, real-life examples. They understand your context better, they are always available to provide immediate feedback, and they are mostly free.
There’s a deeper reason to have employee-teachers. Giving employees the opportunity to teach gives them purpose. Even if they don’t find meaning in their regular jobs, passing on knowledge is both inspiring and inspirational. A learning organization starts with a recognition that all of us want to grow and to help others grow. Yet in many organizations, employees are taught and professionals do the teaching. Why not let people do both?
Pay Unfairly
Swallow hard and pay unfairly. Have wide variations in pay that reflect the power law distribution of performance. Celebrate accomplishment, not compensation. Make it easy to spread the love. Reward thoughtful failure.
As a management team we have probably spent more time thinking through compensation issues than any other people issue, save recruiting. Recruiting, you’ll recall, always comes first, because if you’re hiring people who are better than yourself, most other people issues tend to sort themselves out.
In addition to having all the right environmental factors and intrinsic rewards in place (our mission, a focus on transparency, a strong Googler voice in how the company operated, freedom to explore and fail and learn, physical spaces that facilitated collaboration), we fine-tuned the extrinsic rewards as well. It came down to four principles: Pay unfairly. Celebrate accomplishment, not compensation. Make it easy to spread the love. Reward thoughtful failure.
Economist Edward Lazear of Stanford University has argued that people are on average underpaid relative to their contribution early in their careers, and overpaid later in their careers. Internal pay systems don’t move quickly enough or offer enough flexibility to pay the best people what they are actually worth.
Bill Gates took a more aggressive view, purportedly saying, “A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.” The range of values for software engineers may be broader than for other jobs, but while a great accountant might not be worth a hundred average accountants, he’s surely worth more than three or four of them!
Most performers are below average: 66 percent of researchers are below average in the number of published articles. 84 percent of Emmy-nominated actors are below average in total number of nominations. 68 percent of US representatives are below average in the number of terms they have served. 71 percent of NBA players are below average in the number of points scored. Note that being below average isn’t bad. It’s just the math. As the data show, exceptional contributors perform at a level so far above that of most, that they are able to pull the average up well past the median.
O’Boyle and Aguinis break it down: “Ten percent of productivity comes from the top percentile and 26% of output derives from the top 5% of workers.” In other words, they found that the top 1 percent of workers generated ten times the average output, and the top 5 percent more than four times the average. If the best performer is generating ten times as much impact as an average performer, they shouldn’t necessarily get ten times the reward, but I’d wager they should get at least five times the reward.
The allocation of extreme awards must be just. If you can’t explain to employees the basis for such a wide range of awards, and can’t give them specific ways to improve their own performance to these superb levels, you will breed a culture of jealousy and resentment. Maybe that’s why most companies don’t bother. It’s hard work to have pay ranges where someone can make two or even ten times more than someone else.
Enlisting employees in providing rewards is important too. Trusting people to do the right thing generally results in them doing the right thing. Allowing people to reward one another facilitates a culture of recognition and service, and is a way to show employees that they should be thinking like owners rather than serfs. Trust your people enough to let them recognize each other. It may be kudos and nice words, or it may be small awards.
The Best Things in Life Are Free (or Almost Free)
Most of Google’s people programs can be duplicated by anyone. Make life easier for employees. Find ways to say yes. The bad stuff in life happens rarely… be there for your people when it does.
We use our people programs to achieve three goals: efficiency, community, and innovation. Every one of our programs exists to further at least one of these goals, and often more than one.
Googlers work hard, and nothing is more dispiriting than finishing a grueling week of work and coming home to time-consuming, mundane chores. So we offer on-site services to make life easier. A sense of community helps people do their best work just as surely as increasing efficiency does by sweeping away minor chores and distractions. As we’ve grown, we’ve fought to maintain the sense of community we had when we were just a handful of people, and we’ve expanded our definition of community to include Googlers’ children, spouses, partners, parents, and even grandparents.
The Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are worth special mention. Today we have more than twenty, many of which enjoy global membership. At Google all these groups come together in various ways. Anyone can join any ERG. In some cases there is opportunity cost (time spent on an ERG is time away from “work”), but as a practical matter that’s more than returned in improved retention and happiness. When people gather together in unexpected ways, it inevitably spurs innovation—the third goal driving our programs.
The smallest investments of care and resources can have tremendous results.
Nudge… a Lot
Recognize the difference between what is and what ought to be. Run lots of small experiments. Nudge, don’t shove. Small signals can cause large changes in behavior.
What is our guiding principle? Nudges aren’t shoves. Even the gentlest of reminders can make a difference. A nudge doesn’t have to be expensive or elaborate. It only needs to be timely, relevant, and simple to put into action.
We created a quarterly survey of just two questions: “In the last quarter, this person helped me when I reached out to him/her”; and “In the last quarter, this person involved me when I could have been helpful to, or was impacted by, his/her team’s work.” Every member of the team rated each other member, and the anonymous ranking and results were shared with everyone. People knew where they fell in the ranking, but didn’t know where anyone else fell. The two most obstreperous people, of course, ranked near the bottom, and were dismayed by it. Without any further intervention, they worked to improve the quality of their collaboration. Remarkably, in eight quarters the team went from 70 percent favorable on these questions to 90 percent.
It turns out checklists really do work, even when the list is almost patronizingly simple. You have to send the checklist at the right time, make it meaningful, and make it easy to act on.
It’s Not All Rainbows and Unicorns
Google’s biggest people mistakes and what you can do to avoid them. Admit your mistake. Be transparent about it. Take counsel from all directions. Fix whatever broke. Find the moral in the mistake, and teach it.
At Google, we talk about values. A lot. And we’re daily confronted with new situations that test those values. We are held accountable by employees, our users, our partners, and the world.
The key to balancing individual freedom with overall direction is to be transparent. People need to understand the rationales behind each action that might otherwise be viewed as a step down the slippery slope that leads you away from your values.
What You Can Do Starting Tomorrow
Ten steps to transform your team and your workplace
- Give your work meaning. As a manager, your job is to help your people find that meaning.
- Trust your people. Be transparent and honest with your people, and give them a voice in how things work.
- Hire only people who are better than you. Organizations often act as if filling jobs quickly is more important than filling jobs with the best people. It is an error ever to compromise on hiring quality. A bad hire is toxic, not only destroying their own performance, but also dragging down the performance, morale, and energy of those around them. Hire by committee, set objective standards in advance, never compromise, and periodically check if your new hires are better than your old ones. Proof that you are hiring well is that nine out of ten new hires are better than you are.
- Don’t confuse development with managing performance
- Focus on the two tails. The more specific you can be in slicing expertise, the easier it will be to study your stars and discern why they are more successful than others. And then use them not just as exemplars for others by building checklists around what they do, but also as teachers. One of the best ways to learn a skill is to teach it.
- Be frugal and generous. Most things we do for our people cost nothing.
- Pay unfairly. Ninety percent or more of the value on your teams comes from the top 10 percent. As a result, your best people are worth far more than your average people.
- The single idea in this book with the most potential to tangibly improve the rest of your life is to change how much of each paycheck you save. People tend not to change their savings rate. Figure out what percent of your income you save today, and then save a little bit more from now on. It is never easy. It is always worth it.
- Manage the rising expectations.
- Enjoy! And then go back to No. 1 and start again.
Building the World’s First People Operations Team
The blueprint for a new kind of HR
We’ve built People Operations around four underlying principles: Strive for nirvana. Use data to predict and shape the future. Improve relentlessly. Field an unconventional team.
Strive for nirvana
We must deliver the basics, flawlessly, every time. No errors in offer letters or bonuses, every job filled on time with a great candidate, smooth and fair promotion processes, speedy resolution of employee concerns, and so on. This level of consistent, high quality in all our operations was how we would earn the right to do more. Whatever your own aspirations may be, this is the starting point. Otherwise, failure to deliver the basics even once in a while will cause your business to withhold trust and authority when you want to take on more.
Use data to predict and shape the future.
In most HR departments, there’s a bias toward consistency as a mechanism to ensure fairness. People are happy when you give them what they ask for. People are delighted when you anticipate what they didn’t think to ask for. The analytics function has evolved from description to analysis and insight to prediction…
Improve relentlessly
In each of the past five years we’ve improved productivity, as measured by the number of People Operations staff supporting every thousand Googlers, by 6 percent. That may not seem like much, but it means that we are now delivering more services at higher quality with 73 percent of the cost structure we had five years ago on a per-Googler basis. We’ve accomplished this without outsourcing or increasing the use of consultants or vendors. In fact, we’ve brought more services in-house, which has two virtues. First, it’s often cheaper, especially for areas like recruiting and training. Second, there’s tremendously useful information to be gleaned by managing processes in-house.
Like “HR that just works,” running your HR department or team with the same standards of clear objectives, continuous improvement, and reliability that are used in the rest of your company will make your organization credible and trusted.
Field an unconventional team
Microsoft’s head of HR, Lisa Brummel, grew up in product management, eBay’s Beth Axelrod was a consultant, and Palantir’s Michael Lopp was an engineer. CEOs want a business orientation and analytical skill set that is harder to find in HR than it ought to be.
No more than one-third of our hires in People Operations come from traditional HR backgrounds. The core HR expertise they bring is irreplaceable. One-third of our hires are recruited from consulting, and specifically from top-tier strategy consultancies, not HR consultancies. The final third of hires are deeply analytic, holding at least a master’s degree in analytical fields ranging from organizational psychology to physics.
By applying our three-thirds model, we recruit a portfolio of capabilities: HR people teach us about influencing and recognizing patterns in people and organizations; the consultants improve our understanding of the business and the level of our problem solving; the analytics people raise the quality of everything we do.
Many organizations are moving away from the traditional Human Resources terminology. People can use whatever names they want. But don’t miss an opportunity to build something different, something perhaps better. More than anything, what unites us in People Operations is a vision that work doesn’t need to be miserable. That it can be ennobling and energizing and exciting. This is what drives us.
May Google’s insights serve you well, as you shoot for the stars!