Work Rules!

About the book: Work Rules! takes us through the inner workings of Google, one of the most powerful and successful companies in the world. Bock tells us precisely how Google pulls off this feat while consistently being ranked as the best employer in the world.

About the author: Laszlo Bock is the senior vice president of People Operations at Google. He is responsible for attracting, developing and retaining more than 50,000 “Googlers” based around the world. During his time there, Google has been recognized as an outstanding employer over 100 times, holding a number one spot in rankings in the United States and 16 other countries.

My highlights:
The secret to Google's culture is its mission, transparency and voice. Google's mission is simple and powerful: “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”It's a profound mission because firstly, it gives moral, rather than commercial meaning to employees' work.
Second, the mission has no ceiling.
Another key tenet of Google's successful culture is its transparency.
Hire the best people by looking beyond their degrees and focusing on the right kind of training. There are two ways to have an exceptional employee: hire the best or train the average. As you may already have guessed, Google does the former.
Let your people – with the help of data – run the show. If you really want employees to own their jobs, do as Google does, liquidate status symbols and reduce bureaucratic hierarchy.Google's most senior executives receive the same support, like resources and funding, as new employees and there are only four levels in the hierarchy: individual contributor, manager, director and vice president.
Both your best and worst employees represent opportunities for your company – seize them! If you've worked in an office before, you're probably familiar with the classic pattern of employee performance: a small number of top performers are responsible for most of the successes, and everyone else trails behind them with gradually decreasing performance.The best and worst performers make up the two tails of the performance curve. Both are the minority, while most employees are average performers, sitting in the middle of the curve.Most companies fire poor performers, then hire new employees who require extra training and can't guarantee excellent performance. Even worse, companies also tend not to utilize their top performers.So how does Google use these two tails to its advantage? They place outstanding performers under the microscope and help out those who need to make improvements.Most companies also don't think to study their best performers. This a missed opportunity, as these are the people most familiar with best practices.How, then, do you study the best performers? Harvard professor Boris Groysberg's research shows high performance is dependent on context. That means studying other companies' best practices won't help; you must study your own.
Stop wasting resources on bad training, and use the best teachers within your own company. the best way to master a skill is to split the work into smaller tasks and aim for a specific improvement in one of these small tasks through repetition, feedback and correction.
Training should deliver specific information that people will retain.
First, the basic principles are taught, then consultants roleplay a scenario, and observe and discuss a video of their training. This process is repeated until the desired consultant behavior is achieved.
When Google needs a trainer for sales representatives, it seeks out the best sales manager with the maximum amount of total sales and asks them to instruct lower performing sales representatives.When employees train other employees, not only does it save money, but it also creates a more close-knit community.
Sometimes Google rewards failure and pays people unfairly. Why? Google also learned there are often more effective ways to retain employees: offer experience rather than money.
Their mistake was rewarding with money instead of experiences, like a dinner for two or a team trip to Hawaii. It turned out these special occasions created more memories and brought teams together far better than cash could.

Yep, I'm the kind of person who reads these kinds of books now. In between the novels.