A few years ago, Google’s human resources department noticed
a problem: A lot of women were leaving the company. Like the majority
of Silicon Valley software firms, Google is staffed mostly by men, and
executives have long made it a priority to increase the number of female
employees. But the fact that women were leaving Google wasn’t just a
gender equity problem—it was affecting the bottom line. Unlike in most
sectors of the economy, the market for top-notch tech employees is
stretched incredibly thin. Google fights for potential workers with
Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and hordes of startups, so every
employee’s departure triggers a costly, time-consuming recruiting
process.
Then there was the happiness problem. Google monitors its
employees’ well-being to a degree that can seem absurd to those who work
outside Mountain View. The attrition rate among women suggested there
might be something amiss in the company’s happiness machine. And if
there’s any sign that joy among Googlers is on the wane, it’s the Google
HR department’s mission to figure out why and how to fix it.
Google calls its HR department People Operations,
though most people in the firm shorten it to POPS. The group is headed
by Laszlo Bock, a trim, soft-spoken 40-year-old who came to Google six
years ago. Bock says that when POPS looked into Google’s woman problem,
it found it was really a new mother problem: Women who had recently
given birth were leaving at twice Google’s average departure rate. At
the time, Google offered an industry-standard maternity leave plan.
After a woman gave birth, she got 12 weeks of paid time off. For all
other new parents in its California offices, but not for its workers
outside the state, the company offered seven paid weeks of leave.
So in 2007, Bock changed the plan. New mothers would now get five
months off at full pay and full benefits, and they were allowed to split
up that time however they wished, including taking some of that time
off just before their due date. If she likes, a new mother can take a
couple months off after birth, return part time for a while, and then
take the balance of her time off when her baby is older. Plus, Google
began offering the seven weeks of new-parent leave to all its workers
around the world.
Google’s lavish maternity and paternity leave plans probably don’t
surprise you. The company’s swank perks—free gourmet food, on-site
laundry, Wi-Fi commuting shuttles—are legendary in the corporate world,
and they’ve driven a culture of ever-increasing luxuries for tech
workers. This week, for the fourth consecutive year, Google was named
the best company to work for by Fortune magazine; Microsoft was No. 75, while Apple, Amazon, and Facebook didn’t even make the list.
At times Google’s largesse can sound excessive—noble but wasteful from a bottom-line perspective. In August, for example, Forbes disclosed
one previously unannounced Google perk—when an employee dies, the
company pays his spouse or domestic partner half of his salary for a
decade. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that Google doles out such
perks just to be nice. POPS rigorously monitors a slew of data about
how employees respond to benefits, and it rarely throws money away. The
five-month maternity leave plan, for instance, was a winner for the
company. After it went into place, Google’s attrition rate for new
mothers dropped down to the average rate for the rest of the firm. “A 50
percent reduction—it was enormous!” Bock says. What’s more,
happiness—as measured by Googlegeist, a lengthy annual survey of
employees—rose as well. Best of all for the company, the new leave
policy was cost-effective. Bock says that if you factor in the savings
in recruitment costs, granting mothers five months of leave doesn’t cost
Google any more money.
The change in maternity leave exemplifies how POPS has helped Google
become the country’s best employer. Under Bock, Google’s HR department
functions more like a rigorous science lab than the pesky hall monitor
most of us picture when we think of HR. At the heart of POPS is a
sophisticated employee-data tracking program, an effort to gain
empirical certainty about every aspect of Google’s workers’ lives—not
just the right level of pay and benefits but also such trivial-sounding
details as the optimal size and shape of the cafeteria tables and the
length of the lunch lines.
In the last couple years, Google has even hired social scientists to
study the organization. The scientists—part of a group known as the
PiLab, short for People & Innovation Lab—run dozens of experiments
on employees in an effort to answer questions about the best way to
manage a large firm. How often should you remind people to contribute to
their 401(k)s, and what tone should you use? Do successful middle
managers have certain skills in common—and can you teach those skills to
unsuccessful managers? Or, for that matter, do managers even matter—can
you organize a company without them? And say you want to give someone a
raise—how should you do it in a way that maximizes his happiness?
Should you give him a cash bonus? Stock? A raise? More time off?
Some of Google’s HR lessons won’t apply to other companies. The
search company has been insanely profitable for much of its history, and
many of its problems are atypical. Google has the luxury of worrying
about the best way to give people more money instead of, say, the ideal
manner in which to lay them off. Still, a few of POPS’ findings—like how
to train a better corps of managers and how to improve interviews—will
apply to most other firms. And among the tech giants—many of which are
also quite profitable and face some of the same problems Google does—the
search company is alone in trying to answer its HR questions
scientifically. “We make thousands of people decisions every day—who we
should hire, how much we should pay them, who we should promote, who we
should let go of,” says Prasad Setty, who heads POPS’ “people analytics”
group. “What we try to do is bring the same level of rigor to people
decisions that we do to engineering decisions. Our mission is to have all people decisions be informed by data.”
This effort to bring rigor to HR grew out of Google’s larger culture.
Most of its workers are engineers, the kind of people who demand data
to get them to change their ways. One of the earliest examples of this
was POPS’ effort to streamline Google’s hiring process. In its first few
years, Google became infamous in the Valley for asking prospective
candidates to endure lots and lots of interviews. “The intuition was
that staffing was everything for Google, so everyone at the firm should
be able to interview a candidate,” Bock says.
The people in HR were skeptical of this approach; not only was the
interview process slowing down hiring, it was also harming Google’s
reputation among prospective candidates. So Todd Carlisle, who is now
Google’s director of staffing, did a study to find the optimal number of
times a candidate should be interviewed. He analyzed dozens of Google’s
hiring decisions, keeping track of the scores that each interviewer had
given a candidate after an interview. After crunching the data,
Carlisle found that the optimal interview rate—the number of interviews
after which the candidate’s average score would converge on his final
score—was four. “After four interviews,” Carlisle says, “you get
diminishing returns.” Presented with this data, Google’s army of
engineers was convinced. Interview times shrunk, and Google’s hiring
sped up.
Google’s HR department has uncovered many such nuggets of optimal organizational behavior. Among the biggest finding is that middle managers matter,
which overturned Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s onetime
presumption that you could run a company in which nobody was the boss of
anyone else. POPS determined this by looking at scores the firm’s
managers received from two-sided feedback surveys, taking into account
both what a manager’s underlings and a manager’s manager thinks
about his work. When analysts compared the highest- and
lowest-performing managers, they found a stark difference—the best
managers had lower attrition rates (meaning fewer people left their
teams), and their teams were much more productive across a range of
criteria.
“We were able to show them that those pointy-headed Dilbert
caricatures actually make a difference to their jobs,” says
Jennifer Kurkoski, a PiLab analyst. More importantly, the analysts were
able to use their findings to make bad managers better. After scouring
the feedback that successful managers got from their teams, the
researchers boiled it all down to eight bullet points. They sound obvious and overly vague—“A
high-scoring manager is a good coach,” “a good communicator,” “doesn’t
micromanage”—but the bullet points worked: When POPS spread these truths
through the organization and targeted unsuccessful managers for
coaching, they found that the company’s managerial ranks improved. As a
result of the coaching, Google managers’ collective feedback scores have
improved every year since 2009.
Another major POPS finding concerned how to give an employee more
money. In 2010, buffeted by the recession and increasing competition
from other companies (especially Facebook), then-CEO Eric Schmidt
decided to give all Googlers a raise. It was the job of POPS to
determine the best way to offer that increase. The group ran a “conjoint
survey” in which it asked employees to choose the best among many
competing pay options. For instance, would you rather have $1,000 more
in salary or $2,000 as a bonus?
“What we found was that they valued base pay above all,” Setty says.
“When we offered a bonus of X, they valued that at what it costs us. But
if you give someone a dollar in base pay, they value it at more than a
dollar because of the long-term certainty.” In the fall of 2010, Schmidt
announced that all Google employees would get a 10 percent salary
increase. Setty says Googlers were overjoyed—many people cite that
announcement as their single happiest moment at the firm, and
Googlegeist numbers that year went through the roof. Attrition to
competing companies also declined.
Then there are the smaller findings: To nudge someone to contribute
to his 401(k), POPS found that it’s best if you send him many reminders
and that it’s better if your reminders call for “aggressive” savings
goals. If you implore an employee to contribute $8,000 to his retirement
rather than, say, $2,000, he’ll tend to save more—even if he can’t
afford $8,000, he’ll put in more than he would have if you’d suggested
$2,000. As for the cafeterias, researchers found that the ideal lunch
line should be about three or four minutes long—that’s short enough that
people don’t waste time but long enough that they can meet new people.
The tables should be long, so workers who don’t know each other are
forced to chat. And, after running an experiment, Google found that
stocking cafeterias with 8-inch plates alongside 12-inch plates
encouraged people to eat smaller, healthier portions.
Bock’s ultimate goal is to use Google’s experience to answer some big
questions about the workplace: Are leaders born or made? Are teams
better than individuals at getting things done? Can individuals sustain
high performance over their lifetimes? POPS isn’t close to being able to
answer those questions right now, but Bock argues that Google can
eventually shed light on some of them. “We have the luxury of being a
data-driven company with people with the analytic chops who can do the
math,” he says. “We also have a large enough scale so that when we run
experiments, they’re statistically valid.”
In time, Bock argues, Google’s findings—which it often shares with
other HR professionals—may improve all our jobs. “You spend more time
working than doing anything else,” he says. “If you work eight or 10
hours a day, it’s more time than you spend sleeping, more time than you
spend with your spouse. When you add it up it gets really depressing.
You like your job, but for all time it should be— and it could
be—something more. So why isn’t it?”
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