Author: Laszlo Bock
Year of Publish: 2015
About: People Practices of Google that made it the best employer.
Why I recommend it to every young HR:
The current layoffs aside, Google has been a pioneer of some of the best #peoplepractices the world has seen. It is no mean feat to get consistently ranked as the Best Place to Work by its employees for years together.
Also, during your career, you’re bound to get into a conversation with a senior stakeholder on how can you make the current #workplace like Google. At that time, you need to know the Google, that’s beyond its famous bean bags or spas in office.
Here are some of my most favourite lines from the book:
– The most talented people on the planet want an aspiration that is also inspiring. The challenge for leaders is to craft such a goal.
– The benefit of so much openness is that everyone in the company knows what’s happening. That may sound trivial but it’s not.
– Hiring is the single most important people activity in any organization.
-If all companies are recruiting the same way, why would any of them get a different outcome than their competitors?
– The predictions from the first ten seconds of an interview are useless. Equally worthless are the case interviews & brain teasers used by some organizations.
– We take as much power away from Managers as we can. Less formal authority they have, the fewer the carrots & sticks.
– Almost every major program we roll out is first tested with a sub-group.
– What managers miss is every time they give up a little control, it creates a wonderful opportunity for their team to step up.
– Performance Mgt has become a rule-based bureaucratic process, existing as an end it itself rather than actually shaping performance. Everyone hates it.
– Performance evaluation & people development conversations needs to happen separately.
– Making the feedback templates more specific reduced the time spent on writing reviews by 27%.
– the 70-20-10 learning framework used by most learning professionals doesn’t work.
– Entitlement, the creeping belief that just because you receive something you deserve it, is another risk in our approach.
Do come back & share your learnings from the book, once you’ve read.
Stay tuned for more on #hr & #communicationskills.