Google says: “Getting the most out of knowledge workers will be the key to business success for the next quarter century.” I must admit, I always thought the Google camp sounded like such a great place to work, I was almost skeptical at the validity of their policies. I’ve been around long enough now to witness and know the reasons why people hate where they work, and often why they leave to work somewhere else: belittlement, lies, micromanagement, condescension, humiliation, arrogorance - and of course lack of appreciation. Even the best work environments suffer from these problems at varying degrees. I have 2 things to go over here: first, the ten golden rules of Google. This is good reading, especially if you manage people. Second, a little help on how to survive- because the rest of us all work at one place: not Google.

At Google, we seek that advantage. The ongoing debate about whether big corporations are mismanaging knowledge workers is one we take very seriously, because those who don’t get it right will be gone. We’ve drawn on good ideas we’ve seen elsewhere and come up with a few of our own. What follows are seven key principles we use to make knowledge workers most effective. As in most technology companies, many of our employees are engineers, so we will focus on that particular group, but many of the policies apply to all sorts of knowledge workers.

I really hope the people who need to read this are reading this: this is the kinda crap I dream upper management would get in bed with.

The Ten Golden Rules of Google

• Hire by committee. Virtually every person who interviews at Google talks to at least half-a-dozen interviewers, drawn from both management and potential colleagues. Everyone’s opinion counts, making the hiring process more fair and pushing standards higher. Yes, it takes longer, but we think it’s worth it. If you hire great people and involve them intensively in the hiring process, you’ll get more great people. We started building this positive feedback loop when the company was founded, and it has had a huge payoff.
• Cater to their every need. As Drucker says, the goal is to “strip away everything that gets in their way.” We provide a standard package of fringe benefits, but on top of that are first-class dining facilities, gyms, laundry rooms, massage rooms, haircuts, carwashes, dry cleaning, commuting buses—just about anything a hardworking engineer might want. Let’s face it: programmers want to program, they don’t want to do their laundry. So we make it easy for them to do both.
• Pack them in. Almost every project at Google is a team project, and teams have to communicate. The best way to make communication easy is to put team members within a few feet of each other. The result is that virtually everyone at Google shares an office. This way, when a programmer needs to confer with a colleague, there is immediate access: no telephone tag, no e-mail delay, no waiting for a reply. Of course, there are many conference rooms that people can use for detailed discussion so that they don’t disturb their office mates. Even the CEO shared an office at Google for several months after he arrived. Sitting next to a knowledgeable employee was an incredibly effective educational experience.
• Make coordination easy. Because all members of a team are within a few feet of one another, it is relatively easy to coordinate projects. In addition to physical proximity, each Googler e-mails a snippet once a week to his work group describing what he has done in the last week. This gives everyone an easy way to track what everyone else is up to, making it much easier to monitor progress and synchronize work flow.
• Eat your own dog food. Google workers use the company’s tools intensively. The most obvious tool is the Web, with an internal Web page for virtually every project and every task. They are all indexed and available to project participants on an as-needed basis. We also make extensive use of other information-management tools, some of which are eventually rolled out as products. For example, one of the reasons for Gmail’s success is that it was beta tested within the company for many months. The use of e-mail is critical within the organization, so Gmail had to be tuned to satisfy the needs of some of our most demanding customers—our knowledge workers.
• Encourage creativity. Google engineers can spend up to 20 percent of their time on a project of their choice. There is, of course, an approval process and some oversight, but basically we want to allow creative people to be creative. One of our not-so-secret weapons is our ideas mailing list: a companywide suggestion box where people can post ideas ranging from parking procedures to the next killer app. The software allows for everyone to comment on and rate ideas, permitting the best ideas to percolate to the top.
• Strive to reach consensus. Modern corporate mythology has the unique decision maker as hero. We adhere to the view that the “many are smarter than the few,” and solicit a broad base of views before reaching any decision. At Google, the role of the manager is that of an aggregator of viewpoints, not the dictator of decisions. Building a consensus sometimes takes longer, but always produces a more committed team and better decisions
• Don’t be evil. Much has been written about Google’s slogan, but we really try to live by it, particularly in the ranks of management. As in every organization, people are passionate about their views. But nobody throws chairs at Google, unlike management practices used at some other well-known technology companies. We foster to create an atmosphere of tolerance and respect, not a company full of yes men.
• Data drive decisions. At Google, almost every decision is based on quantitative analysis. We’ve built systems to manage information, not only on the Internet at large, but also internally. We have dozens of analysts who plow through the data, analyze performance metrics and plot trends to keep us as up to date as possible. We have a raft of online “dashboards” for every business we work in that provide up-to-the-minute snapshots of where we are.
• Communicate effectively. Every Friday we have an all-hands assembly with announcements, introductions and questions and answers. (Oh, yes, and some food and drink.) This allows management to stay in touch with what our knowledge workers are thinking and vice versa. Google has remarkably broad dissemination of information within the organization and remarkably few serious leaks. Contrary to what some might think, we believe it is the first fact that causes the second: a trusted work force is a loyal work force.

… I know, I know– it’s a dream, like I said. Personally, I think I’ve been lucky. For the most part, I can’t say too many negative things about how I’ve been managed; in fact, my direct management now is probably the best I’ve ever had. I’m sticking this down here, because I’m not ass kissing or trying to draw attention to it- I consider myself lucky, and there are still problems with my organization I think the Google rules would fix. Nevertheless…

What can you do? What are ways to handle the management you deal with… when they are INSANE!?? Getting those 10 golden rules is not going to happen over night- if at all. If you are reading this with the hope that you can get your boss to change, you can stop reading right now. The likelihood that your boss is going to change behavior that has become entrenched over the last 30 years is indeed remote. Any tricks I can offer you are in the category of boss management, not boss modification.

Another factor to take into account is how much you care about the job or the boss. There is no point engaging in an elaborate strategy to foil your boss when you could just as easily find a better job with a more agreeable boss. Put simply, is the personal price that you will inevitably pay worth the somewhat modest gains that you might achieve?

It is helpful to realize that none of the boss’s behavior is personal. Crazy bosses tend to abuse whoever is in their line of fire. Similarly, when you manage your boss, it isn’t personal. It’s just a survival strategy to prevent you from going the same way as your boss.

Here are some strategies to deal with a boss who seems to be on your case, to help make your personal work environment a little better:

1. CC other people on emails you send to your boss, and provide a plausible reason why the other person should also receive the email. This ensures that other people can vouch for you if your boss later accuses you of being out of line.
2. Ask your boss to make decisions in group settings because it is less likely she will reverse decisions stated publicly. it also ensures that other people can confirm that the decision was actually made.
3. Ask your boss for instructions in writing, and if she won’t give it to you take copious notes, and email it to her under the guise of checking that you have correctly understood the instructions.
4. Make sure that you sometimes mention to a supervisor or another boss a “specific situation that occurred with my boss last week.” A related strategy is to seek advice from a supervisor about a problem you are having with your boss. These strategies enable others to be aware of what is going on even if they are not willing to take action.
5. Try to build in buffers between you and your boss. These are people that you report to instead of your boss so that they can take the heat when it is too hot to bear alone.

In short, the more protections you have against the craziness, the less likely you are to get hurt.

Filed under: Society