Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2015. Bock is described as Google’s senior vice president of people operations; he left Google in 2016. The figure that more than a third of Google’s first 100 employees still work there is from 2015.
Laszlo Bock is Google’s senior vice president of people operations and the author of Work Rules!, a book in which he offers ideas for applying the culture of one of the most revolutionary companies to change the way people are managed and teams are led.
Laszlo starts from one premise: we spend more time at work than anywhere else, so it makes no sense for work to become a demotivating or dehumanising experience.
For him, employees are any company’s most valuable asset, and losing talented employees can be truly expensive. He even talks about taking power away from managers and giving it to employees, a view typical of Google’s culture. Google is a company that says its success comes from giving power to its users, or at least that is how Jeff Jarvis explained it in his book What Would Google Do?
The problem many large companies face with their best employees is that they simply don’t know how to keep them, and money doesn’t seem to be enough of an incentive to make them stay.
“People don’t stay for the money,” Laszlo said in an interview with Bloomberg, noting that more than a third of Google’s first 100 employees still work at the company even though they became rich thanks to its stock market flotation.
See also: 6 tips for acing a job interview, from Google’s director of operations
According to Laszlo, top talent stays at a company for only these reasons:
1. The quality of the people they work with
2. The feeling that the work they do is meaningful
Talented people want to do more than make money. They want to do something meaningful, to have an impact, a purpose. Google, along with other companies, really is changing the world, and when employees feel they are taking part in meaningful change, they become much more productive.
When people talk about the perks Google employees enjoy, they usually mention free meals, being able to come to work in a tracksuit, games rooms, massages, on-site dry cleaning… But Laszlo says that when someone wants to leave the company, they don’t look at those kinds of things, just as they don’t look at the money.
What they would feel sad about is leaving a good team of people and professionals they have worked with, and walking away from a project that aims to change the world.
Steve Jobs said something similar when he set out to bring in the executive from Pepsi, asking him: “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
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