“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.”
“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.”
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