Learn How to Run Employee Performance Reviews Like Google: Mission, Transparency, and Voice

As of March 31, 2024, Google had 180,895 employees.

Performance management plays a pivotal role in employee satisfaction and needs to be super structured, especially when the number of employees is so high.

Being a tech giant, engineering and ranking algorithms are deeply ingrained in Google’s DNA. The tech company has an internal performance management system, which follows an airtight ranking algorithm. This ranking system rates employees as average, top, and below-par performers and zooms in on the top-performing and underperforming employees.

Google is a great inspiration for HR leadership and people management best practices. They’ve already spent tons of money and time figuring out what works best. And they’ve even talked about it openly, so you can use their practices as a benchmark and potentially adopt some of their successful strategies.

So, what lessons can we learn from Google’s stellar people management strategies?

Google’s people philosophy: trust, meaningful work, and algorithms

Google is a perfect example of how founders can play a pivotal role in shaping company culture. To understand the culture at Google, you must understand the founders’ vision.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google’s legendary founders) wanted to organize information and make it available to everyone without discrimination. Their top-down approach reinstates that company culture can thrive when people are given adequate freedom and trusted to do good. In doing so, everyone naturally performs better and has much higher accountability. Their philosophy is deceptively simple: Want better from your employees? Trust them more!

Bock details the practices that led to Google becoming a benchmark in human resources, or as they like to call it, People Operations:

The best part about the People Operations function at Google is that many of their best practices are forever evolving. Google constantly learns from data collected from its unique talent pool, all of whom are the best-in-class for each function: sales, product, engineering, partnerships, and more.

Some of the gold-standard practices across Google, retained to this date, are:

1. Hiring the 1% talent pool across functions. Google’s People Operations carefully sources, vets, and handpicks the best-in-class to hire a “great fit eventually,” making subsequent performance and appraisal discussions that much easier. Google interviews are the toughest to crack. They have an acceptance rate of 0.2%
2. Rewarding, promoting, and recognizing talent based purely on merit
3. Investing in employees all year round through different skill-based and executive coaching forms
4. Not giving up on the bottom-performing 5% of employees

How does Google run performance reviews?

The performance reviews at Google aim at motivating the underperformers and encouraging the high performers to keep up their excellent work. There are multiple performance check-ins at Google across all quarters.

Here are the key elements of their review system:

1. Quarterly OKRs

At the beginning of each quarter, Google’s top executives set OKRs for the company. OKRs help teams channel their efforts in the right direction.

Releasing these OKRs ensures that every employee sets their OKRs is in sync with Google’s larger objectives, so everyone at Google pushes themselves towards a shared larger goal.

OKRs are visible to everyone in the company on the internal website, and leaders hold 1-on-1s at their preferred frequency to discuss them.

2. Monthly check-ins

Managers regularly conduct coaching calls with employees to discuss their goals and progress. Google also invests time in training managers on how to coach employees and hold these meetings effectively.

3. Annual 360-degree feedback

Employees get well-rounded 360-degree feedback every year from their managers, peers, and direct reports. This feedback gives employees a holistic picture of their growth and where they can improve.

Employees also assess themselves. They receive a single open question where they need to list specific projects, their roles, and what they accomplished in their role.

Peers use the reviewer’s self-evaluation for reference when writing their feedback. The goal is to ensure the peers know the reviewer’s projects and work rather than assess the reviewee’s summary.

Peer feedback is anonymous, except for the managers who can see which of their employees have rated the other negatively or positively.

4. Performance calibration

After collecting all the data from 360-degree reviews, managers draft a rating for their employees. This rating is mainly based on OKRs. However, the manager also considers the overall context, e.g., a economic shift that might have affected ad revenues.

For the draft rating, managers use the following rating scale:

• Needs improvement
• Consistently meets expectations
• Exceeds expectations
• Strongly exceeds expectations
• Superb

By now, managers have only drafted the ratings. Therefore, no rating is final till the end of the calibration process. In the calibration process, five to ten managers meet to discuss their ratings and finally agree on a fair rating.

5. Compensation and promotions

Promotions at Google happen twice a year. Google expects employees to demonstrate that they are already performing at the level to which they wish to be promoted.

Feedback from former Googlers indicates that only those who consistently show impact and take on additional responsibilities are promoted. In practice, this means that promotions are closely tied to the annual review data as well as the more frequent developmental check-ins that inform managerial decisions.

It is essential to note that although informed by annual review data, Google people leaders strongly advocate for holding separate compensation and development conversations:

These two meetings are a month apart, so the feedback isn’t mixed with numbers and is purely qualitative and actionable.

Reasons behind Google’s current performance review system

Earlier, Google did two performance evaluations in a year. A report cited that 47% of Googlers thought the previous performance review systems were cumbersome and not the best use of their time.

The new annual review system (GRAD) encourages employees to coordinate with their managers throughout the year to get feedback and plan career development. However, they will only receive performance ratings once a year. Google says its new system will “reflect that most Googlers deliver significant impact daily.”

However, Google continues to enable employees to get promoted twice a year.

The top three reasons why Google scrapped the time-consuming twice-a-year performance review system.

1. Fewer reviews = Less pressure

Employees always perform better if they are in a relaxed state of mind. Two employee reviews in a year were causing people to focus on myopic goals and miss the bigger picture. The underperforming employees weren’t getting enough time to prove their mettle.

A single review in a year would encourage the workforce to set long-term goals and achieve them.

2. Every hour is essential

Scrapping the bi-annual review system would save the managers and employees considerable time. Googlers can use this time to deliver significantly more impact.

3. Increased sense of accomplishment

Most Googlers are doing great work and don’t need to be micro-managed. This will give the employees a sense of accomplishment and improve their morale. Confident, well-assured employees are intrinsically motivated and perform better.

The key to Google performance review success

Google believes in transparency and uplifting its employees holistically.

The performance review system acts as a compass providing direction rather than a speedometer measuring performance.

Google treats its employees as assets and reminds everyone that taking care of your employees is still the best people management strategy.

Here are some distinct reasons why Google’s performance review system is effective:

1. Bringing radical transparency

Google believes in making every employee’s OKRs visible to the entire company. This level of radical transparency, where even a junior employee can view the CEO’s OKRs, forms the backbone of a bias-free, meritocratic culture.

Transparently aligning objectives and incentives is just one of the many ways Google builds high-performance teams across the organization.

2. Setting goals correctly

Goals should be public and ambitious to ensure employee alignment with organizational goals. This way, everybody knows how and where they fit in the larger picture. Plus, they’ll also have the opportunity to know what others are working on. Google makes its goals/OKRs public to help employees set the goals correctly.

3. Listening to employees

Google encourages managers to conduct career development check-ins, allowing Googlers to share their thoughts and grow with the company.

4. Focusing on employee development

Google continuously invests in employee growth. Every check-in conversation employees have with their manager is also about their development and progress and is not just limited to feedback. This continuous learning culture makes feedback even more effective.

5. Conducting holistic 360-degree reviews

Leaders find 360-degree feedback helpful because it provides a well-rounded view of an individual’s performance by incorporating perspectives from peers, managers, and direct reports. Through the 360-degree review process, Googlers also get actionable feedback contributing to their growth, and managers get a complete view of individual performance.

How can you run a performance review process like Google?

The essence of the entire Google feedback process program lies in:

• Transparency of goals
• Coupling development with feedback
• Conducting 360-degree reviews to avoid bias

You can do all of this in Deel Engage. These are the concrete steps you should follow.

Assign transparent career paths

With our career management module, you can create a transparent career progression path for roles in all departments, outlining the clear expectations for each role.

Define OKRs for your entire organization

Use the goal management module to define OKRs for all your departments. Make the goals public so everyone can see what their peers are working toward. Assign individual goals that align with the organizational direction.

Schedule regular check-in

Deel Engage provides a Slack plug-in for setting up 1-on-1 calls. Managers can use it to set up regular check-ins with their team members. The plug comes with built-in reminders and a note-taking feature.

Assign development plans

Managers and team members can create personalized development plans aligned with career paths and organizational goals. These plans can include concrete goals (e.g., courses, certifications, shadowing) and timelines.

The HR department can create templates so managers and their teams never start from a blank page.

Launch an online learning library for continuous development

You can create a learning library with our learning management software, a single source for all organizational training and mentorship. Access to this portal will give your workforce adequate learning resources to meet their development goals.

Conduct 360-degree reviews

Deel Engage’s performance management module helps you set 360-degree feedback reviews with downward, upward, peer, and self-evaluations.

Our platform simplifies the review process by allowing you to:

• Define peer nomination and approval rules
• Set anonymity settings—defining who can see what feedback
• Pre-set review questionnaires with a healthy mix of rating and qualitative questions
• Add specific questions focused on promotion readiness
• Assign reviewers, self, peers, managers, and direct reports according to custom rules, such as belonging to a specific department or location, or according to specific dates (e.g., 12 weeks after the hire date)
• Add a calibration step for consistent reviews and ratings across your organization
• Define the timeline of your progress
• Automate the entire review

Run compensation reviews

With Deel’s acquisition of compensation management software, Assemble, you can soon run compensation reviews on the platform. You’ll be able to link performance feedback with compensation outcomes and more.

Automate performance reviews and development with Deel Engage

Deel Engage enables continuous development and feedback. We support the entire employee lifecycle, from onboarding new hires and creating career progression paths to providing regular training and automating feedback for ongoing growth.

Book a demo to create a growth culture at your workplace.