This is an exclusive, abridged excerpt from my book, Work Rules!
A Googler named Todd Carlisle once said the ultimate recruiting slogan would be “work at Google and live longer.” He wasn’t joking.
For years we’d been testing ways to improve the quantity and quality of Googlers’ lives. And because we provide free meals and snacks to Googlers, we found ourselves in a unique position to test whether insights from academic research would apply in the real world.
Food illustrates how our impulses can override our conscious thoughts. Most of the insights gleaned from our food-related experiments translate directly to broader questions of how the physical space around us shapes our behavior, how many of our decisions are made unconsciously, and how small nudges can have large impacts.
Another reason I’m emphasizing food is that diet is one of the biggest controllable factors that affect health and longevity in the United States. Managing your health, and your weight in particular, has all the hallmarks of an impossible task. The results are slow to appear and difficult to observe, so you get little positive feedback. It requires sustained willpower, which we all have in only limited supply. And we’re constantly bombarded by social pressure and messages that encourage us to consume more. Rob Rosiello, who ran McKinsey’s Stamford, Connecticut, office while I was there, used to say that the most profitable line in the English language was “Would you like fries with that?”
This isn’t a weight-loss book, and I’m far from an expert in health and nutrition, but the techniques we implemented at Google helped me lose thirty pounds over two years and keep it off. Even if you don’t have cafés in your office, you may have a break room, or a vending machine, or a mini-fridge. And you’ve surely got a kitchen at home. Maybe some of what we’ve learned will help you too.
We decided to test three types of intervention: providing information so that people could make better food choices, limiting options to healthy choices, and nudging. Of the three, nudges* were the most effective. Nudging involves subtly changing the structure of the environment without limiting choice.
The idea was sparked by an article by David Laibson, a professor of economics at Harvard University. In his paper “A Cue-Theory of Consumption,” he demonstrated mathematically that cues in our environment contribute to consumption. We certainly eat because we’re hungry, but we also eat because it’s lunchtime or because people around us are eating. What if we removed some of the cues that caused us to eat?
In our Boulder, Colorado, office we measured the consumption of microkitchen snacks for two weeks to generate a baseline, and then put all the candy in opaque containers. Googlers, being normal people, prefer candy to fruit, but what would happen when we made the candy just a little less visible and harder to get to?
We were floored by the result. The proportion of total calories consumed from candy decreased by 30 percent and the proportion of fat consumed dropped by 40 percent as people opted for the more visible granola bars, chips, and fruit. Heartened by the result, we did the same thing in our New York office. Healthy snacks like dried fruit and nuts were put in glass containers, and sweets were hidden in colored containers.
After seven weeks, Googlers in our New York office had eaten 3.1 million (3,100,000!) fewer calories—enough to avoid gaining a cumulative 885 pounds.
We turned to our cafés to see if a similar small nudge could change behavior. We selected one café and supplemented our standard twelve-inch plates with smaller nine-inch plates. We put up posters and placed informational cards on the café tables, referencing the research that people who ate off smaller plates on average consumed fewer calories but felt equally satiated. 32 percent of Googlers tried the small plates.
We served over 3,500 lunches in that café that week. Total consumption dropped by 5 percent, but waste -- the amount of food thrown away uneaten -- fell by 18 percent. Not a bad return on the cost of a few new dishes.
Ultimately, we are neither entirely rational nor entirely consistent. We’re influenced by countless small signals that nudge us in one direction or another, often without any deep intent behind the nudges. Organizations make decisions about how to structure their workspaces, teams, and processes. Every one of these decisions nudges us to be open or closed, healthy or ill, happy or sad. Our goal is to nudge in a direction that Googlers would agree makes their lives better, not by taking away choice but by making it easier to make good choices.
Now look around you right now and discover how your environment is nudging you and those around you already. Is it easy to see other people and connect? When you email or text your colleagues and friends, is it to share good news or snark? We are all constantly nudged by our environment and nudging those around us. Use that fact to make yourself and your teams happier and more productive.
And at home, open your pantry. For most of us, I bet the chips, candy, and sugary cereals are right there in front, at eye level, easy to get to. Open the fridge and see the sweetened yogurts, juices, and sodas staring you in the face. Try to find the wilting fruits and vegetables locked inside the crisper. And your poor, forlorn fruit bowl sits tucked away on a back corner of your kitchen counter.
Want to lose weight? Nudge yourself. Use smaller dishes -- in fact, get rid of the big ones! Shuffle your pantry so the popcorn (easy on the butter!) is in front and tuck the chips and cereal behind the dry pasta and cans of tuna. Make it a little harder to grab a handful of chips. Hide the sweetened yogurts and drinks in the drawers of your fridge and put the fruits and veggies right in front. Put the fruit bowl in the middle of the counter. Yes, it’s in the way. That’s the point!
You’ll be surprised by how different the same place can feel, and how easy it can be to change habits.
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If you’re enjoying these posts, check out Lazlo Bock's book, WORK RULES!: INSIGHTS FROM INSIDE GOOGLE THAT WILL TRANSFORM HOW YOU LIVE AND LEAD, available for pre-order now and shipping on April 7. Learn more at www.workrules.net.

* “Nudges” were defined by Richard Thaler (University of Chicago) and Cass Sunstein (Harvard Law School) in their book Nudge as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives….To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”