But how does Google pull it off? In the past couple of years, the company has hired social scientists to study the organization. The scientists—part of a group known as the PiLab, short for People & Innovation Lab—run dozens of experiments with employees in an effort to scientifically answer questions about the best way to manage a large firm. “What we try to do is bring the same level of rigor to people decisions as we do to engineering decisions,” says Prasad Setty, who heads Google HR’s “people analytics” group.