The Best Things in Life Are Free (or Almost Free)
Most of Google’s people programs can be duplicated by anyone
P
eople can exist, indeed did exist for thousands of years, without companies. But companies can’t exist without people. In tough economic times we lose sight of that fact. Companies struggle to maintain their profit margins or even to keep their doors open, cutting working hours and benefits.People take what jobs they can. Work becomes ever more miserable. Then companies are surprised that attrition leaps as soon as the economy improves.
In contrast, our founders’ letter from our 2004 IPO filing read:
We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge, doctors and washing machines. We are careful to consider the long-term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity. [italics mine]
As we’ve added programs, I’ve been pleased to find that the ones that matter the most to Googlers don’t come with enormous price tags. In part this is because the times when a person could most use his employer’s help come infrequently, as I’ll explain shortly. And in part it’s because adding new programs is largely about saying yes to employee ideas.
Most people assume Google spends a fortune on doing special things for our employees.
Aside from our cafés and shuttles, we don’t.lvi Most of the programs we use to delight and care for Googlers are free, or very close to it. And most would be easy for almost anyone to duplicate. The astonishing thing is that more companies don’t come up with ones of their own. All it takes is imagination and the will to do it.
We use our people programs to achieve three goals: efficiency, community, and innovation. Every one of our programs exists to further at least one of these goals, and often more than one.
Encouraging efficiency in your professional and personal lives
Most companies want workers to be efficient. Google is no different. As you might guess, we measure everything: We closely monitor how efficiently our data centers are used, computer code quality, sales performance, travel expenses, and so on. We also want people to be efficient in their personal lives. Googlers work hard, and nothing is more dispiriting than finishing a grueling week of work and coming home to time-consuming, mundane chores. So we offer on-site services to make life easier. They include:
ATMs bike repair
car washes and oil changes
dry cleaning, where Googlers drop clothes off in bins and pick them up a few days later farm-fresh and organic produce and meat delivery
holiday fairs, where merchants come on-site to sell products
mobile haircuts and beauty salons that pull up in enormous buses outfitted with barber’s chairs mobile libraries, a service provided by many of the towns where we have offices
These cost Google nothing, because we don’t pay for them. Entrepreneurs want to provide these services and require only our permission to come on our site. Googlers pay for the services (though in some cases we are able to negotiate volume discounts on their behalf). And in some cases, such as grocery delivery, Googlers themselves organize the services.
And they are easy to establish. In our Chicago office, a Googler asked a local nail salon owner if she would set up shop in a conference room each week so Googlers could get their mani-pedis at the office. Now it’s a Googler-maintained perk that costs Google nothing more than the coffee the manicurist drinks. All we needed to provide was the culture, where Googlers knew they could suggest new programs and shape their own workplaces.
There are some services that do cost Google money, but the amounts are relatively modest and the impact on Googlers is immense. For example, for those who bike or take public transportation to work, we maintain a handful of electric vehicles for their use in case they need to pick up groceries or a friend at the airport. There is also a concierge team of five people who support our more than fifty thousand employees by helping with travel planning, finding plumbers and handymen, ordering flowers and gifts, and otherwise saving Googlers an hour or two of time as they can. To be very clear, these are costs Google can afford because we’re large enough that a few extra people or vehicles (the cost of which is depreciated over years) are not a large percentage of our cost structure. But we also have online bulletin boards that anyone could duplicate, where people offer tips about local services like plumbers, give tutor recommendations, and share local deals they’ve spotted. And once you have fifty or a hundred employees to make up a potential market, you can start negotiating volume discounts with local businesses.
A community that spans Google and beyond
A sense of community helps people do their best work just as surely as increasing efficiency does by sweeping away minor chores and distractions. As we’ve grown, we’ve fought to maintain the sense of community we had when we were just a handful of people, and we’ve expanded our definition of community to include Googlers’ children, spouses, partners, parents, and even grandparents. Many companies hold a “Take Your Child to Work Day,” as we have for many years. In 2012, we held our first annual “Take Your Parents to Work Day,” and welcomed over two thousand parents to our Mountain View office and over five hundred parents to our office in New York. Each day starts with a welcome, and then either a peek at the future of what we’re building or an insider’s account of our history. One year we had Omid Kordestani, our founding sales executive, talk about growing Google from ten people to twenty thousand. Another year, Amit Singhal, our SVP of Search, recalled how, as a child in India, he watched Star Trek’s Captain Kirk direct his computer by talking to it, and how astonishing it is that Google Now allows him to do exactly the same thing. The rest of the day is filled with product demonstrations, where parents can check out our self-driving cars or stand in a
twenty-foot-tall room with Google Earth projected all around them, explore the campus, and then join a special TGIF hosted by Larry and our senior team. We now host these days in more than nineteen offices, including Beijing, Colombia, Haifa, Tokyo, London, and New York City, and add more each year.
Take Your Parents to Work Day isn’t about humoring helicopter parents who continue to coddle their fully grown children. Instead, it’s a chance for us to say thank you and broaden the Google family. Not surprisingly, our parents are incredibly proud of us and, surprisingly, most of them have no idea what we do for a living. Helping them appreciate the impact their children have, even when those children are fifty years old, is heartwarming. I was stopped a dozen times by parents with tears in their eyes, delighted at the chance to get closer to their children, and grateful to be recognized for having raised such amazing people. The Googlers loved it too. Tom Johnson wrote that “Thinking about taking [my mother] around the place I am so proud to work [at] and seeing how happy she was to spend the time with me brings a wide smile to my face every time.”
It was my favorite day at Google ever.
We also work to create a community within the company. As discussed in chapter 2, the Q&A portion of TGIF is the most critical part of the meeting, as any Googler can ask any question, ranging from “Why is my chair so uncomfortable?” to “Are we sufficiently sensitive to user concerns about privacy?” Events like the gTalent shows, where you suddenly realize a saleswoman is also a champion equestrian acrobat (that’s doing gymnastics on the back of a moving horse!) and an engineer is a nationally ranked ballroom dancer, or Random Lunches, where people are set up with Googlers they’ve never met to get to know each other over lunch, are easy to coordinate and make the place seem smaller and more intimate. These programs cost almost nothing except the time spent dreaming them up (though we do offer snacks and drinks at some of them—that’s optional).
We have more than two thousand email lists,lvii groups, and clubs at Google, ranging from unicycling and juggling clubs (which seem to be something that every technology company is required to have) to book clubs, financial planning groups, and even one jokingly called Fight Club after the Brad Pitt movie. They don’t really fight. Some wag just thought that if you’re going to have clubs, you of course should have a Fight Club. (I can’t really talk about it.) Among our clubs, the Employee
Gayglers (focused on issues facing lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people) Greyglers (for older Googlers)
Over a decade ago I noticed that Time Inc., the publishing company, had their own versions of these organizations. One was an Asian American Club, and they’d put up a flyer advertising a class on feng shui they were hosting, and inviting everyone in the company to come. I was struck by this, since my prior experiences had been with groups that focused on serving their own communities but rarely on building connections across communities.
Similarly, at Google all these groups come together in various ways. Anyone can join any ERG. We have numerous Mosaic chapters that bring people together across all the ERGs in offices that are too small to support dedicated VetNet or Greygler groups. There’s a series of Sum of Google conferences and events, ranging from potluck dinners and movie nights to career talks and volunteer projects, premised on the idea that many of these groups have common ground in what they experience in society.
Other noteworthy groups include our fifty-two Culture Clubs, which in addition to keeping our culture strong in each office, organize events that both bring Googlers together and forge deeper connections with people outside Google. A few recent examples from programs run by volunteers, ERGs, or Culture Clubs:
Almost two thousand Googlers joined pride marches in the United States in 2014, and hundreds more participated in Hyderabad, São Paulo, Seoul, Tokyo, Mexico City, Paris, and Hamburg.
The Hispanic Googler Network held a family health day in Mountain View, welcoming more than three hundred local, low-income families to our campus to share information about technology, fitness, and nutrition. Doctors and nutritionists were on hand to provide medical advice and referrals for ongoing support.
The Black Googler Network (BGN) hosts an annual outreach trip. In 2014, thirty-five members from seven offices met in Chicago for three days of outreach to minority-owned small businesses, career development, and community partnership. They were able to reach thirty minority business owners by hosting “small business blitz” office hours, where business owners could pick Googlers’ brains at six different stations, covering topics ranging from social marketing to building a website. BGN also hosted more than forty elementary and high school students, including at-risk youth, at the Google Chicago office. The students received a tour, presentations on opportunities and diversity in computer science, and a hands-on experience with Blockly, an introductory coding activity.
Each month in Singapore, Googlers spend two afternoons supporting abused women and men from all over Asia who have lost their jobs or need help getting back on their feet in some way.
Googlers teach the aspiring businessmen and businesswomen how to use the Internet and Google products to gain the skills and confidence required to find a new job or start a business in their home country.
VetNet helps veterans build skills and find jobs when they return to civilian life. One recent example was “Help a Hero Get Hired,” a resume workshop for veterans transitioning out of the military. VetNet ran fifteen workshops in twelve cities across the country as part of our 2013
GoogleServe week of community service.
In support of a Googler in our Amsterdam office who was waiting for a kidney transplant, the office organized a “Pay to Pee Day,” where every time nature called, Googlers were asked to pay a modest fee that was then donated to the Dutch Kidney Foundation.
Googlers in Tokyo held a “Sell Your Soul” auction in Tokyo to raise money in the wake of the 2011 tsunami. Googlers offered services that reflected their deepest selves, ranging from cooking tips and coding advice to providing a guided 700-kilometer cycling trip to northern Japan. They raised $20,000 for tsunami relief.
In Mountain View, California, Googlers lead computer and English classes for members of our janitorial staff as part of a program called Through Education And Dialogue.
Our Madrid office, responding to record unemployment in Spain, decided to donate a ton of food over a forty-day period, which would provide seven thousand hot meals to those in need. The team ultimately collected four tons of food, which was matched by Google and donated to Cáritas, a local aid organization.
And lest you think Google is some kind of forced-march fun-house, of the kind described in Dave Eggers’s dystopian novel The Circle,195 there’s no expectation or requirement that people need to do any of this stuff. Just like when we were all kids in school, some people join clubs, some play more than others, and some just want their own quiet place to get their work done.
In chapter 9 we talked about how learning works at Google, but as so often happens, we didn’t predict an elusive but powerful side benefit of these programs. In 2007 we created our Advanced Leadership Lab, a three-day program for senior leaders where we deliberately assembled a diverse group, spanning a range of geographies, professional functions, genders, social and ethnic backgrounds, and tenures. Stacy Brown-Philpot, at the time a director in our sales organization, who went on to be an entrepreneur-in-residence at Google Ventures before becoming chief operating officer of TaskRabbit, was in the first session. Years later, she and I compared notes on what a special experience it was to build that program from scratch.
“I loved the people I met. I didn’t realize that we had so many amazing people doing so many different things,” she told me.
“Who do you stay in touch with?” I asked.
“No one.”
“But …”
“It’s weird. I’ve never had a need to reach out to them. But I feel better just knowing they’re there.”
Stacy’s comment took me back to my own childhood, and an exchange between Pooh and his dear friend Piglet in A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh:
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. “Pooh?” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s hand. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
Perhaps some of the value of these networks and groups comes from simply knowing they are there.
Fueling innovation
These efforts do genuine good in the world, but they also make a difference inside our own walls.
When people gather together in unexpected ways, it inevitably spurs innovation—the third goal driving our programs. Amazon lists 54,950 books on innovation for sale, presenting many competing and often conflicting theories. Google, of course, has a number of approaches, but the most salient one is the way we use our benefits and also our environment to increase the number of “moments of serendipity” that spark creativity.
David Radcliffe, our VP of Real Estate and Workplace Services, lays out our cafés and manages the lengths of lines so that there are “casual collisions” between people who might have interesting conversations.
We dot our floors with microkitchens, pockets where you can grab a coffee, a piece of organic fruit, or a snack, and take a few minutes to relax. Often you’ll see Googlers chatting and comparing notes over a cookie and a chessboard or around a pool table. Sergey once said, “No one should be more than two hundred feet away from food,” but the real purpose of these microkitchens is to do the same thing Howard Schultz tried to create with Starbucks. Schultz saw the need for a “third place”
beyond the home and office, where people could relax, refresh, and connect with one another. We try to do the same thing, by giving Googlers a place to meet up that looks and feels different from their desk. And we use the placement of these microkitchens to draw people from different groups together.
Often they’ll sit at the border between two different teams, with the goal of having those people bump into one another. At minimum, they might have a great conversation. And maybe they’ll hit on an idea for our users that hasn’t been thought of yet.
Google’s microkitchens are interspersed throughout our offices. This is a particularly nice one. © Google, Inc.
Ronald Burt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, has shown that innovation tends to occur in the structural holes between social groups. These could be the gaps between business functional units, teams that tend not to interact, or even the quiet person at the end of the conference table who never says anything. Burt has a delicious way of putting it: “People who stand near the holes in a social structure are at higher risk of having good ideas.” 196
People with tight social networks, like those in a business unit or team, often have similar ideas and ways of looking at problems. Over time, creativity dies. But the handful of people who operate in the overlapping space between groups tend to come up with better ideas. And often, they’re not even original. They are an application of an idea from one group to a new group.
Burt explains: “The usual image of creativity is that it’s some sort of genetic gift, some heroic act.
… But creativity is an import-export game. It’s not a creation game. … Tracing the origin of an idea is an interesting academic exercise, but it’s largely irrelevant. … The trick is, can you get an idea which is mundane and well known in one place to another place where people would get value out of it.”
These gently orchestrated encounters aren’t our only trick. We also try to constantly feed new thinking and ideas into the organization. Employees are encouraged to give Tech Talks, where they share their latest work with anyone who is curious. We also bring in star thinkers from outside. Susan Wojcicki and Sheryl Sandberg, a sales VP at the time and now COO of Facebook, were instrumental in growing the concept behind these talks, using their networks and interests to recruit a range of
These gently orchestrated encounters aren’t our only trick. We also try to constantly feed new thinking and ideas into the organization. Employees are encouraged to give Tech Talks, where they share their latest work with anyone who is curious. We also bring in star thinkers from outside. Susan Wojcicki and Sheryl Sandberg, a sales VP at the time and now COO of Facebook, were instrumental in growing the concept behind these talks, using their networks and interests to recruit a range of