Inside the Cubicle: benefits

In terms of newspaper headlines that employees should be happy to see, today's front page story in the Chicago Tribune, "Bosses, let your people nap" ranks pretty high up there.

The article talks a lot about how we are a sleep-deprived nation and how proper sleep improves cognitive function. I agree with all of this for the most part, but I think the article misses the larger point about how perceptions of an effective "work schedule" are antiquated.

The fact is that if we all worked 9 to 5 then we should have no excuse for not getting enough sleep. However, fewer and fewer people work a "traditional" schedule and many employees feel pressure to work insane hours (and many are celebrated for it).

The question of whether to nap at work implies that one has to be at the office in order to be working. If an employee is not actively engaged in something that requires them to be at their desk, what is the value of having them sitting there appearing to be doing something important? What is the need to mandate that an eight or ten hour work day must occur during a set period of time?

Google's software engineers often work through the night, do you think it is okay for them to nap? I would bet yes. Best Buy allows corporate employees to set their own schedules and work from anywhere; they can duck out for some shut eye any time they want.

Am I advocating people slumped over on their desks, or leaning back in their chairs drooling? No, of course not. That is exactly the point. Give employees a little trust and freedom and you may be surprised how much discretionary effort they give back.

My view is that businesses need to reconsider whether traditional notions of professional decorum really serve business needs. Does keeping employees captive and sleep deprived really serve anyone's interests?

Expect to see a lot of leading organizations experiment with non-traditional work environments over the next year.

It came as no big shock that Google was named No. 1 on Fortune's 100 Best Places to Work list this year. The lavish perks, stock options and free-flowing culture are all well documented; however, there is a method to the apparent madness.

7 ways that Google has become an employer-of-choice and succeeded financially (and 3 challenges they face going forward):

Practical experimentation is encouraged - Engineers are given 20 percent of their time to pursue projects they are personally interested in. Several company products including Google News and Adsense have come from this. Note that is only engineers, the employees most likely to develop innovative offerings, and the most valuable talent to attract, that are given this privilege.
A higher purpose - At Google, the mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That means that the job is never done, there is always more information to gather and ways to make it easier to find. That could mean cataloging every book in the world, developing a better blog search tool, or making it easier for individuals to create Web sites - all of which Google is working on. This ambitious and aspirational mission ensures that employees will always be driven to accomplish more and see the company as able to play in different spaces. Google is not a search company - They are an advertising agency, a media provider, a publisher, a finance company, a social networker. They are whatever they want and need to be. This also means, with an array of integrated products, they can go after any market and any competitor they choose.
The leaders have control - When Google went public, there was fear that the pressures of shareholders would force the company to abandon much of its unique culture. However, Google's founders - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page - retained voting control over the company and vowed to adopt a long-term approach to business strategy saying in the IPO letter, "A management team distracted by a series of short-term targets is as pointless as a dieter stepping on a scale every half hour." The result is that Google can take more chances than peers and bet on potentially huge payoffs down the road. It also means that they do not have to deal with calls from activist shareholders to trim overhead and administrative costs associated with employee benefits.
Culture is designed to increase discretionary effort - Why provide food, laundry services, doctors and entertainment on-site? Why provide free wi-fi-enabled shuttles to work? Why let people wear what they want? Because when you make "work" a desirable place to be, it is more likely that people will want to be there - and it is no surprise that Googlers willingly work late into the night on projects.
Employees reap the rewards of success - Yes, Google pays competitive wages for computer engineers, but it is the stock options that really matter. For those who have been in the company and whose options are vested or near-vested, this means a lot of new multi-millionaires. However, new employees will benefit rom Google's innovative new stock-option plan that potentially increases the value of options for people who missed out on the initial boom.
Good ideas win - Google employees are smart - the luxury of being the best is you get to pick the best - and come up with a lot of ideas. If an employee can come up with a sound business case for an idea, whether it is related to his specific project or not, it will be heard. Executives hold office-hours where employees can make their case for a project, and if they are convincing, resources will be given to develop the idea. One of Google vice-president Marissa Mayer's "Nine Notions of Innovation" is "don't politic, use data."
Get the best and the brightest, and keep them - Over the past few years, Google has used its leadership position and reputation for allowing creative freedom to attract some of the legendary minds in the field of computer engineering - including former employees of Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco and several top academics. The company, which has always had a low turnover rate, around 5 percent, is now focusing on retaining high-value employees.

So is Google the perfect organization? Well, there are a few things that they have to be careful of...

Balancing business and pleasure - Giving freedom to engineers is a great way to attract talent and spur innovation, but it can't come at a sacrifice to the core business strategy - which is what brings in revenue. There must be a functional balance between what employees want to do and what needs to be done. While Google's willingness to launch beta versions of new products at an alarming pace excites engineers, they need to focus on seeing the larger business implications and the risk to the brand.
Managing growth - Google was built on a collegiate model that encourages camaraderie and independent thinking. That is easy when there are only a couple hundred of you, but harder when you are 10,000 strong and growing - in size and location. With growth, comes a need for management, which means bureaucracy, and that flies in the face of the Google culture. Much of the company's success has been based on the fact that they have been more flexible and forward-thinking than its competitors (think Microsoft and Yahoo). Google knows there is power in small teams.
Too tied to founders - We have seen it with Nike, H-P, Home Depot and Apple (for a time) - companies that are driven by charismatic individuals with strong personalities often struggle when those people step down. Brin and Page are only in their 30s but who knows what will happen if they get bored, decide to retire to a private island in Tahiti or move on to another start-up. They, in a large part embdy the Google story and culture, and their absence would be a huge loss.

As Fortune admits every year, the Best Places to Work List is a little bit of a chicken and egg situation - are they an employer-of-choice because they are doing well financially or are they doing well financially because they are an employer-of-choice?

For Google (and many of the private companies on the list) it is somewhat of a moot point because they are insulated from short-term pressures to boost shareholder value. However, Google is a numbers-driven company - they even use algorithms in their hiring process - and it is unlikely they would dedicate resources to keep employees happy unless they had data to support the fact it was helping the business.

There is only one Google, and companies should not look to replicate their strategies. The lesson to be learned is that creating a healthy, attractive work environment for employees is an integral part of business strategy. It is not the responsibility of HR, it must start at the top and be driven throughout the company through organizational structure, benefits and compensation and most importantly, strategic communications.

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