The New York Times’ Steve Lohr provides an overview of Google’s “revamped…social contract with its workers,” which is fueled by the company’s turbo-charged revenue growth and a management philosophy built around the motto “Don’t Be Evil.”
Meals of all kinds, painstakingly prepared by company chefs, are free at the company’s headquarters…Other amenities there include children’s day care, doctors, dry cleaning, laundry, a gym, and basketball and volleyball courts. Maternity or paternity leave is 12 weeks at 75 percent of full pay. There is also up to $500 available for takeout meals for the entire family after a newborn arrives, courtesy of Google. Shuttle buses (with wireless Internet access for working while commuting) ferry employees to the Googleplex from throughout the Bay area. And the big perk: the company’s engineers are given 20 percent of their time to pursue their own ideas instead of company assignments.
To encourage a sense of ownership, all Google employees receive stock grants or options…The company also doles out cash payments, including Founders’ Awards of millions of dollars, for innovations that add value to the Google franchise.
Lohr then asks “[b]ut what happens to all this corporate largesse when, someday, the laws of economic gravity are felt at Google and growth slows sharply or worse?” He suggests Google’s management believes “any slowdown will be a soft landing that can be managed by easing the pace of hiring,” and quotes Shona L. Brown, Google’s vp of operations:
“We will not pull back on our commitments to employees,” Ms. Brown said. “The last thing we would do is take it out of the hide of our employees. That is a path to a downward spiral.”
Brown makes a good point, but it’s one that’s a lot easier to live by when a company is enjoying, as Google is, a prolonged and dramatic upward cycle. The good news for Google and its employees is that this upward cycle could very well continue for a long time, allowing the company’s employment model to evolve along with its revenues, profits and economic impacts. That employment model, coupled with Google’s industry-transforming intention-based advertising model (and, of course, its skyrocketing revenue and profits), makes the company a uniquely fascinating and important specimen in the Web 2.0 ecoystem.
Mitch Shapiro at 1:54 AM|Comments(0)
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