28 October 2008

Google Aims to Retain Entrepreneurial Spirit as It Grows

Pampered by the company, employees give back in creativity

Googlers are allowed to bring their pets to the office as long as the pets don’t bother other employees.

By Andrzej Zwaniecki
Staff Writer

Mountain View, California — When you visit Google’s main campus here you risk a serious bout of envy. You wish your own employer offered at least a small part of what Googlers, as employees are called, can enjoy. The place is so unconventional that at times it feels more like a cross between a self-sufficient gated community, an all-inclusive resort and a college campus than a corporation.

Google employees receive more-than-decent salaries, generous bonuses and stock options and can win founders’ awards sometimes worth millions of dollars. But money is not all that matters at one of the most successful software companies, Googlers say.

For example, everything you need at home and in your neighborhood is here and is either free or heavily subsidized: 11 cafeterias that offer gourmet meals; snack and juice bars; laundry facilities with free bio-detergents; day care for kids and a pet-friendly policy (yes, you can bring them from home); on-site car washes and oil changes; and more.

Google also tries hard to make the workplace healthy, convenient and environmentally friendly. The campus draws 30 percent of its power from solar panels, uses an advanced air-filtration system, operates shuttle buses and provides bikes for trips between buildings.

Googlers can go to a well-equipped gym or swimming pool; play beach volleyball, roller hockey and pool; take yoga classes and get a massage. To stimulate their brains, they can study foreign languages and attend various presentations and lectures. And if they get tired from all this, they can … take a nap in one of the strategically placed nap pods.

Some companies offer similar benefits. But none has matched Google in the breadth and quality of the offerings. It was more than enough to make Google Number 1 in Fortune magazine’s 2008 ranking of the best U.S. companies to work for.

Visitors often think the benefits are intended to keep employees at work as long as possible, says Claire Stapleton, a public affairs associate at Google.

Googlers indeed work long hours, and it is not unusual to find a group discussing a project late at night or even into the early morning. But Stapleton told America.gov that the company helps employees in daily chores to give them more time for being creative, independent of whether their ideas are job-related or not. She believes the extraordinary benefits on which the media and visitors focus so often are not the main reason people are eager to work at Google.

Beach volleyball is one of several sport activities that employees can engage in on the corporate campus.

“It has to do more with the corporate culture, which keeps people excited and motivated,” she said.

Stapleton said Google goes to great lengths to create an invigorating environment and an entrepreneurial culture in which creative ideas are nurtured and often turned into products and services. In such a culture, each product or service is unique.

“There is no one typical way that products get launched,” she said.

Emily Nishi, a director in the human resources division, says many Googlers are motivated by an opportunity to come up with new things. The company encourages crazy ideas and lets employees go down their own paths, she told America.gov.

For example, software engineers can spend 20 percent of their work time on projects that have nothing to do with their job functions. Gmail — Google’s e-mail program —Google News, the company’s fleet of plug-in electric vehicles and the shuttle-bus service were all conceived initially as such nonessential projects.

Googlers also enjoy working in small, focused and self-managed teams and having easy access to the founders and heads of the company — Larry Page and Sergey Brin — who listen to their suggestions and answer their queries during weekly meetings.

Nishi said Google looks for employees with a wide variety of professional, ethnic and cultural backgrounds because it believes that creativity thrives at the intersection of varied professional and life experiences. At lunch time, the main cafeteria crowd is indeed multiethnic and multiracial, but also unusually young for a large corporation.

Nishi said the company hires a lot of college students. But some Googlers, particularly those in executive ranks, had long professional careers before they joined the company.

Google employs more than 12,000 people at offices around the world. It received almost a million applications for about 3,000 jobs it has advertised recently.

With such a choice, the company can select the best. And the quality of Googlers makes it an even better place to work for.

“Here you work with the brightest people, the most driven people, the most passionate people and the most compassionate people, who are really interested in making the world a better place through technology,” Nishi said.