Office Fitouts – One of the Keys to a Great Culture
I had the opportunity today to visit the San Francisco offices of Google. They are fantastic. I was given a guided tour and saw just how the Google guys do it. A couple of things i observed were:
- The technology (ie screen / keyboard) was identical on every desk – this means that people can move desk and just plug in
- There were some offies but these were shared – evidently no one has their own office
- The office was decorated with lots of fun things that people had obviously bought in from home
- Casual clothes is the order of the day – and i dont mean business casual – i mean casual
- They have a free cafeteria with a great selection of food
- There are TV screens everywhere
- The office is in general very open plan
- They had a huge slide between floors – unfortunately i didnt get a chance to ride it
So it made me think about how important open plan is to the culture of a business. In many businesses, management have their own offices and sometimes, they have their own floors. Often they have an office with a secretary sitting out the front. I always remember doing a study at the National Australia Bank in Melbourne in the mid 90′s and there the senior management had their floor and even an express lift from the carpark to that floor. These senior management floors still exist today in many large businesses.
Now, for me, this is old world culture – a representation of the baby boomers and not in alignment with what Gen X or Y expect. At the REA Group we went for open plan. I had a desk just like everyone else and i think it helped create a very open culture. Quite often people would just walk up to my desk and have a chat. I found i could keep in the loop and openly participate in discussions that were randomly happening around me. If a private meeting was required, people can go to a separate meeting room and then have their discussion.
I would recommend to any business that wants to build a open, fun, engaging, happy culture that they think about the structure of the office and how they keep it open and equal.
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this kind office fitouts is always a dream for a job seeker.
i believe to let an employee to work in an independent mode is the best way to get above 90% output from a software engineer. thats why google is googlingly growing day by day.
i am just a graduated software engineer & job seeker now. and searching for a job with these kind of fitouts is really hard.
Very good post. I’ll use a lot of these recommendations to fitout the new EPC offices here. I agree to all of them. Especially in an IT dictated environment, allowing people to wear real “casual” clothes is a big plus.
Cafetaria and food, definitely! How much money does it cost if you have a guy who’s starving from hunger and can’t work correctly for 3 hours? How much does a chocolate candy cost? Easy calculation.. I also think that coffee and candy should be paid by the company. We’re all grown-ups and people will not eat 25 candy a day anyway.
Bring your own decoration – yes, great. People should feel at home at their job. As long as everything is kept clean, though. I probably couldn’t live with someone bringing his flesh-eating flower and feeding it two mice a day, that would be a mess.
I’d LOVE a slide – anything that makes staff smile is bound to pay off in added loyalty and enthusiasm for coming to work. I recently moved from a small-minded parochial company to a broad-minded gem, and the latter features many of the aspects you mention: free cafeteria (in our London office, anyway – boiled cabbage, anyone?), personalised / decorated workstations, and very few offices (except for the big wigs, and they have to do without the view or natural light). Rank-and-file staff (90% of us) are rewarded with open plan, great views and natural light, and polished concrete floors + carpet where needed.
Your thoughts are so true Simon,
I have worked for both small and large companies with closed office plans and open, and an open plan office works so much better. When you think about how much of the waking day is spent at work, to be in an area where you can feed off the positive energy of other work mates around you benefits everyone.
Now there is a stronger focus on health and wellbeing, I would like to see companies do more to encourage their staff to be healthier, be it better food in cafeterias, discounted health insurance, subsidised gym memberships … even an area set aside with gym equipment (hired by the company) so staff can utilise it.
Then there are massages, fruit baskets, facials, Friday drinks. Rewards for happy, successful staff can be balanced … and endless.
I was thinking about this post today while I was out for a drive, and it seems to me that there is a risk of contradiction :
- on the one hand, every desk is equipped with the same standard hardware to allow for easy exchange of desks
- on the other hand, people seem to be happy to bring their own decoration, which means that they want to style their desk in a very personal way
Now, if I brought some funny things to decorate my desk to my very personal style, I would be pissed off if the next day, someone else was sitting there and I had to find myself another desk which might be decorated with pictures of Marylin Manson.