Create a Productive Atmosphere, Inspired by Google’s HQ
“The Office” was a great show, it reminded anyone who worked in one just how crazy things could get. While the characters where oftentimes outlandish and over-exaggerated, they carried real personality traits that we could all identify with. It also teaches us a good lesson that a work environment that takes itself way too seriously is a terrible place to work and will eventually fail in some critical way.
The folks over at Google have been reinventing what it means to be an office or corporate working environment. They know that the workplace needs to be productive and efficient machine, but shouldn’t be treated like one. Many companies have adopted their way of thinking when it comes to the workplace, let’s look at a few of them that maybe you should consider trying out.
Real Perks and Benefits to the Job
How serious are you about keeping the employees that you have? Beyond the monetary cost of having to retrain replacements and reestablish trust all over again, you need to weigh just how much you think those employees are worth to your company.
The folks over at Google obviously have enormous coffers of wealth to reinvest into their company, but they are still unique in how much they reward their employees: from fully-covered dental and health plans, vacation packages, and educational subsidies, these perks should be an industry standard practice for large companies, but unfortunately it’s not. This is where you can really make your business standout and attract talent that will truly respect your brand and what it represents.
Real Employee Involvement
In most businesses, big and small, the power structure is clearly defined and segregated. You’ll have the employee complaints that typically go unaddressed, the managerial complaints that take anywhere from a few months to a year to get addressed, and finally the upper-management that makes immediate changes. While this may make sense in the traditional corporate world, it is the absolute laziest and borderline inefficient way of doing business.
Employees come in all different personalities, it is your job as a company to make sure they are treated fairly and feel like they have a voice. If you aren’t successful in doing that, then they’ll simply find another way to be heard, either by quitting or going behind your back with extracurricular activities.
Freedom to Express
Continuing on from the last point about employees having a voice, when your company is approachable, it starts to feel like a real community. Managers and staff can focus on doing work better, faster, and not pass the buck down on someone else when something goes wrong. Mistakes don’t get covered-up for fear of repercussions; and nobody feels inadequate due to not getting all the proper training they should have gotten, but avoided because of the emphasis on timetables and not employee efficiency.
When the work environment is as relaxed and confident as Google’s HQ is, productivity actually goes up, employee retention isn’t a conversation that eats up precious resources. Your company can grow without having to follow the old “Two steps forward, one step backwards” formula.
