Recently, Fortune Magazine released it’s “100 Best Companies to Work For 2007″ and Google’s Mountain View, California campus was number one. Their employees are exceedingly loyal. “A team of wild horses couldn’t drag me away,” says one employee. They’re even more than willing to work all nighters without question.

So, what in the world would make someone want to enjoy working that much? Check out these college-like incentives and I’m sure you’ll understand:

• Free meals from 11 on-site gourmet restaurants and snack rooms all over, complete with cereal, candy, fresh fruit, cappucino makers, the works.

• An on-site fitness center, complete with weight room, lap pool, personal trainers and massages.

• Five on-site doctors and, you guessed it, all free.

• Game rooms that include pool tables, foosball, ping-pong, and arcade games.

• Rock-climbing walls, beach volleyball and roller hockey twice a week in the parking lot.

• Engineers can spend 20% of their time at work on independent projects.

• Employees can bring their dogs to work, so long as their co-workers don’t mind, the dogs are not aggressive, are free of fleas and the owners clean up after them.

• Pajama day, TGIF parties every week and charity events on-site.

• Six weeks paid sabbatical available for every 6 years an employee works there (537 employees took sabbaticals last year).

• Free car washes and oil changes on-site. If an employee wants to buy a hybrid vehicle, Google will give her $5,000 toward it. They also provide free Wi-Fi enabled coach buses from five Bay area locations.

• Free on-site salons and barber shops.

• A $2,000 reward for referring new employees.

• Google will reimburse up to $500 in takeout for the first 4 weeks of an employee’s maternity leave.

• Available resources to study 4 foreign languages: Madarin, Japanese, Spanish and French.

• Free on-site laundromat and dry cleaning.

• On-site childcare.

• Motorized scooters for on campus travel in style (and speed).

• A founders award, up to millions of dollars (literally), for new program ideas and designs.

Whew. No wonder Google receives an average of 1,300 resumes a day (up to 1.1 million a year) for an average of only 2,229 available jobs a year. And Google doesn’t pay for all of these incentives out of their allotted administrative expenses. It all comes out of the company’s profits, which were over $6.1 billion in 2005!

So, raise your hand if you’d like to work in a place like Google. Yeah, me too (sigh). I think what every business owner can take away from this is that they should make their company a place worth working for, even if that means dipping into the profits a bit. In the end, the employee loyalty and productivity are completely worth it.

Source:
• CNNMoney.com: 100 Best Companies to Work in 2007

One Response to “Learning from Google’s HR Techniques”

1. Startup Myths Keep Entrepreneurs Motivated says:
   

   [...] So very, very true. As entrepreneurs, we long for the unlikely success story to motivate our own. We want the instant clientèle, the instant demand for our product. We want the sky rocketing profits within a year. We want to have the ability to provide a swimming pool and 12 restaurants for our employees (see Learning from Google’s HR Techniques). [...]

   Posted July 3rd, 2007 @ 9:19 am
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