Google Sleep Pods and Yelp Beer Pumps: Are We Supposed to Live at Work?
Have you ever got to the end of a working day and thought: “You know what? I think I’ll hang around here for a bit longer … ”?
No, nor me.
But you might, if you worked for a tech giant like Google. There’s even an informal competition to see how long a Google employee can “live” at one of the search behemoth’s delightfully appointed HQs; eating in the canteen, showering in the gym, and sleeping in a car parked in the corporate lot. The record is supposedly held by an employee at Google’s Crittenden site and stands somewhere in the two year range.
To make that job even easier Google has installed some delicious-looking retro-futuristic “sleep pods” that are technically designed for mid-shift cat naps but could well be pressed into service as improvised beds.
It’s an approach that could catch on in the UK, especially in the home counties. After all, salaries in the UK are flatlining (unless you’re an MP). Property prices are still steadily inflating (particularly good news if you’re an MP). And of course tech companies tend to recruit the type of employee who missed out on their opportunity to step on to the property price escalator by dint of carelessly being born too late.
Plenty of tech and advertising firms have created kidult working environments with table football and mini-fridges to make their office feel more like a youth club than a workplace.
For that matter, so many of us are now so attached to our employers through smartphones and 3G tablets that we may as well be in the office all day anyway.
It’s only natural I suppose. As the industrial age, at least for us in the west, puffs its last climate-punishing puff, we can throw off the yoke of the commuter and choose to work where live, or live where we work. Just as we did in those fondly remembered days when we were all serfs.
If we are moving to a work environment where we graze at our duties for protracted periods, rather than gulp them down in rigid shift patterns, more of our workplaces need to enable the new culture of low-level presenteeism. Here are some steps in the right direction:
One admirable innovation has already been implemented at City giants Deloitte. There workers can observe their offspring’s nursery activities via webcam. In due course, those same children can no doubt aspire to a bit of work experience at Deloitte and ultimately join the megacorporation themselves. If that notion doesn’t make your heart skip a beat, you’re not damaging your cardiovascular system with enough sedentary desk work.
The business review site Yelp offers a whole suite of workplace blandishments to keep workers on site; pool tables, table-tennis, a videogame room, and perhaps most enticingly the KegMate. An in-house invention, this state-of-the-art beer pump offers free on-tap craft beers for staff and guests. Again, taking the long view: our agrarian ancestors drank home-brewed ale all day long and it didn’t do their work-rates any harm. Try having the Wars of the Roses today. Without a few cold drinks to keep people’s minds focused on the slaughter, the wars wouldn’t last a week.
Some workplaces have also offered staff a Treadmill Desk. First implemented in our prisons by Sir William Cubitt in the early 19th century, treadmills not only keep staff fit so that they can live longer, more productive lives – they can also supplement the company’s electricity supply. After all, keeping the lights on for all these late-night workers doesn’t come cheap.
Now, the last thing I’d like to imply to any potential employers, especially in the current perma-recession, is that I’m in some way hostile to this constant erosion of our work-life balance. Au contraire, I’m happy to dispense with the distinction between work and leisure entirely. I’m never happier than when I’m deliberately losing at table football to my slightly tipsy line manager.
In fact, you know what? I think I’ll hang around here for a bit longer.