Perks and Recreation: In Silicon Valley, a new wave of tech companies tries to enforce fun.
Perks and Recreation - Megan Garber - the Atlantic
Evernote has a new vending machine. It sits next to a shelf of cereal dispensers in the glass-walled great room of the software company’s airy new offices in Redwood City, California. The machine is activated not by coins, but by employees’ ID badges. And it dispenses, instead of candy, computer accessories. Slot 69: an Apple mouse. Slot 59: a MacBook power adapter. Slot 43: a wireless keyboard. On the day I visited Evernote’s offices, someone had put an iPhone 5 box into Slot 35 as a joke. A staffer, soliciting Sven for an iTunes card to test an app she’d been working on, glanced at the box and laughed. “People have been trying all day to get that thing out.”
Considering that Evernote is a Silicon Valley start-up, and considering as well that Silicon Valley start-ups tend to be both famous and infamous for the quirk of their workspaces, a vending machine that spits out Apple accessories is at best a modest innovation. Especially when you compare it with features at Evernote’s fellow firms in the Valley and nearby San Francisco. There’s Twitter’s rooftop garden, a sod-and-cement expanse studded with turquoise couches. And Dropbox’s music room, complete with a piano and guitars. And Skype’s pool-and-foosball room, its walls upholstered with cheeky (and sound-minimizing) Astroturf. And YouTube’s indoor slide: one story high, three lanes wide, fire-engine red.
These features are physical manifestations of what Valley denizens refer to, only half ironically, as the “perks arms race.” Google’s long-standing offerings—its catered meals and on-site hair salon and volleyball courts—have trickled up and down the Peninsula, to companies both scrappy and established. While Valley offices do what offices have always done—direct employee behavior, enforce corporate culture—they also make a sales pitch to those same employees. Keeping workers happy and healthy, the firms reason, is the best way to keep them productive. And with tech talent in constant demand, it is also, the firms figure, the best way to keep them around.
So while massages (Eventbrite), intra-office scooters (Dropbox), and treadmill desks (Facebook) may inspire envy among some outsiders—myself, I’ll admit, included—they are perks, in the end, with a purpose. Evernote’s vending machine will save its busy IT department time. The roving, Webcam-enabled robot that Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO, uses to check in with employees is a practical (if beady-eyed) way to facilitate worker-boss communication when Libin is out of town. Even the office feature that might win the award for Most Outlandish—the goats that have been known to roam Google’s sprawling campus—is practical: the creatures are a relatively low-cost way to keep the grounds free of weeds.