Gargi Gupta visits the Google office and discovers that it’s a place where the young can feel at home and express themselves freely.
When Manan wants a break from work, he picks up his guitar and strums a few bars. It helps that the team he works with at Google’s Gurgaon facility is a small one and has been allotted a cubicle — not the norm in this largely open plan workspace — so he can just close the door and bang away without having to worry about disturbing the rest of the office. “We also plan to bring in drums because I and one of my team-members are part of the Google in-house band,” informs the 26-year-old who’s been working at Google for four years now.
Jamming in office? If that surprises you, check out the “breakout” areas, which are kitted with a pool and foosball table, a carrom board and chess board, and a massage chair if you’re feeling fagged out. Every where there’s the look and feel of a college canteen, a disconcertingly squeaky clean one.
Bright primary colours (they are also the colours of Google), graffiti, posters, puppets and little cutouts made with chart-paper and tinsel, even balloons. The walls are generally white, strung here and there with pin boards and group photographs of Googlers looking happy and having fun together.
Every enclosure on the work floor — everyone sits grouped according to their function — has a theme: Trojan Safari, Retro, Phoenicians, Inca, Team Tango, Google Garage, Vikings, and so on, with decorations to match. “Jungle” is the theme for the Trojan Safari enclosure, so you have a stuffed-toy tiger lounging atop a desk and bamboo chiks draped along the partition, with plastic creepers and snake cutouts stuck on it.
One particularly imaginative enclosure has the autorickshaw for a theme, all black and yellow, with detailed cutouts of the number-plate and meter, and the witty message, Buri nazar wale, Tere bachhe jiye, Bare hoke tera khoon piye. “It’s all done by the Googlers themselves, after work,” says Puja Kapoor, HR business partner. That’s evident — everyone seems to have had a gala time messing around with paper and glue, and seem to have allowed their imagination to run wild.
It’s a young office, with the design and layout paying some thought to making it a space where young people feel at home and express themselves freely; where comfort, smartness and utility matter far more than plushness; where work spaces and play spaces come together so closely that you’re never far from a bean bag, or an exercise ball, or a bowl piled high with lozenges or shelves stacked with jars of cookies and other nibbles. Then, of course, there are the breakout spaces, five in all, in addition to one large cafe which also doubles up as a meeting room where the entire office can assemble.
The youngsters love it. “We are not bound by our work-station. I can always go and sit on the bean bag here,” says Niti as she plays carrom with her friends Mrinalika, Riju and Nishant. “The office is Wi-fi connected and frankly, no one cares where I work — the end result is what matters.” “It gives a great sense of ownership,” adds Nishant, “You feel it is yours. It’s a feeling that comes into your work too.”
Interior design as an HR ploy? Seems like it. And it’s not just the Gurgaon office but all Google offices all over the world that are similarly young and funkily designed. Take the Zurich office, pictures of which have been doing the rounds of the Internet. Now that’s a wacky office — you could, if you chose, slither down a spiral slide into the canteen; there are what look like giant Easter eggs where people can work, or chat, or whatever you feel like.
Cable-car carriages, placed randomly in the middle of the rooms, do duty as work cabins, decorated up in ever changing themes — sometimes it’s “winter”, with fake snow, stuffed penguins and a reindeer bust on the wall; or it could be “garden” with potted plants and gingham curtains, and at others “traffic”, with scenes of chaotic traffic on the wallpaper.
The conference room has an overturned wooden boat lined with a thick mattress where you can lie back as you listen to a presentation, and the massage room has an aquarium through which the light is filtered, giving you the illusion as you lie on the recliners of being underwater.
“We are a people company, out customers and our employees come first,” says Manoj Varghese, Google’s director for HR. (All companies say that, but at Google they take it to an extreme — right down to the weighing scales next to all those jars of cookies!) In terms of space, he says, “All Google offices are more or less the same.”
So you’ll have the same colour scheme, the same features like “breakout area” and “tech-stop”, and the same well-laid out cafes. Indeed, it’s one division, called real estate and facilities, which is a part of HR and finance, that works on the interiors, and implements them with the help of local vendors.
“All offices have spaces earmarked for people to have fun and interact. Employees can do what they like with 20 per cent of their time. People are encouraged here to interact and opportunities are created for them to collaborate, and when people from diverse backgrounds interact, they discover great ideas.” Afterall, this is a company that thrives on ideas, which shows how an idea can build a business.
Source :http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=334269
