Campus life after lockdown
July 2020
The big FANG companies – (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google) and the rest – love referring to their gigantic establishments as ‘campuses’. This gives them an agreeably bookish, academic air. Campuses are portrayed as offering a new way of working; somewhere to work, rest and play. Google says that ‘building a sense of community is one of the first steps to creating a more positive company culture.’
However, as we all know, there is nothing really new under the sun, and these campuses and their owners’ dreams would come as no surprise to the 19th Century Cadbury family who created the model village of Bournville near Birmingham for their workers,
The similarities are marked. Just as in Bournville, thousands of people, employed by one company, are transported into work at the campuses on company transport, and are given offices, laboratories, restaurants, cafes, kitchens, gyms, sports fields, shops, gardens, creches, swimming pools, lounges, medical services, evening classes and more. The chocolate entrepreneurs provided all this and then went even further by building schools for employees’ children and houses for the staff.
However, a COVID-19 shaped spanner has been thrown into the works, threatening to derail the FANGs rather lofty ambitions. Whatever you call their huge buildings, the pandemic emptied them while everyone worked from home. Many of the staff found they liked it; Facebook and Google will allow their staff to carry on at home until the end of 2020. Twitter has even said that the staff need never come back.
The companies, so keen to foster a sense of duty and community in their staff, have been forced to think afresh. The head of Google’s ‘People Innovation Lab’ (I’m fairly sure that’s part of what we used to call Personnel, but I can’t be certain) has spoken about the difficulties of maintaining the company ethic remotely; the head of Apple is concerned that they risk losing opportunities for fruitful collaboration by chance.
I wonder how it will all develop. For the time being, if you don’t need to be in the office all the time, from now on you probably won’t be, COVID or no COVID. Companies have discovered that the online meetings work, productivity does not suffer and overheads reduce.
International conferences have had their bluff called, too, particularly irritating to some academics who regard these junkets as a perk of the job. They must now present their research online from their spare room. The organisers have found that this is just as efficient, many more people attend, and it’s cheaper. I don’t expect them to go back to organising ‘real world’ events in in a hurry.
Indeed, I fully expect to see house builders beginning to include small ‘working from home’ rooms in new houses. No doubt they’ll call them ‘work-life balance flex points’ or similar, but it will really be the return of the study, and a good thing, too.
All that having been said, I am a big believer in the pendulum theory. That is, whenever society moves in a certain direction, it carries on to a tipping point, and then turns back.
So don’t be surprised if, after we have all abandoned our offices and moved online for a while, some young business emerges with a brilliant idea: why not get all the staff into one large room, get them talking to each other, and exchanging ideas in a random and exciting manner? Management theorists will hail this as a ground-breaking proposal.
And then once we do that, another pundit will suggest giving people private rooms so that they can think without distraction, and suddenly offices will be as they were in the 1950s.
At which point someone will suggest we might as well all work from home - and off we’ll go again.
A few links
Google’s company culture In their own words:
https://peakon.com/blog/workplace-culture/google-company-culture/#:~:text=Google's%20culture%20is%20flexible%20(employees,pong)%20and%20founded%20on%20trust.&text=Google%20also%20prizes%20creativity%2C%20actively%20encouraging%20employees%20to%20innovate.
Letter from Google’s CEO to all staff:
https://blog.google/inside-google/working-google/working-from-home-and-office/
A video tour of Apple’s HQ:
https://youtu.be/knTiUD5IAww
Life at the Googleplex in 200 seconds. It’s from 2009, but you get the idea.
https://youtu.be/eFeLKXbnxxg
Bournville history, by Cadbury
https://www.cadbury.co.uk/about-bournville
