The Conical Glass: The special ones

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

The special ones

Because I am lucky enough to know someone who works at The Special Company, I have visited it several times. Of course, you know about The Special Company because you use its primary product all the time, but you've probably read about its lavish employee perks in publications like the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, which document T.S.C. as exhaustively as People covers Britney Spears or Angelina Jolie.

The most famous perk at T.S.C. is the free food. T.S.C. has hired top chefs to produce cuisine for its employees. If you're in the mood for something Asian, Indian, Mexican, or organic & macrobiotic, you'll find it in one of T.S.C.'s numerous eateries. Plus, if you work there, you can invite your friends or relatives to join you for a meal -- absolutely free. I can attest to the fact that the food is delicious and top-notch. The only thing lacking is a fine wine to accompany it, but that's understandable; it is a workplace, after all.

In addition, T.S.C. offers "mini-kitchens" in each of its buildings, with on-the-go foods like fresh fruit, trans-fat-free cookies, string cheese, granola bars, yogurt, etc. The kitchens used to contain a lot of junk food, like M&M's and potato chips, but T.S.C. decided those things weren't healthy enough, and got rid of them. This led to some controversy among the employees, but if anyone really needs a junk fix, there's an In-N-Out Burger right down the street from the campus.

What else do you enjoy if you work at T.S.C.? The buildings are stocked with washers & dryers (free, natch) so you can do your laundry at work. There are free or reduced-price massages, or, if the masseuses are off-duty, massage chairs. You can bring your dog to work. Doctors and dentists come right to the campus in specially equipped vehicles so you can schedule an appointment on-site. Famous speakers from all walks of life address the employees. Occasionally, the company whisks everyone away to a free ski vacation, via a chartered bus to the mountains.

The T.S.C. even cares about you when you go to the bathroom. They have installed special high-tech toilets with heated seats and bidet functions.

T.S.C. only hires geniuses, and they do love their jobs. All of these perks are, in a way, velvet handcuffs: they want to keep you at work as long as possible, obviously. Why would you leave to go to lunch or dinner when the food served right there is far better than anything you could get off-campus?

I always feel a little wistful when I peel off my visitor's badge and leave the grounds. I've been self-employed for the last decade, but I have spent a lot of time in standard workplaces, and Joe works for a big high-tech company, so I'm not completely out of the loop of Employment Today. At T.S.C., you get the overwhelming sense that someone cares about you. It's like being enveloped in a loving embrace. They want you to be happy. They may have ulterior motives, but let's face it, 99.999% of us work for companies where you're expected to be highly productive, and all you get in return is a paycheck. Whenever I go to lunch with Joe, we always go out; it would never even occur to us to eat at his company's mediocre cafeteria (where, by the way, the food costs money).

The biggest drawback of T.S.C., to me, is that it's located in Silicon Valley, and I wouldn't want to live there; it's too far from San Francisco and boring suburbia-land compared to the East Bay. Plus, I know that whatever quirky talents I do have, they're not the ones T.S.C. is looking for. It's possible Joe could get hired there, but he's not as easily seduced by free food and massages as I am; he always reminds me that "work-life balance" is not a priority for employees, and it must be hard on the spouses. Still, I have to admit that it would be nice if some of T.S.C.'s philosophies on how to treat one's workers rubbed off on corporate America as a whole. Is a happy employee is a productive employee? The geniuses at T.S.C. are proving that, every day.

posted by 125records @ 12:06 PM

2 Comments:

At 7:31 PM, yellojkt said…

My new company brings in lunch twice a week. Just sandwiches or pizza or something, but I think it's a great perk.
At 11:00 AM, neal said…

My company does that about once a month, if we are lucky. And there is never any food in our cafeteria. Just old stale crusts of bread and usaully something moldy. Of course, I work at home.

Of course, there are days like today, where I take 5 Tuvans out to eat Greek food :)