expertSEM

The LA Times recently covered the foodie culture at Google’s offices, which made me reflect upon the peculiar savings which result from giving away food. Back in 1997, this behavior was a bit more common among dotcom boom companies than traditional businesses. In the early days of the internet, it was easy to categorize this as ingénue largesse, in the same category as Nerf wars, company dogs, and stock-as-pay.

Yet as Google has grown to one of the premier American companies, surpassing their compatriots in the technology field in growth, integrity, and popularity, they have kept this vestige of the past, and even enhanced it. Google’s offer of free food is now the stuff of office worker fantasy. So what is it they gain?

Google’s business model relies on maintaining a creative lead on their competition to devise the next big thing (which they have achieved several times). To do this, they hire some of the brightest people coming out of the nation’s top colleges (alas, the PPC Handyman was denied). To do this, you might expect they pay outrageous amounts to acquire the top talent, but PPC Handyman’s sources inside the GooglePlex reveal that this is not the case? Indeed, some Googlers even describe the pay CUTS they took to be a part of the great Google.

Why do the best and brightest take less money to work for someone with extremely high expectations? I’m sure we could talk about prestige, community of geeks, résumé building, or stock options, but I suspect free food is in many ways the culprit.

I would also wager that the cost to Google is less than $10 per day per person to offer such a perk, or approximately $2,500 per person per year. From what I gather, this is less than the pay decreases people are taking to be assimilated into Google, but the straight economic reasons are not the end of the story.

By creating an environment where employees mingle with different departments, casually bat around different ideas, and don’t need to consider the time cost and options of going out to lunch, Google effectively buys back an hour of employee time for $10-ish dollars which is now used for casual collaboration and team building.

That’s quite a value when talking about the time of some of the best and brightest minds in the country. It’s important to remember, they started this benefit when they were a small startup with no income and a smattering of VC money. Any company that deals with an intellectual product would be wise to follow this example and get a little bit more value out of your employee’s time for a small amount in additional investment. And hey, that’s something anyone can be in favor of.