Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers Google is pitching another strategy to convince Googlers to return to the office, specifically the campus at Mountain View HQ: offer them a night in an on-site hotel for $99 where they can simply crawl to their desk the following day. A three-day hybrid week was initiated by the company last year, yet employees aren't …
What kind of facilities do you think they'll provide for that, though? I somehow doubt you get a place where you can move in all of your things. Most likely, it's a smallish room with a bed, table, and bathroom, useful for being able to stay there but not where you want to live full time. That's assuming that paying every night will allow you to reserve a specific room at all times rather than getting assigned new ones on occasion, basically the difference between static IPs and ISP DHCP where yours doesn't change very often but you can't guarantee it. People might start comparing it to other options in the area, even expensive ones, to find something that better fits the kind of residence they expect with a well-paying tech job.
The threat of being fired when they're caught using someone else's security credentials to access an office. Maybe someone would be willing to take the risk, but I'd never entrust my credentials to someone else because they could use them to access the office while pretending to be me, possibly before doing something worse, and I have a feeling both of us would receive some nasty consequences as soon as that was discovered.
Google probably has more interest in getting people back to the office than a lot of companies, given how large an office footprint they have in the Bay Area. There's still that large area by Diridon Station in San Jose that they bought up for redevelopment into another huge campus (albeit right next to a major public transport hub), will be interesting to see how that fares.
This doesn't sound like such a bad deal.
I mean, suppose you took advantage of remote working during the pandemic and now live in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Driving to Mountain View takes 3 - 4 hours, but that's manageable if you don't have to do it every day -- there are plenty of folks who do this for the weekend, often leaving Thursday night and returning Monday before dawn.
With the Google accommodation plan, you can leave early Tuesday, spend Tuesday and Wednesday night at the G*Hotel for $200, and be home late Thursday. And of course "early Tuesday" and "late Thursday" are fungible quantities. This works out at $800 per month, which is substantially cheaper than trying to buy a crash pad in Silicon Valley, particularly when you factor in the idea that some weeks may only need one night, or none at all.
Of course it's not ideal, but when considered in the light of Bay Area housing, it's not a horrible way to keep your G*Income stream while living remotely.
(I can get hotels just across the bridge from Facebook for ~$150/night, plus the bridge tolls. So $99 isn't bad).
Well, perhaps, but it's nothing new: affluent people in The City (of London) used to (and many probably still do) have flats "in town" and live in "the country". Back around the turn of the century the City was a desolate wasteland on weekends, but bustling during the week. For a while there was a thriving pastime in finding places to go out to eat on Fridays and Saturdays (spoiler alert: east of Bishopsgate).
[ Back in the early 1960s, my parents bought a good sized but somewhat run-down house in the not-very-fashionable suburbs close to the far end of the District Line, waited until the kids finished school, sold the suburban house -- which had become much more fashionable and less run-down -- and bought a flat in the Barbican and a house in darkest Oxfordshire, all through the magic of real-estate appreciation and child labor for renovation... ]
This is the poster-child company for both overt and covert tracking analytics. Surely Google has data showing productivity levels of remote vs. on-site workers. I didn't see any reference to productivity metrics in the article.
I might be a touch cynical here... If Google has hard data showing greater productivity on-site, I expect they would be shouting it loudly. The absence of that data suggests either the data does not exist, or the data exists but does not support their return-to-office narrative. I am betting the latter is accurate.
I'm betting on the former. They should be able to collect that data, and someone probably does, but statistical analysis of that data is hard and leads to complex reports that say things like "The correlation indicates with low confidence". Manager's don't want to look at that, and Google's business relies on that fact. After all, a lot of advertising is useless but people do it because they can't be bothered to analyze whether it helped or to run some experiments to see how much. Why should they check the numbers when they can just announce the new idea, which might be beneficial or harmful but they have the freedom not to check which.
Your top performers will flee. What's left will be demotivated. Your output and morale will suffer. What a terrible use of the company's real estate assets. The employees have spoken. You should listen to them. You lack metrics showing that in office performance is better. If you had such metrics, you would shout them from the housetops not hide them under a bushel. My prediction is: years from now business schools will be using the RTO push as a cautionary tale of how more adaptive companies prosper by finding profitable uses of their unoccupied real estate while ones stuck in a more 20th century mindset are left behind.
I've been to the office 3 times this year. We now share 18 hot desks between a department of 100, so we couldn't all come back at the same time if we wanted to. The organisation is considering closing it's current campus and rebuilding a smaller office elsewhere.
So looks like I'll likely be at home for the rest of my career,
That's quite a change in just 3 years.
"grab a delicious breakfast or get a workout in before work starts."
Are they mutually exclusive? Is that why it's "only" $99 per night?
And this IS a bunch of IT nerds, so is breakfast whatever cold pizza is left from the night before?
I think he'd prefer the breakfast over the workout ------->
It became clear a good while ago that none of the 'big' employers were ever going to allow 100% remote forevermore, but people seemed happy to live in denial. If you were one of those people who literally bet your house on that and moved 300 miles away from your employer's nearest premises on the promise of "remote work forever" that is now being rolled back, then you have a problem coupled with some big personal decisions.
There was a delusion that "remote work" meant employees would now hold all the cards and dictate their terms with employers being overjoyed to give it to them. "Remote work" meant you can live on the banks of Loch Cranachan and get Canary Wharf pay and benefits without ever being able to point out London on a map.
That was never sustainable and ultimately very unrealistic. I also suspect this "digital nomad" trope will go the same way in 2-3 years, the only reason it's a thing at all is because countries are reeling from the lack of tourism. That will eventually stabilise.
Considering how awful London is, I'd argue that Loch Cranachan is insufficiently far from that self-aggrandising monument to an empire it can't accept it doesn't have any more for anybody whose had the bad luck of needing to spend any length of time there.
- Signed, A Northern Lass.
Oh I don't know. There's such a thing as competition. If the competition is willing to let employees work from home then Google is gonna lose out on some big talent.
Unless all the companies by way of synchronicity decide to ban WFH this trend won't die. Employees will fight it tooth and nail.
Agree, lockdown was too short!
It would have probably only required a few more months before leaders would have been forced to adopt WFH etc. as the new way of working.
However, it was sufficient for some to see the true scale of overhead costs, specifically of head office admin functions being performed in expensive locations.
I suspect the two big factors in the “Return to the Office” are:
1. Too many Peter Principle people in management.
2. Existing office leases.
Not saying there aren’t benefits in same time-same place working, just that these aren’t the main drivers (back in the 80s some rapid growth IT companies seem to have managed to balance office and home working, also BT had a mature WFH organisation, so blended working is not really new..)
Expect firstly, as growth continues to elude companies, there to be a downward pressure on staff costs. However, the wise will be looking to not extend those now expensive leases, so secondly,as they finish expect offices to be vacated. Also media releases will extoll the virtue of WFH et al; With C-suite individuals being remotely interviewed from their Caribbean island “hovell” (/sarcasm).
I would also expect activist investors will be pushing boards to get rid of offices - consuming monies that could be lining investors pockets…
Google will either have to accommodate its workers or risk losing talent to companies who have a more lenient policy on WFH (work from home).
WFH can be extremely profitable for most Bay Area workers since housing prices are literally in the millions for a 4 bedroom run-of-the-mill home near one of the tech-giants. If you can work from, say, Nebraska, you could save yourself a bundle.
I wonder if there’s a financial incentive to the company to have employees come into the office. It can’t be simply expense reduction because regardless of whether the office space is leased or is owned by the employer, it is already sunk cost. So, why the hard sell on RTO? If there was data to prove better productivity, that would have been blared out incessantly.
Is it because real estate expense gets favorable tax treatment in the company’s books if employees are on-site? Are there any accountants reading El Reg (why? ;)) that can chime in on this theory?
As they are proud of always hiring the best, the best can easily walk.
I suspect they will have a massive uphill struggle that will result in the $99 being waived and a pay increase for many behind the scenes in hush hush pay deals.
If it was me, I'd refuse point blank because this is dictat caused by the same thinking that made bricks and mortar stores close by not adapting to online quick enough.
Who'd want to work for a has-been company like that now, if you can just as easily walk into a better higher paid remote job?
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