Glimpses of life at Googleplex

MANILA, Philippines - Lunch time at Google’s sprawling corporate headquarters in Mountainview, California is very much like noon time in any university campus – people are milling about, some on a leisurely stroll, others more hurried, some are riding bikes, some are just lounging on wooden chairs painted in Google colors.

The cafeterias are filled to the brim, but many choose to dine al fresco. There are also many food trucks parked all over the campus and you can take your pick – Mexican, Italian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese or Filipino cuisine.

Yes, there’s a Filipino Comfort Food truck called Adobo A-Go-Go, which dishes out plates of our famous national dish and all you need is your Google ID to get a taste of home.

Gail Tan, head of communications and public affairs, Google Philippines & Thailand, estimates that there are over 30,000 employees at the Google headquarters (also known as Googleplex) from almost all nationalities. Walk into the cafeteria and you’ll see humanity in technicolor – almost every race, nationality, ethnicity, gender identity and even fashion sense are represented.

Food, it seems, is one way to iron out the many contours of diversity. So at the main cafeteria, you can line up at the salad bar, the sushi bar or the pizza bar. You can make your own burger, burrito, soup, rice bowl or your own sweet concoction for dessert. The food carts all over the campus are also meant to cater to the food taste of a very diverse group of people working and innovating together.

“We need food to nourish and sustain us in our work,” says one of the tour guides. Not even once did she mention or explained though why the food is free – morning, noon, night – not just to employees but to visitors as well.

Tan says food is actually free in all Google offices all over the world, including the Philippines. The kitchen is a requirement in every building a Google office is housed. In addition to the kitchen, there is a well-stocked pantry with free-flowing coffee, tea and other drinks.

In one of the mini-kitchens at Googleplex, there is an adjoining game room where people can play at lunch time and a laundry room where they can do their laundry while taking a break. These are standard amenities in all buildings at Googleplex.

Many years ago on a visit to the Google’s Singapore office, we spotted a room with low white tables paired with pastel colored chairs, making it look like a kindergarten class. The game room has a billiards table, Nintendo Wii and Wow Magic Sing, the walls are painted in Christmas red, cool blue and neon green.

It seems like an odd place in corporate Singapore, housed in a cylindrical building in the city state’s financial district where people are in business suits, mostly in blacks and grays. But anywhere in the world, tech companies like Google are oddities because they defy the norms of the regular corporate life.

It seems that it takes an enormous amount of creative fuel to motivate people whose jobs involve writing code, designing software, dabbling in algorithms, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, the cloud and all the hardcore geeky stuff that has everything to do with machines, computers  and mobile phones because it is a tough world, a cruel industry that could make you obsolete if you even bat an eyelash.

Frederik Pferdt, head of innovation & creativity programs at Google, asked every member of our tour group to draw the person sitting next to us and hand over the ‘art work’ to that person. The room sputtered into a Babel of reactions that are a few decibels higher than in a bar.

“That is the reaction I get in 99 percent of people,” he says, noting that most were embarrassed to hand over their work. “If I do that exercise with kids, they’ll draw cars that can fly, rockets that can reach the moon. They are never embarrassed about crazy ideas.”

What is happening in most organizations, he says, is that people lose the ability to not just come up with ideas, but the courage to share those ideas with each other with pride.

“We are trying to establish an environment where people can share ideas which might not be finished, might not be perfect, but are an attempt to start disrupting things, to start a discussion of things that may be impossible at the moment,” he explains. 

Once a week, he says, the company has an event called Thank Google it’s Thursday (TGIT) where the leaders come together with the employees to share ideas and passions across teams and answer questions from across the company.

“That openness and transparency are very valuable to an innovation culture because you can actually feel what is the pulse of the company, what do people really care about at the moment, what are on our leaders’ minds,” he says.

Perhaps it is true that you can indeed see things differently and dream big things if you see the world from upside down like a fruit bat hanging from a tree or if you are living the ultimate geek life at Google.

By encouraging people to ask big questions and share them, Pferdt says, they get people excited about being part of something bigger, or being a part of a mission to achieve something and change the world. And what if those questions can actually be translated into corporate mission statements as well?

Visitors at Googleplex do get excited about very simple things, aside from the free lunch  – first, the colorful bikes that one can use to roam around the campus; and second, the Android Lawn Statues, which were named after versions of Google’s Android mobile operating system – Froyo, Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich, Lollipop, Jelly Bean, KitKat and Marshmallow.

That’s the best place ever in the campus for a selfie or a groufie.