Unit 2, Listening 1, The 21st-Century Workplace
Part 1: The 21st-Century
Workplace
John Blackstone:
Welcome to the good life at Google. This campus in Mountain View, California,
offers employees comforts, privileges,
and perks that workers at most other companies can only envy. But what may seem
like luxuries are actually good business, and Google can prove that because the
company studies everything it does.
Laszlo Bock: We try to bring as much analytics[1]
and data and science to what we do on the people side as our engineers do on
the product side.
Blackstone: Laszlo Bock heads Google’s People
Operations department; that’s HR to you and me. Google’s talent for data mining gives him detailed
information on what pays off.
Bock: When an employee starts on the
first day, we have data that says if the manager shows up and says, “Hi, nice
to meet you, you’re on my team, we’re gonna be working together” and does a few
other things, those people end up 15 percent more productive in nine months.
Radcliffe: Google will be an unconventional company.
Blackstone: To make sure the rest of the Googler’s
career remains productive is David Radcliffe’s responsibility.
Radcliffe: We thought it would be a great idea to
build a . . . a building that allowed us to really try out new things and find
out what works and what doesn’t work.
Blackstone: He’s in charge of creating the perfect
environment.
Radcliffe: We call it our living laboratory.
Blackstone: Inside the living lab, Radcliffe’s team tests
everything from floor to ceiling. Diner booths[2],
it turns out, can work better than traditional conference rooms.
Radcliffe: I would say, “casual collisions” are what we try and create
within the work environment. You know you can’t schedule innovation[3].
Blackstone: This is a conference room in here . . .
Radcliffe: . . . It’s a, it’s a conference room
that was made overnight. It’s—the idea behind this is the employee should own
their individual space to be as creative as possible and we shouldn’t get in
their way.
Blackstone: When all that innovation gets too much,
there’s a solution for that, too. [whispers]
Should we whisper out here?
Radcliffe: I think so. No workplace is complete
without a nap pod[4]. We’ve found that the 5-
to 15-minute power nap . . . it works on Sunday before you watch the football
game, why not here at work?
Blackstone: The lab searches for building materials
that are free of chemicals, like soy foam furniture. Even the impact of paint
colors is analyzed.
Radcliffe: We actually get a negative response
out of this color, so you probably won’t see it popping up in other parts of .
. .
Blackstone: People don’t like purple for some reason.
Radcliffe: I guess not, I don’t know what it is.
. . . I actually like the color myself, but it doesn’t work in the work
environment.
Blackstone: While unhappy workers at other companies
may sometimes feel they’re toiling[5] on
a treadmill[6], Google offers treadmill
desks as an option. Research has shown that walking while you work can be good
for your health.
The company maintains a thousand
bikes on campus and gives workers their own garden space to grow vegetables.
Google famously provides free food—three meals a day plus unlimited snacks. The
company’s data mining revealed that was making Googlers gain weight. A change
was needed.
Bock: We started experimenting with
what we called nudges, which are small interventions
we can make that don’t force people down a path, but make it easier to make a
better decision.
Blackstone: Nudges promoting smaller plates increased
their use by half. Food choices are now color-coded green, yellow, and red—red
being the least healthy. Salads and greens moved to the front of the line, and
sugary snacks became a bit harder to find.
Bock: We took the sweets, M&Ms,
for example, and we moved them a little further down the shelf. And what we
found was over a seven-week period, we actually had people consume over three
million fewer calories of M&Ms.
Blackstone: Ultimately, the goal behind all this
number crunching is to extend the
life of the average Googler by an astonishing 30 years.
You want them to live longer.
Bock: We do actually. It’s funny. I
think our oldest Googler is 83 years old. And we want people at Google for a
lifetime.
Blackstone: And the search giant will keep searching
for ways to do that.
Unit 2, Listening 1, Part 2, Activities A and D. Video
also available on iQ Online.
Page 35, 37
Part 2: The 21st-Century
Workplace
John Waanders: The
basic layout of our floor plan is
designed very much akin to[7] a
typical large-scale Wall Street trading floor.
Liu: It represents the days of
Michael Bloomberg and how he traded and how he worked on Wall Street.
Waanders: On a trading floor, typically you’ll
find people on opposite ends of the floor stand up and scream something. Here,
you’ll often hear that somebody has a client on the call or a new prospect on
line 5 from Ohio.
Liu: There’s so many floors, so
many areas to this building that sometimes I get lost finding my way there, and
I’ve been here for six years.
Mayo: Every kind of nook and cranny[8] of
the space is kind of occupied at all times. There are people broadcasting television programs from
right next to where you’re getting your cereal. So when you come in, you know
that you really need to step up to the plate[9].
Pettypiece: We have television, we have radio, we
have print, we have a huge web presence, we have The Wire and The Terminal
. . .
Waanders: We have one bank of elevators that
everybody comes up together on. Everybody gets off on the same sixth floor and
from there you distribute out to the 20-something floors that we’ve got. From
somebody casually observing it, it’s chaotic,
but more often than not, I’ll compare it to Grand Central Station at rush hour.
Pettypiece: I think a lot of engineering has gone
into thinking about how to get these thousands of employees around in a limited
space.
Liu: There’s just so many
floors, so many areas to this building, that sometimes I get lost.
Storelli: I think of it as a university
environment because it’s so easy for me to just start talking to anybody on the
team without appointments, without really much of a formality, which makes
sharing of thoughts and ideas extremely easy.
Liu: The first time I walked
into the headquarters, it felt like you were working at a tech start-up[10]
or a tech company because it’s that modern, it’s that modern-looking. All the
rooms are made of glass so you can see inside and you can also see outside of
these rooms.
Waanders: People don’t really expect to have a lot
of privacy at their desk. So when you’re sitting at a desk that’s on an open
trading floor, the fact that somebody in a remote office[11]
has a camera that sees you isn’t much different than somebody being across the
floor and being able to see you from there.
Liu: Our main form of
communication is email and it’s through our terminals or on our phones. We can
instant-message each other. Your emails come up quickly. We’re all tethered to
our smartphones and our tablets, so it’s almost like you can’t get away from it.
Waanders: Throughout the building there’s a lot of
information about what’s going on with the company. It’s displayed on walls, on
arcade screens, on overhead displays . . .
Liu: For other people, it might
get overwhelming to see all this
news all the time, but for me, well, I’m a news junkie[12] .
. .
Pettypiece: There definitely are days where all this
information can get to be a little too much. You just need to put your
headphones or some earplugs in.
Waanders: There is no place to escape.
Pettypiece: I’m pretty good at tuning out a lot of
the information and noise around me.
Liu: I use the news ticker[13]
on the sixth floor. I look at that all the time, too.
Storelli: There’s no office. It goes to the
idea of sharing of ideas. When it comes to throwing out good ideas, we’re all
at the same level.
Waanders: Sometimes you’ll see one project going
on and another project and they have roughly the same end, and there’ll be some
friendly competition.
Liu: There are actually a couple
places that you can relax. Let’s say if I need a break, I’ll go up to the sixth
floor, to the Link, where Bloomberg provides the free drinks and the free
snacks to employees and all the guests that come in. So I’ll go there and take
a break. When the weather gets warmer, we sometimes have our show meetings
outside.
Mayo: Bloomberg employees really do
use every piece of the space.
Storelli: You can sense the energy. It’s like
seeing, seeing the blood flow of the thinking of the company.
[1] analytics: noun detailed analyses
[2] diner booth: noun a table at a restaurant enclosed with two long high-back seats
[3] innovation: noun a new idea or product
[4] nap pod: noun a small enclosed spot to sleep
[5] toil: verb to work hard
[6] treadmill: noun an electric walking machine used for exercise
[7] akin to: adjective similar to
[8] nook and cranny: noun a small corner in a room
[9] step up to the plate: idiom to do what is necessary
[10] tech start-up: noun a technology company that is just beginning to operate
[11] remote office: noun a workplace that is distant from the main office
[12] news junkie: noun someone very interested in the news
[13] news ticker: noun a line of text containing news shown on a computer or
television
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