Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  The new interior of TBWAChiatDay’s offices. Photograph by Benny Chan, Fotoworks

  In its bravura, encircled, thorough design, TBWAChiatDay was at once breathtaking and scary. As a space, it soared, and to walk around as a visitor made you long, briefly, to work there—or at least get in a game of basketball. If this was a city, it was one that curiously made no reference to the massive city outside. In some respects, the city inside was better. Few streets in Los Angeles were as walkable as the one inside the TBWAChiatDay warehouse. Strolling around the place, cresting pedestrian bridges and lingering underneath the deep red hoops, reluctantly recalling my car and the freeway and the flight out I had to catch, I thought, why would you ever leave?

  Something similar occurred to me when I visited the offices of Google in Northern California. Campus offices like Google’s totally incorporate everything we do into one area. At Google you not only get free food all day and the gym anytime you want but also have day care, on-campus health and dental service, a resistance pool, and the ability to get your oil changed. If a preference for urban life causes you to move away from the main campus in Mountain View, you can take the Google bus from several points in San Francisco and begin your workday on the bus. (In fact, steep rent and housing increases have occurred in neighborhoods with proximity to Google bus pickup points, suggesting that the effect of offices carries well beyond their immediate glass-and-concrete bounds.)

  Visiting Google’s Mountain View offices is initially an underwhelming experience. The large campus is superficially indistinguishable from many office parks: low-slung, glassy buildings, encircled by trim lawns, all ringed by heavily trafficked streets and highways. To be sure, the beach volleyball court and “community” garden add a certain California-progressive air to the general tech company aesthetic—not to mention the strategically placed, goofy-looking small bicycles, slathered with the eye-popping Google quadricolor of yellow, blue, green, and red, that you’re supposed to be unembarrassed riding from building to building. It’s when you enter the buildings that you begin to sense a slight shift in the atmosphere. What looks from the outside like just another sunny chain of cubicle warrens turns out to be something that takes the word “campus” rather seriously.

  Like TBWAChiatDay, Google’s headquarters—the Googleplex—is meant to be a self-contained universe. You shouldn’t ever have to leave the campus to do the work you want; in fact, with endless amounts of free snack food and treadmill desks, you pretty much never have to leave, even to sustain your own biological existence. But the point of reference for this all-encompassing universe isn’t, as with TBWAChiatDay, the city; it’s the university. This isn’t a European-style university, plopped down in the middle of the city. The model is clearly Stanford University, which the Founders (as they are called), Sergey Brin and Larry Page, attended for a time, before dropping out to found their more lucrative corporate university—many of whose employees come, of course, from Stanford.

  The idea behind Google has been to make the normally wrenching transition from university life to corporate life as seamless as possible. Google had inherited the campus in 2004 from defunct Silicon Graphics, which had established the now hackneyed urban idea: a “Main Street” running through the building, spoking off into “neighborhoods,” encouraging people to use stairways rather than elevators for random encounters. The architect Clive Wilkinson (also the designer for TBWAChiatDay) was hired to push the idea of circulation even further, adding links between buildings, while emphasizing the campus life of the company. Outdoor sports, lots of food, various common rooms, a park—these were the first signifiers of campus life. Zones within the building were designated as “hot” and “cold”: the hot areas were meeting rooms and lounges, collaboration spaces for teamwork; the cold areas more like libraries and study rooms, for seclusion and private work. Finally, for the engineers who needed to code, “tents” were provided to house two to three people. This, according to the Founders, was the right size for coding.

  Google’s Mountain View office, which I visited in the spring of 2012, was an extraordinary conglomeration of spaces and furniture, not all of which, pleasantly enough, pushed the envelope of innovation. Aside from the treadmill desks (which I didn’t see anyone use), some of the spaces had cubicles. Many of the workstations were tightly packed together. And yet Google seems to care immensely about its workers’ preferences. New lighting, chairs, and desks were being tried out constantly. In one of the buildings, the Google rep Christopher Coleman told me, the company was trying out “ten different lighting systems, four different mechanical systems, and five different furniture manufacturers,” all to see which worked best for the Googlers.6 In that respect, Google seemed to hark back to older kinds of campus and familial work environments—Connecticut General, or even the Larkin Building. Google liked to mix traditional arrangements, such as cubicles, and “wackier” concepts, such as egg-shaped private nests (which it uses in its Zurich office), where people can have private conversations or even settle down and take a nap.

  Like TBWAChiatDay, Google seemed to want its employees to stick around, something its spokespeople confirmed. When I asked Coleman whether Google permitted workers to telecommute, he replied, “No—and we discourage it.” Google wanted its employees to be productive on campus, he argued, and coordinating with workers not at the office wasn’t helpful in that regard. But an employee I spoke to, who asked to remain anonymous, suggested that the policies weren’t so strict. She had worked at Google for several years, before moving to a dot-com start-up, only to move back to Google. “They’re the most flexible company I’ve ever worked for,” she said. “If people commute a lot, they’ll often work from home on a Friday. It is fairly lax, I would say, in terms of being at work and getting things done. They just assume you’re doing good things for the good of the company, and they trust you.”7

  Coleman took me into a large amphitheater with a two-story screen, where, he mentioned, the Founders would speak every Friday to the Googlers about what was going on in the company. Meant to be charmingly paternalistic, it struck me as scary: I had a slightly melodramatic vision of the giant poster of Citizen Kane, leering down at a mass of people in thrall. But soon afterward, Coleman showed me into what he indicated was one of the Googlers’ favorite places in the building. “They just love this place,” he said, as we walked into a small café space, buzzing with talk and the whir of a blender. It was a juice bar. Coleman pointed to the juices written on the chalkboard. This was their favorite place? He asked me why I thought people liked it so much. The juices? I replied. He pointed to the floor-to-ceiling windows, letting in a glimpse of green, and the late afternoon California springtime sun. “It’s the proximity to nature,” he said.

  The simplicity and cheerful haphazardness of Google tended to contradict the rather elaborate image it had constructed for itself. The same employee I spoke to above seemed to confirm this. She mentioned that the cafeterias have “these strange designs: you return your tray in a place where people are lining up for food. There’s this very inconvenient crossroads.” The Founders had set it up to encourage—of course—random encounters and encourage fraternizing among engineers. But when I asked her whether she thought Google’s long corridors did anything, she said, “You’ll run into people to get to know them and form relationships—it inspires innovation, I guess,” before confessing, “I don’t know why they did that.” What was more important in her view turned out to be the least prepossessing aspect of the office’s design: the company’s permissive dog policy. It was running into people with dogs that would prompt more human interactions: with dogs, she said, “for whatever reason, people are much more social.” In other words, long corridors where people might run into each other are fine, and their effect is equivocal, but what might work even better are policies that allow you to bring your pet to work.

  The Google and TBWAChiatDay models of workplaces have a kind of unquestioned authority to them, as well as
outward popularity. Many on the outside are trying to get in: Google receives about seventy-five thousand job applications a week, in no small part because it’s reputed to be a good work environment. It’s also, as a result, a very exclusive environment, and there is a kind of self-selecting quality that contributes to the informality of Google’s atmosphere: it’s an open secret, as an employee told me, that Google tends to seek out Ivy Leaguers for its office, ensuring that everyone has the same cultivated attitude of intelligence.

  Yet the model of an office that caters to all your needs (and mostly keeps you there) came under severe public strain when a Google alumna, Marissa Mayer, tried to apply its lessons to the company where she had recently become CEO, the struggling Silicon Valley search engine company Yahoo! Roughly contemporary with Google, Yahoo! had fallen conspicuously behind, becoming widely seen as a Valley has-been. Hiring Mayer in 2012 away from Google—where she was employee number twenty, and therefore something of a multimillionaire—was seen as both a last-ditch effort and a brilliantly bold move. Much of this boldness apparently had to do with the fact that Mayer, at the time of her hiring, was pregnant. How would she manage a company while also being a mother? people asked. Some of the testimony about Mayer’s insomniac prowess and even-the-early-Protestants-weren’t-like-this work ethic suggested the path forward. “She used to put in 130 hour weeks at Google,” explained Business Insider, and “she managed that schedule by sleeping under her desk and being ‘strategic’ about her showers.”8 As for her efforts to be a working mother, there was the unspoken and obvious idea that Mayer would be able to afford some in-home help. Still, there was hope among many that she would institute model work-life policies as a mother. Such hope suffered tremors of dismay when she announced that she would be taking only a paltry two-week maternity leave.

  And when an internal memo from Yahoo! leaked in late February 2012, indicating that the company’s policy on telecommuters would be abrogated, and all work-at-home employees asked to start putting their days in at the office, the fiercest outrage came from working parents, who took it out on Mayer. “Rather than championing a blending of life and work,” Lisa Belkin wrote at the Huffington Post, “she is calling for an enforced and antiquated division. She is telling workers—many of whom were hired with the assurance that they could work remotely—that they’d best get their bottoms into their office chairs, or else.” “Did Marissa Mayer actually have a baby or was that like a ploy for press or something?” one blogger at the site Scary Mommy wrote. In an industry—and a region—that had pioneered techniques of flexible working, many said, the fiat decision to end a progressive practice was nothing but a reactionary move. These sentiments were widely echoed.9

  The move itself had an obvious and plausible, if nonetheless cruel, rationale: that, faced with a beleaguered company, the CEO had made a “tough decision” to weed out the workers who were using their remote status to collect paychecks while remaining unproductive. A source close to Mayer suggested that at Yahoo! “a lot of people hid. There were all these employees [working remotely] and nobody knew they were still at Yahoo!” Many of them no doubt would not be able to come to the office as requested and would be forced to leave. It was a way, the same source attested, of “carefully getting to problems created by Yahoo!’s huge, bloated infrastructure.” The supposition that her Google training had led to the decision was also probably specious, since flexible work remains a practical reality there, if not something the company advertises. What’s more, a few months after the controversy over her decision—and despite and perhaps a little because of it—Mayer announced an extended maternity and paternity leave policy of eight paid weeks: this was nothing compared with, say, Sweden’s national policy of sixteen months’ leave at 80 percent pay, but in the United States, where paid maternity leave isn’t even required, it was a step in the right direction.

  Although this was not the intention, the decision at Yahoo! had set off a wide-ranging discussion about the nature of the workplace, one it appeared that office workers were increasingly desperate to have. At the heart of it was the issue of control. There was the old suspicion that workers shouldn’t be too far from management, who needed to keep a close eye on people to ensure that they worked, which many affirmed. Some insisted that despite all the trendy discussions of mobile work, people still worked better together, in an office. Others—following a long if sinuous line of management theorists—suggested that workers were better educated than ever before and had correspondingly high expectations and need for autonomy: they didn’t have to be corralled or watched in order to work and in fact worked better when not under surveillance.

  Whatever the truth of these arguments, there’s no question that in the last decade workplace “control” in the old sense has been subject to a certain kind of unraveling; in its stead have come workplaces characterized, at least on the surface, by more informality and autonomy on the part of workers themselves. Most people suggest that the increased mobility of technology is the prime mover in this. And there’s of course a great deal of truth to that: as everyone knows, contemporary technology enables us to work in ways that permit—as well as demand—work outside the bounds of the workplace. Of course, not all of the workplaces that produce mobile technologies encourage such work within their own offices. As the Dutch architectural historian Juriaan van Meel pointed out to me, “The small irony of these new ways of working is that the people who produce the tools that allow us to work in the cloud, to work anywhere we want to—this software is being produced by people sitting in offices … It’s highly personalized—at Google at least—people in cubicles, people working in groups. It’s not being done on an iPad from a café … roaming and working wherever you want to.”

  The hold of the office over its workers began to dissipate well before the “cloud.” The rise of temporary, freelance, and contract work in particular coincided with the gradual breaking of lifetime employment policies in American corporations in the “lean and mean” 1980s. As the cycle of mergers and layoffs became at once more intense and more routine, a larger proportion of workers were being hired on a contract basis, among them thousands of former employees forced out of the permanent workforce. Some of them, of course, sought out semipermanent work. Well before people felt comfortable about working from home, the change in the labor force began to prize apart the idea of “work” from any particular “place.” In her superb book, The Temp Economy, the historian Erin Hatton traced the rise of the temp industry from the early 1950s to the present. The early temp offices, like the “Kelly Girls” agency, explicitly linked work and gender: most temps were (and are) women, who performed work outside the home for needed cash—though the assumption was always that their real work was inside the home. It was only by the 1980s, when companies became less committed to having permanent workers, that temping became a fundamental, even paradigmatic, part of the American economy: temps were hired to replace striking workers, and the figure of the “permatemp”—the de facto permanent employee who conveniently received no benefits—became a common feature of the tech company landscape.10 When we see nomadic and non-territorial offices, with official policies about flexibility, it’s just as much the influence of this history of work as it is technology that’s the source.

  During the same years that Jay Chiat was trying to force his virtual office onto unexpectedly recalcitrant employees, a self-styled visionary consultant named Erik Veldhoen was doing something similar at a Dutch insurance company called Interpolis. Like Chiat/Day, Interpolis was doing badly in the early 1990s. It hired the ubiquitous consulting firm McKinsey to come in to do some consulting work, which naturally led to the ham-fisted solution of layoffs. But layoffs didn’t solve the problem. In desperation, Interpolis turned to Veldhoen. In 1995 he had become somewhat notorious for having published a book called The Demise of the Office, which argued, as many others were suggesting at the time, that telecommunications would soon put an end to the office as we knew it. Veldhoen and his
company came up with a simple plan. They assigned teams to floors and created a variety of work settings on each floor—private offices, semi-open spaces, and totally open spaces. Private desks were abolished. Workers now had lockers, a home zone where they worked each day, and an internal mobile telephone. And workers were now permitted to work from home as much as they needed—which typically meant one to two days a week. The people Interpolis had trouble convincing were not the workers themselves, as might be expected, but the managers. Managers were too used to being in positions where they could constantly watch their workers. The idea that workers might work anywhere in the building, let alone anywhere outside it, was frightening. “They think that if I see somebody he works,” Louis Lhoest, a consultant at Veldhoen + Company, told me. “It is not true. Most managers are quite lousy managers. If you’re really in contact with your people, you don’t have to see them every day, or every hour.”11

  The fear on the part of management that workers would disappear turned out to be unfounded. According to one study from the Center for Buildings and Places, a Dutch workplace research institute, workers appeared to seek each other out more, and internal communication increased.12 Environmental psychology studies, which suggested that requirements of status, privacy, and personalization were large barriers to flexible working, turned out to be disproven. After some initial resistance, workers adapted quickly to their new arrangements—though they did tend to seek out the same spot to work, despite the idea that the “activity-based” arrangement within the office was supposed to get people working in different spots.