What the Health!

Did you know?
A number of American companies make their employees' day at work not only a happier, but also healthier place. They provide them with healthy meals, open office spaces, fitness classes or even child care centers. As an example, I would like to tell you about an American company in the heart of Silicon Valley: Google.

Google Headquarters, Mountain View, CA

 

"Let's face it," says Eric Schmidt, "programmers want to program, they don't want to do their laundry. So we make it easy for them to do both." Google's 44,777 employees seem to be damn lucky. Not only is it possible for them to get their laundry done, but also can they go to the hairdresser or even have a doctor's appointment on the 26-acre Google campus in Mountain View, California.


Food, Snacks and Haircuts?

After enjoying a free gourmet meal in the cafeteria, Google employees can spend the rest of their break playing Ping-Pong, pool or even volleyball. Some of them might even want to go to the on-site hairdresser - for free. Provided by a company called Onsite Haircuts, its mobile homes are travelling around cutting the hair of  "Silicon Valley's tech army."

Back to food and snacks: Throughout the day, the cafeteria offers healthy snacks like dried fruit, nuts or coconut water. Before they decided to offer nuts such as pistachios, some employees "had a serious M&M addiction", Google admits. By the way, all the snacks are available for free. Although, there is one thing Google charges its employees for: machine food. What is that? Machine food is food inside an automat. So you'd have to insert money in order to get food. Google set their prices quite high so as to avoid its employees to buy those rather unhealthy foods and gain weight.

By having about 20 cafeterias on the Google campus, employees can decide on where to go for lunch.

Leisure Activities

As mentioned above, there are various possibilities how Google employees can spend their breaks. What seemed most intriguing to me was that just recently, Google invented a lap pool. What is a lap pool? It's a very(!) small outdoor pool that is "equipped" with a strong current that allows one to swim and swim and swim - and go basically nowhere! Of course, Google arranged lifeguards in case someone drowns.

On the entire campus there are numerous lounges where Googlers can just hang out and talk. They're even allowed to bring their dogs to work: "The presence of dogs at Google has been a unique and to some, a treasured part of our workplace culture. Dogs can be a valued and important part of employees' lives, and their ability to keep a dog in their workplace may enhance the quality of their work life."

BTW: In order to make sure that employees make it to meetings in time, they are provided with scooters and, what is even more exceptional, the campus has a slide (yes, a slide!) which can be used instead of taking the stairs.





Health Care

In case Google employees don't have time for a doctor's appointment, they can go for a checkup to an on-site doctor instead. There are even chiropractors and massage therapists on the Google campus. What would you say about a nice massage during lunch break?
I'd like to stop at this point and recommend watching this video as it gives some more insight on how working at Google Headquarters is like. It's worth watching, I promise. Have fun!

Image Sources

(1) www.whereverwriter.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMG_5682.jpg
(2) http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/3/000/249/1e6/06c0a31.jpg
(3) http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2006/inside_google/google/05.jpg
(4) http://www.whereverwriter.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMG_5693.jpg
(5) http://i.huffpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/250533/slide_250533_1519698_free.jpg?1347647456000

Sources

http://greatist.com/health/healthiest-companies
http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1947844_2013328,00.html