Google Is Now Providing Servants to Its Employees [Perks]
·237 words·2 mins·
Heads up: This post is 15 years old.
My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
Free food, free time, freedom to do what you want while you’re on the company’s paycheck. Most companies and most business owners just can’t grasp these concepts of “autonomy to improve motivation”!
(Testing “sent-to” from Google Reader, it wants to send the entire feed item content out! I’m cutting it down a bit…
So much for the war on Googler entitlement. Amid heated competition for engineers, Google is trying a remarkable new perk: free use of “runners” to clean apartments, take out trash, cook dinner, run errands—whatever is needed.
Googlers are being provided with credits on TaskRabbit, an online service that brokers odd jobs in five major cities. Recent job listings on the site include “Fold Laundry and Put it Away,” “Cook dinner for 2,” “assemble four items from Ikea,” “standard wash and fold: 3 loads,” “dispose of Ikea bead,” “Pick up and deliver cake,” and “walk a dog.” The perk, presumably, only applies to Google workers who live in one of the five metropolitan regions TaskRabbit serves, including New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.
TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque wouldn’t get into specific details, like whether Google has put a dollar limit on how much it will pay toward any one job, or whether the benefit is permanent. But she did confirm to us that “Googlers are enjoying TaskRabbit as a sponsored service,” adding:
