“I’m here to thank you for your crazy genius parenting,” said Andy Berndt, the director of Google’s Creative Labs in welcoming the nearly 300 Googlers and their parents gathered at the company’s 8th Avenue headquarters to mark the company’s first-ever East Coast Take Your Parents To Work Day. “Whatever you did to your kids to make them this excited and creative and madly talented, that had to come from you guys,” he said, looking around the room of beaming moms and dads. “You should take a mad victory lap for that. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
With that, and a brief airing of the tear-inducing “Dear Sophie” commercial, sons and daughters were hugged and the indoctrination day's festivities had begun.
When Google thinks about making employees productive, says SVP of People Laszlo Bock, they don’t think in terms of the cushiest benefits (although Googlers do enjoy the best in maternal health and even death benefits) or outlandish perks (although video game banks and inter-office scooter transport have become the norm). So when the company introduced its first-ever “Take Your Parents To Work Day” in 2012 on its Mountain View campus, "It wasn’t a matter of “being cool,” he says, but rather “Just the right thing to do.”
“For people who are younger, when you get a job at Google, it’s a big deal,” Bock told me in a recent interview. “And people want to share that big deal with their families. It makes sense to include parents because we think of the people connected to Googlers as an extended family.” By bringing their parents to work for a day of seminars and tours, Google aims to welcome the extended family of its employees, introduce them to the work done on-campus and, of course, ensure they drink the company Kool-Aid of health, happiness and productivity.
"Sure we have bring your kids to work day," Berndt said as he sent the families off for the day. "But it's things like Bring Your Parents To Work that make us proud to work at Google."When he joined Google in 2007, Berndt thought he knew what he was in for. After all, his dad is an engineer. Much to his surprise it was his mother, a grade school teacher, whose career was the best indicator of what he’d encounter. “If you come to Google with business in mind, you’ll be lost," he advised. "Think of Google as a school and you’ll be right at home."
Google was a school on the recent Friday that marked the first-ever event, with coursework offered for Googlers and parents that ran the gamut from “How Google Makes Money” to “So You Think You Can Search.” In each the scene was similar: young Googlers pointing at computer monitors while moms and dads with varying degrees of tech-savvy looked on and smiled. Tools developer Ben Grooters was particularly hands-on with his mother, Edith Bauer and step-father Andrew in a Google Hardware course. “My mom actually was a programmer a long, long time ago,” he said with pride. Actually she was a teacher of programming, she corrects her son, and she couldn’t be more excited by the “gifted classroom” she discovered at Google.
At the opposite end of the savvy spectrum, Ari Shamash, a middle-aged engineer who led the hardware course, was accompanied by his own mother and father, septegenarians whose only exposure to technology has been through their son, even from a young age. Mom Dalia recounts with pride how her son wrote his first program in middle school. “I remember the first check was for $1,000,” she laughs, “and the checks kept getting smaller and smaller.” These days Ari is still setting the bar—teaching his mom Google products one at a time. “We use Google chat,” he says. “That way she gets the message on her computer if she’s home or her smartphone if she’s out.”
“How many of you feel like you understand what your kids do when they say they work at Google?” Berndt asks as the emcee of the day’s events. Two tentative hands in a sea of hundreds are raised. “She tells me she’s a product specialist,” says the mother of Katherine Wu, a member of Google’s product development team, “But I could guess what that is. Coming here and seeing it is something else all together.”
Of course while some parents and step-parents came to Google to learn more about the products and services their children develop, still more came for the cool-factor. “When you work here every day sometimes things start to seem ordinary,” says Amy Khosla of the much-hyped oddities of Google’s campuses. Parents (and reporters) were encouraged to indulge in a snack from the many health-conscious “mini-kitchens” on each floor while scooters were scattered for borrowing at every turn. The common refrain as the group made its way to the Water Tower Café—just one of three main dining areas on-campus--for lunch? “Wow.”
By lunchtime the crowd had been won over. You might imagine the conversations that will take place around the dinner table down the road when the unthinkable happens and their Googler children ever consider jumping ship. Ghost-white faces. Wide-eyed bewilderment. “But why would you ever, ever do that?”
Google's don’t-call-them-perks are known internally as “Optimize Your Life,” a three-pronged initiative by Bock’s team that aims to improve the physical, emotional and financial health of its employees no, Bock says, because it’s good for the bottom line, but because, in keeping with Google’s Do No Evil, “it’s the right thing to do.” That said, he does concede that there has been a happy accident of a trickle-down effect. “The programs improve retention,” he says, “They appear to improve performance and data has shown that they alleviate stress. In the end, I’d much rather be at a company that cares versus one that doesn’t.”
It’s safe to say, at least for these parents, that Google’s cool-factor (and Bock's hard work) has paid off. “When you tell someone your daughter works for Google, their eyes light up,” one father told me conspiratorially. Another mom confided how “amazing” it is to brag to all of her friends. “Google, she works at Google?” they ask. And while the question “What does she do?” might stump most parents—at least before this month’s session—it’s nothing compared to the question they hear most often: “Can you get my kid a job there too?”[newsincvid id="24468046"]
