Even though it was just 8am, the canteen at Facebook’s Singapore office was pretty packed with employees having breakfast. I was a bit surprised – I had this idea that kids working at these new tech companies were not early risers and preferred working late at night.
“Hey, maybe they never left,” jested the colleague whom I was having breakfast with.
He could be right. After all, the offices of these new tech companies are so impressive who would ever want to leave to go home especially when you live in cities like Singapore and Hong Kong where your flat is probably the same size as the phone booth which doubles up as a meeting corner in your office or you still live with your parents because you can’t afford to get into the real estate market.
Tech companies like Facebook, Google and Airbnb spend millions of dollars on creating workplaces that blur the lines between work, play and life – calling them offices is almost an insult – and they do so clearly to attract and retain talent but I suspect also to make work so fun you never want to leave.
“This thing called work-life balance, you find it within these four walls,” laughed my friend as we were taken on a tour of the Facebook office.
But first about the breakfast – it’s as big a buffet spread than at a five star hotel. There are Western, Chinese and Indian choices. I was told they ran a chef competition and the supremo running the kitchen is a celebrity chef. Occasionally, they have visiting chefs – just like in a hotel, see what I mean by making you feel so at home?
Look at me, I’m so Instagrammable
Throughout the workplace, there are conversation pieces – there’s a piece of art made up of thousands and thousands of used chopsticks (top picture). There’s a vending machine where you can pick up any gadget you need that day free of charge. There’s a corner where you can have an Instagrammable moment with a couple of cutouts.
Everything is deliberately kept raw in keeping with Generation Z’s “living life in beta” mantra – I have read that Facebook’s culture is that life is a journey of tests and who knows if you’ll ever reach the destination. I understand the ceiling had to be stripped at the cost of thousands and thousands of dollars so that the pipes, vents and stuff underneath would be shown.
Living life in beta
Take me please, I am free and yours
There’s Facebook mahjong, a wall where visitors can leave messages, a treadmill room with a view – who needs to go to gym, you can run and work at the same time – and an LED display wall that shows Facebook interactions around the world – it looks like a scene from a science fiction movie.
Games to keep boredom at bay
I am told they are growing so fast they have to move offices every two years – imagine the tear-down and build-up costs each time – but this is what companies like Facebook feel they need to do to create a place where people want to do more than work – they want to belong to a community.
It’s almost cult-like.
Booking.com’s Singapore office has a big gathering area around good coffee and food
Tech companies in travel such as Booking.com and Expedia are also splashing out on their offices because they know they have to compete for talent. Expedia’s Singapore office is in the same South Beach building as Facebook and Booking’s offices in the Marina Bay Financial Tower is not too shabby either. And by the way, the views from all these offices are literally worth millions of dollars.
Co-working space at Far East Pavilion, Singapore
The numerous co-working spaces that are popping up in Singapore to cater to the growing startup scene are trying to emulate these offices – call it a poor man’s Google or Facebook – but they do exude a vibrancy and energy that encourages creativity.
So how on earth can traditional travel companies who need to embrace digital transformation compete with these new tech companies for the same pool of digital talent?
All this was going through my head when I listened to Andrew Grant, author of “Who Killed Creativity”, talk about the factors that suck creativity out of us at Travelport Live conference in Macau recently.
Among the factors he listed were pessimism and negativity in the staff canteen. He spoke of a hospitality human resource executive who told him they deliberately served bad food and cold coffee so people wouldn’t stay too long in the canteen to “bitch” about work. “Google makes a nice canteen, they create a place where people can meet, connect and bang into each other,” said Grant.
Another big killer is pressure, he said. He cited a statistic that said addiction to email can lower your IQ twice as much as smoking marijuana. “It takes 25 minutes to get into the creative flow and yet we spend our time multi-tasking – doing four or five things at one time. When you do that, all creative ideas shut down.”
Other factors that kill creativity in the workplace – fear, insulation and narrow-mindedness. “Our newsfeed algorithms feed us information we already want to hear. We are getting narrowed down. We are creating a safe place where like-minded folks can hear things they can already agree with, rather than look for diverse opinions.”
Which is truly ironic – the very same tech companies that are killing our creativity are spending millions on work spaces to unleash their staff’s creativity?