Google Employee Productivity
Posted by jonathan at 5:11pm EST on 06/18/2009
Google employees are well known for making good use of their time. But don’t let this overly zealous reputation fool you. Of course not every employee will be working 24/7, every moment of every day.
Do Google employees need a break from time to time? You bet!
If you’ve ever been to a Google office, you know first hand that it’s never all work and no play, there’s definitely play involved. Here are a few other quick shots of Google offices around the world.
Update at 6:50pm EST (06/25/2009), Brian White made a comment below and I completely missed the joke he was inferring. %20 translates into “space” in web terms. If you had a URL like this, example.com/This Is My Joke.html, a browser would interpret it as example.com/This%20Is%20My%Joke.html.
So in short, he was “spacing” out 
Brian’s a clever guy, he flew right by me on that one. Thanks for the comment Brian!
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OZ
Jun 20th, 2009
Reminds me of when I was in the IBM lab here in Toronto. The research and experience these big companies have shows that people are more productive when they are in a more relaxed environment.
If you have a whip behind your every move, you’re going to get stressed out, and that diminishes your productivity. If you know you can go somewhere to relax, and the environment is based on goals (time is << goals), you're going to be more productive.
Even just knowing you can go somewhere to relax if you need to be makes you more productive. Google takes concepts and turns them upside down and rearranges them, that's why they're so successful.
That's why obsessing about employees work 40 hours a week as a #1 priority is moronic in my opinion. It's setting goals and accomplishing them that drives business forward, time is just a subset of that.
Regards,
OZ
Jonathan Dingman
Jun 21st, 2009
That’s some great insight OZ, thank you for taking the time to leave a comment.
I completely agree, that stressing over 40 hours a week, will indeed mean less productivity. Setting goals is far more productive and will make employees happier at the end of the day
Dataflurry
Jun 22nd, 2009
That is awesome, I love seeing companies that treat employees great. I am sure the fact that Google is so profitable allows them to invest in entertaining activities, but those are some great statistics for productivity.
Brian White
Jun 25th, 2009
I think you missed the joke. “%20″ is Unicode for a space…
Jonathan Dingman
Jun 25th, 2009
Haha, how right you are
I was so consumed by the 70/20/10 methodology of Google, that it didn’t even click that you meant a space instead of 20%
very clever of you