Even though it was just 8am, the canteen at Facebook’s Singapore office was packed with employees having breakfast. I was 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, my breakfast host.
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 tiny or you still live with your parents?
Companies like Facebook, Google, Airbnb, Expedia and Booking.com spend millions of dollars on creating workplaces that blur the lines between work, play and life 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.
The breakfast is as big a buffet spread as at any five-star hotel. There are Western, Chinese and Indian choices. They run chef competitions and the supremo running the kitchen is a celebrity chef. Occasionally, they have visiting chefs – just like in a hotel.
Throughout the workplace, there are conversation pieces, art works and sayings on the walls. 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 understand the ceiling had to be stripped at a huge cost so that the pipes, vents and stuff underneath would be exposed.
There’s a treadmill room with a view and an LED display wall that shows Facebook interactions around the world. This new generation of workers want to do more than work in an office – they want to belong to a community. It’s almost cult-like.
Today, numerous co-working spaces, which try to emulate these environments, are popping up all over the world to cater to these new workers – they exude a vibrancy and energy that encourages creativity.
At the Travelport Live conference in Macau recently, Andrew Grant, author of “Who Killed Creativity”, talked about the factors that suck creativity out of the workplace.
One factor is pessimism and negativity in the staff canteen. “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. 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 send 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.”
So if you want your talent to be creative, serve good coffee, have a pantry stocked with goodies, and make it so fun they never want to leave.