A relentless focus on employee experience

We can’t win on “setup convenience”, so we have to be extremely good at providing a great in office experience. This might sound like it would not scale but we will build this “experience layer” into existing pre-fabs/components or build components (seasonal, animated backgrounds for example) that can be layered on top of each office.

Furthermore, the bar here is not “high”. Yes, Gather is walking + talking simulator so how can we make walking or talking more “fun”. A few reflections I make about our office:

• Gelb religiously re-rolls the big deca art painting on the way to and from stand up

• I water my plant and get angry when someone else waters it while I am afk

• Greta makes pirate-ship desks and custom Go-Karts, etc.

• Ellen has a cat

How much of this can be “built in” to the components? Maybe, if we have different desks, they should all have something special.

Opinionated desks & areas

Instead of empty desks, each desk should have (up to 3?) characteristic/identifying features such as a pet, a plant, re-loadable pictures, pirate stuff, certain color, etc. For bigger offices (~25+) we do themed areas. Each area is the hub for a team or project in the company.

The Google office in Switzerland I visited was designed like this:
Each floor had a different theme (Beach, Alps, Jungle, etc. Reflected in the wallpaper and flooring) with a fitting “quiet room” (A little indoor garden with a hammock on the Jungle floor), “coffee room/ social station”, “call pods” (on the Alps floor these were old gondolas), etc. Different floors were separated by fire poles (that you were not allowed to use as a visitor since your were not insured.