Google is one of the most inspirational companies when it comes to employee management and work-life balance. For more than two decades, Google has stood up to the expectations of most other companies and has basically set up the standards for office culture in Silicon Valley. There are companies all across the globe that look up to Google in employing lavish employee perks like free food and other services. The company has successfully kept its employees happy for more than two decades and this one of the biggest reasons for Google to be standing among the top five technology companies in the world.
Unfortunately, it seems like things at Google aren’t the same anymore because, over the past few months, Google employees have been complaining about the company’s policies tirelessly amidst which a senior executive announced that he is moving to New Zealand and some workers are tagging this as “special treatment”.
The pandemic hasn’t been tough on any of us and companies all over the world are employing remote work culture, even Google but employees are calling it Google’s hypocritical remote work policies because of several reasons.
As mentioned in a report by CNET, Laura de Vesine, a site reliability engineer at Google was after the tech giant for a potential relocation to which there was no positive response or justifiable reason. Fed up with the search engine company’s inflexible policies, she handed in her notice to leave the company. This is just one of many cases that Google has been black-spotted with and there is more to the story.
The report further mentions that last fall, Laura de Vesine’s team was asked to relocate from the company’s office in Sunnyvale, California to North Carolina which is approximately 40 miles south of San Francisco. Google had issued a relocation of the entire team with the prospect of ditching the Bay Area housing prices and long commute time which was far from convenient. Google employees got pretty upset at this point but the company demands what it requires and it was a done deal to relocate. However, this decision by the company came with a 15% salary cut, de Vesine mentioned, and only sometime later, the team was told that there would be a 25% cut in salary instead of 15% earlier. It is natural for the employees to feel devastated with the company at this point but after one month, the team relocation idea was completely scrapped.
De Vesine said that it is a fact that Google doesn’t prioritize the needs of human beings and with this incident, maybe she is right.
Corporate remote work culture is going to be normal for the next few years and big tech giants are incorporating permanent ‘work from home’ or coming to the office two times a week, or a hybrid model as per the company’s convenience. Nevertheless, Google needs to revive its reputation of being a global standard for work culture, or else, there is a good chance that it will lose its goodwill in the eyes of the world.
