Google, the tech giant known for its great employee perks, is making changes to its companywide benefits as it seeks to reallocate funds and create cost-cutting measures. With the company laying off thousands of employees amid recession fears and prioritizing Artificial Intelligence technology, it is taking drastic steps to keep up with other search engines.
According to a Business Insider report, Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat sent a memo to Google employees on Friday outlining the elimination or reduction of several perks, including some of the company’s micro kitchens that provide employees with free snacks like cereal, espresso, and seltzer water. According to the memo, the company will also no longer allocate funds towards purchasing personal devices like laptops.
“...equipment is a significant expense for a company of our size, we’ll be able to save meaningfully here,” Porat wrote in the memo. She added that the company would reduce its hiring pace and reallocate teams to focus on higher-priority work.
As per the reports, the modifications to perks will differ depending on the requirements of each office location and will be influenced by the usage patterns of amenities like kitchens in that particular office space. The micro kitchen will be closed on days that typically see a significantly lower volume of use, and some fitness class schedules will be shifted depending on how they are being used.
For a long time, Google workers have relished in the luxuries of laundry services, massages, company-provided meals, fitness amenities, as well as handsome salaries and stock awards, rendering it a desirable workplace. Nevertheless, these privileges may soon come to a close, as Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, revealed earlier this year that the company would be downsizing its workforce by approximately 6 per cent, equivalent to nearly 12,000 employees.
Pichai, who has called AI the most transformative technology, said that by laying off employees, the company could “direct our talent and capital to our highest priorities.”
In addition to these changes, Google recently informed employees that some workers would have to rotate and negotiate desk space as the company looks to downsize some of its offices.
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