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Workplace Campuses and Historical Precedents

Traditional workspaces are designed to allow each person to get the maximum amount of work completed each day, spending most of the time alone in a fairly utilitarian environment with minimal distractions. The size and location of the offices indicate status (corner offices are prized), and lunchrooms or cafeterias and water coolers provide the only place for brief social encounters.

State-of-the-art workplaces today, however, incorporate technology and encourage collaboration. Ergonomic furniture is available for comfort, and laptops and tablets allow workers to move around the facility as desktop computers could not. In fact, workers in the new flexible workplace spend less than 50 percent of their time at a desk.

Moreover, as we discussed in the previous section, many enjoy the flexibility of telecommuting as needed. Furthermore, in open-plan spaces, all work positions locations are alike; status is not signaled by location or size.

As early as the 1960s, large companies like Bell Labs built suburban compounds for their corporate headquarters, but they were a far cry from the campus settings of Apple and Google today. Bell Labs’ design, for example, was a series of laboratories and office buildings grouped together, with a functional cafeteria.

Workplace campuses are also modeled on university campuses that provide a relatively complete work and living environment for students. As noted, Facebook and Google are building apartments near their corporate campuses. Facebook’s new project, named Willow Village, is near Menlo Park, California, and will include some fifteen hundred units. Employees who lease an apartment there will be eligible for a company bonus.

The future workplace campuses and mega-corporate campuses with housing bear a superficial resemblance to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “company towns,” which existed around the world.

In a company town, the stores, entertainment venues, and housing were all owned by the same company, which also employed everyone in a local factory or mine.

The remote locations of factories sometimes made it necessary for such employers to provide workers with housing and a means to acquire the necessities of life, but those who lived and worked in the company town paid for all purchases from their wages, which, of course, went straight back to the employer. The owners and builders of company towns, like George Pullman or Henry Ford, were often idealists who envisioned creating a social utopia.

But the towns and their owners could also be paternalistic and self-serving. Indeed, company towns created what is called a monopsony in the labor market, where there is only a single buyer, and the economic analysis of monopsony shows that with the lack of competition for labor, wages of workers are suppressed. That is, “a monopsonist in the labor market can leverage its market power. Because it is the only firm hiring, it can pay its workers less.”

Company towns began to disappear when cars became affordable and employees could drive to work. However, all that driving lengthened some workdays and disrupted the balance people enjoyed between working hours and personal time. Like telecommuting, corporate villages are one approach to cut down drive time. However, critics of Facebook’s Willow Village are calling the property “Zucktown” and wondering whether the development will further blur the work-life balance for employees of Mark Zuckerberg’s social media company.

The Pursuit of Work-Life Balance

Twenty-five percent of U.S. employees in multiple industries were recently surveyed and reported feeling “super stressed” as they juggled work and home responsibilities.

Daily stress from trying to maintain work-life balance can produce health effects like reduced immunity and inadequate sleep. Stressed workers are also less productive in the workplace.

Efforts to offer employees an ever-widening array of amenities appear to be an effort by employers to create work-life balance and make their companies more desirable as places of employment. The idea is that life is simpler if food is readily available and free at work, if a doctor’s office or hair salon is just down the hall, and if home is right on campus.

Some research shows that millennials believe integrating work and leisure in some combination fosters work-life balance.

They may see less need to have clear boundaries between their work world and their home life as technology pushes them to be connected in so many ways that once did not exist but now seem inescapable (e.g., an employee of a global firm that conducts business around the clock may never be truly separated from the office due to connectivity provided by mobile devices).

Have employers then crossed a line with these perks? Have they created an expectation that the employee who works on a corporate campus where all needed services are provided will, in turn, be accessible for long hours of work on a regular basis? Are the amenities really velvet handcuffs that tie employees to work? Living right next to work clearly will reduce commuting time, and via this path, it may promote work-life balance. But the expectation that long hours should be routine just because they are possible will hamper, rather than facilitate, the quest for work-life balance. Furthermore, to the extent that mega-corporate campuses do tie workers to their jobs, reduced worker mobility means that labor markets will be less able to adjust to changing conditions.

The Ethical Challenges of Workplace Campuses

It is hard to imagine that anyone could find fault with a job that came with all the amenities of a campus-like environment. However, the all-encompassing aspect of these workplaces means a manager’s job description greatly expands to include small-city management functions. As the April 2018 shooting of employees at YouTube’s headquarters suggests, corporate campuses may have a greater need for security, with duties that dovetail those of the city police. Growth of the compound will challenge managers to comply with city planning and zoning regulations. How should these villages within a city contribute to the municipal services they need for the population they draw? Should the city be able to require a greater tax contribution from mega-corporate campus developers that equals the load they add to the city’s fiscal responsibilities?