The Google day care controversy: a recruiting lesson about setting the right expectations

Have you read about it? The Google daycare controvery has hit blogosphere.

In a nutshell: As an employee perk, Google offers in-house day care centres. Not your run-of-the-mill day care centre, mind you, but a $37k a year all singing and dancing nursery complete with the latest educational toys and trendy Reggio Emilia genius-training philosophy.

Google’s in-house recruiters used it as a lure for future employees (who wouldn’t?) But imagine the dismay when the new recruits found out that it could take up to two years to get a place for their child. Oh well. The price for working for the “best company on the planet”.

But the current controversy is that during this credit crunch someone at Google finally woke up and discovered they were subsidising each child way above the industry average. Ooooppps. So they decided to almost double their childcare rates. Yikes.

As a parent with children in daycare, this would alarm me. Actually, stress me out. If I were a Google employee in this situation, I would feel that on top of the stress of juggling a job and childcare, now I can’t afford it and I have to move my child elsewhere even though he/she may be settled quite nicely and the new daycare will add extra commute time.

Here’s the lesson: Don’t create perks you are going to take away. If you take something out of one hand, put something in the other. In sales, it’s all about setting the right level of expectations and then delivering on it. If you can, over deliver. Do not, I repeat, do not under deliver.

Of course it is easy to criticise from the comfort of my laptop at home. I can just image how it happened: a brainstorm session with lots of free pizza and someone has the idea of increasing employee retention by offering the greatest childcare on earth right on campus. Good idea, if you can substain it.

But come on Google, we expect more forward thinking from an industry leader.

- Susanna

Comments

[laurie ruettimann]

The choirs of angels are singing AMEN & HALLELUJAH to this post. :)

[Recruitment Nick]

Very good post.

Too often companies under use their perks as a selling point, so it is very interesting to see a problem from the other perspective... how reliance on perks as an enticement can hurt business.

But it is not just the removal of a perk that has hit google (though it is of course the main reason for this bad press). For me Google have often used a 'holier than thou' attitude. they come across as being all about the people, that everything they do is geared to improve things for their employees.

Great, and they have succeeded in creating a wonderful company to work for. BUT if you have an entire media image based on this you have to be very very careful when removing a perk, as the very essence of what you are doing is actually the opposite of employee focussed. Certainly you do not run rough shod over focus groups opinions as Google managed to do here (reports of members of the focus groups breaking down into tears when Google first pitched the idea of doubling rates).

There is a big lesson on what not to do here, both in using perks as part of the recruitment process, and in managing the public perception of decisions... neither of which Google have managed to do at all well.