Experieonces with/opinions for elaborate workplaces?

In My Humble Opinion
1

One of my kids recently started working at Epic near Madison, a firm that does computerized medical records. We recently visited her, and she took us on a tour of the headquarters. If you Google Epic headquarters, you can pull up a ton of images.

The campus occupies several hundred acres of rolling farmland, and consists of maybe 20 buildings. Most of the buildings have “themes.” For example, three are a “farm”, and the buildings resemble a huge barn, a farmhouse, and a toolshed. The exterior and interior reflect each building’s theme, tho there is an overarching “mission-type” feel for several of the buildings and much of the landscape. Other buildings have themes of dungeons, dragons, old west, Asia, show biz… 1 of 2 new buildings under construction will be wizards. The landscaping around these buildings is elaborate and impeccable. There is a huge treehouse for meetings. There are all kinds of art and objects in and around the buildings: the dragons building has a 30’ dragon in the conference room. One hallway could be out of an Indiana Jones movie. There was a pillarless underground theater that sat (I think) 9000, in a building designed to resemble a rock structure. The main floor lobby of that building had real planes hanging from the ceiling. Just about every aspect of the buildings is custom, perfectly installed, and spotless.

I’ve never been to any tech HQ in Cal, but I imagine some aspects of them might be similar.

My wife and I found ourselves confused as to the reasons for such an expensive and elaborate setting. I’ve worked in some very nice office buildings, but never in one that looked like Disney World. Is it thought that working in such a place will make employees more productive? More loyal? More creative?

I guess I can understand encouraging a “playful” and creative mindset, and creating fun areas where staff might congregate and interact. But this just seemed so completely over-the-top for anything needed to achieve that.

My daughter is basically a glorified coder providing customer service. Her job could be done anywhere that she had wicked computing and communications equipment. I could imagine something like this more if it were a movie studio or something with a more obviously creative element to their product.

If I were a paying customer, I could imagine being less than thrilled to see what I was paying for - but I guess if they think the product is worth the price, it doesn’t really matter whether it goes into the owner’s pocket or into a building.

If I worked there or owned part of the company, I could imagine saying, “tone down the décor, and put the savings into my paycheck.”

The main reason I’m posting this is simply because my wife and I both found the experience disorienting and confusing - it was so different from anything else I had experienced in my 54 years, and on such a huge scale. Was hoping some of you might be able to help provide some frames of reference. Any thoughts or impressions?

2

While each business has to determine the cost/benefit analysis on its own, I think you’re suffering from the kind of limited thinking that consumers and employees often have. They think that it’s a simple equation of revenue minus costs equals profit and that you can change one factor in the equation without affecting all of the others.

So as an example, let’s say that $50,000 spent on fancy art increases employee loyalty by enough to save $60,000 in recruiting and training costs and that more motivated employees raise customer satisfaction by 2%. Then it’s money well spent, isn’t it?

Employees might say they’re more interested in the money, but behavior is a lot more complex than that. Most businesses recognize that the corporate culture is the single most important factor in running well. There are lots of different culture strategies and there are different pros and cons, but once you find something that works, you want to stick with it.

It’s a tangent, but people often say the same thing about advertising. If a company ran less ads and sold less product, that would probably make the product more expensive, not less. Their spending on advertising saves you money. It’s counter-intuitive, but it’s often true in the real world.

3

First, Epic is really cutting-edge in the industry. I’m jealous!

These kinds of workplaces are popular with companies that have a lot of intensive deadlines where employees spend extremely long hours at work (think 12 to 20-hour days). It helps employees having those long days to be able to go somewhere and play games, or nap, or decompress with a book, or work out. Same theory as free food/coffee/soda/juice/fancy water, just more elaborate.

Blurring the line between work and social also seems to help make working long hours more palatable.

No one in IT thinks twice about elaborate workspaces, since they know that the employees really work their asses off.

If I were just starting my career, I’d think it was really cool. These days, less so. But I’d work for Epic in a heartbeat.

ETA: I’d much rather work for someplace with a playful decor than one that was standard-issue office-grey-and-blue, which is just cold and depressing.

4

I’ve only ever worked for places where most of us were in one building, and when we had back to back meetings were often a few minutes late because of the time it took to get from a conference room on one floor to the next. How do these people who work in campuses handle meetings?

Also, I’ve only ever worked in the mind-sucking gray drab offices, and would like a little “team spirit”. We even have a very good marketing department that makes polished and professional banners and posters for conferences and trade shows, and after each one they’re apparently thrown away or jammed into a dark storage room somewhere. I’ve asked why they’re not arrayed around our offices to give us a little company pride and saw only blank stares.

5

I am very familiar with Epic. They are the gold standard in the medical software industry. I can assure you their customers will not be complaining. There is a waiting list for medical institutions that want Epic’s software installed. Epic has very high standards and they will not attempt new installations before they are prepared to provide their unparalleled level of service. Your daughter is very lucky to have this job. Even if it is not ideal for her she is gaining invaluable experience in a field where she will be in demand. Simply working for Epic for a couple of years will give her a ticket into numerous hospital IT facilities and other medical software providers.

6

Thanks for these answers - especially dracoi’s suggesting that 1+1 does not always = 2. Like I said, this was so unlike anything I had ever encountered. I’ve been in elaborate law offices, where I questioned why clients would want to be paying for such opulent furnishings. But this was an uncommon sort of experience for which my wife and I had no frame of reference.

I think my daughter is really pretty happy w/ her job (tho it is not the hard science she studied.) To the extent she has any complaints, I think they are related to the fact that she was in grad school in S Cal and is an avid rock climber. As nice as Madison and Epic are, they aren’t S Cal! But they seem to go out of their way to hire and retain really bright people, concentrating in hard sciences, and they teach what the employees need to use and service their proprietary technology. We’ll see how it looks after the honeymoon period is over.

This does not seem to be an environment whether the folk put in monster hours. My daughter came from an experimental lab setting, where she was putting in crazy long hours 7 days most weeks. She was shocked (and amused) when folk at Epic would talk about how they occasionally would put in a long day - like 10 hours! :eek: And when we walked around on a Saturday afternoon, I didn’t see a single person working in an office (most of the office doors were open, no meetings in the meeting rooms.)

I think Epic seems like a neat company and the founder a neat woman, tho I could question such extravagance WRT health care. You know the hospitals, insurers and such are passing those costs right along. But that is another thread. Epic has done a great job of anticipating a need, and then making the most of it as it developed. Whether my kid stays there for 2-3 years or the rest of her career, I’m very happy with what she will get from it. And her pay allows her to take frequent flights back to S Cal or wherever the climbing is good! :cool: