Free Food and Structural Holes
Free food is lovely, of course. But Google’s purpose of having free food no more than 200 feet away from its every employee is not as simple as feeding empty bellies.
According to an article on Forbes, free food is just a small perk that contributes to employee happiness. More importantly, free food opens up an opportunity for people from different social and work groups to communicate, and acts as an fuel for innovation. It may sound like a farfetched attempt, but we shouldn’t ignore the role that structural holes play in the context of a tech company network.
Different from three meals where we are surrounded by friends and families, snack time is usually considered alone time. People are more relaxed when being away from work, even for a short period of time. The existence of micro-kitchen takes advantage of that relaxing atmosphere and provides a convenient place for chitchatting. Two people may randomly run into each other while getting drinks in the micro-kitchen. Person A is from the software development team and person B is from PR department. Out of politeness, they may ask how each other’s weekend went and find out they both love hiking. The small talks build on and they could go from acquaintances to friends over 3-4 short coffee breaks. Under normal circumstances, these two people from different product teams may never meet each other at work occasion or even have same group of friends given the size of the company and their work concentrations.
When two people from different groups become friends, between them there emerges an edge, more specifically, a local bridge. Since A and B have no friends in common, deleting this edge would increase the distance between A and B to a value strictly more than 2 and split A and B into two different components in the network. Even the edge between A and B usually starts off as a weak tie, it does provide a communication platform for two groups. Over time, A and B may form more local bridges with people from other departments, which leads to structural holes in the company network. Structural holes effectively minimizes the impact of social homophily on the company. Social homophily roots in people’s tendency to form social ties with others who have similar mindsets like themselves. The existence of likeminded groups, however, would potentially smother the emergence of new ideas and innovation. Structural holes in the company network in a way break the exclusivity of some social groups and nudge employees to be the endpoints of local bridges. As the author of the Forbes article says, all ideas are combinations of pre-existing ideas. The small talks between a salesperson and a product engineer may very well translate to the next breakthrough in the technology industry. Additionally, the local bridges would slowly transform to triadic closure, which leads to a bigger network within the company.
Sources:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidburkus/2015/07/02/the-real-reason-google-serves-all-that-free-food/
http://www.fastcompany.com/3035569/the-future-of-work/forget-what-you-think-you-know-about-the-office-of-the-future