HR Strange But True

Is Your Workplace an ‘Experience’?

Do your employees and clients view your workplace as just a facility? At Square, founded by Jack Dorsey, inventor of Twitter, the workplace is an “experience”—complete with an on-site barista!

According to an article in Fast Company, the mobile credit-card and money payment system company, with offices in San Francisco, New York City, and Atlanta, focuses on facility management and office perks through its “Experience Team” directed by “Director of Experience” Kyle Zink, that seriously considers everything an employee or visitor “sees, hears, tastes, touches, or smells.”

The experience concept is an all-encompassing effort by Square’s management to address “existential aspects of their work” to enhance employee performance. According to the article, the Experience Team recently revamped the food program to offer vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free offerings.

The San Francisco office also has a dollar-a-cup coffee bar with an on-site barista, which uses the product of one of Square’s clients.  Cleverly, the barista/marketing staffer also uses the coffee payment transactions for on-site beta testing! 

The Team also decided to bring the outdoors in by holding terrarium-building classes so that workers could have live plants in their work areas, so conducive to productivity, and most now do.

And workers get off-site experiences as well—the San Francisco office recently walked across the Golden Gate Bridge en masse.

Beer-making classes were another hit experience with employees (no word on if on-site imbibing was involved).

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