Google's Child Care Debacle in NYT and what SHOULD they do?

We can learn from this article.

On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble By JOE NOCERA Published: July 5, 2008
Two months ago, Google held a series of secret focus groups with employees who have children in Google’s day care facilities. The purpose was to gauge their reaction to the company’s plan to raise the amount it charged for in-house day care by 75 percent.

The summary (paraphrasing the Times article here) is Google put in place day care. Then they did their own (better?) day care which almost doubled the costs. Then the closed the less expensive one and eliminated a 700 person wait list by pricing the day care out of range for everyone but the most wealthy googlers. And charged to be on the wait list. And now they don’t list day care as an employee benefit because at $2500 per month per kid few can afford it. And for philosophical reasons there is no longer any lower cost option for mere mortals who don’t buy into the latest Warholian 15 minutes of Teletubby child development fads.

The full article is worth a read. But the *main problem* is one of economics. They put in place benefits that sounded great, the CEO felt like a hero announcing them I bet. Yet benefited only a few with kids (like me) while the rest of the company paid for it (was taxed effectively). So sure I *would* want subsidized child care personally, but does everyone else want to pay for my benefit that they cannot use if they don’t have kids?

Meanwhile, someone at Google woke up one day and realized that the company was subsidizing each child to the tune of $37,000 a year

Is child care a universal right? Because all those years I spent driving crappy unreliable cars while my friends had new ones because we had a $1200 a month day care bill compared to $800 in rent, well actually actually those years were awesome because I love my kids. But it would have been cool to have my cake and to eat it too!

The article concludes:

But here’s the real problem: providing day care isn’t an economics experiment, nor should it be just another Google perk, alongside organic food and free M&Ms. Day care matters to people’s lives in a way that few other perks do. There are many people in this country — including, I’ll bet, many Googlers — who believe that employer-provided day care, at affordable prices, ought to be like health insurance, a benefit that every company provides as a matter of course. Yet as the technology blog Valleywag noted recently, Google doesn’t even advertise day care as a benefit for its employees anymore. That’s the real shame.

Google may be providing the greatest day care ever, but so what? It doesn’t matter how good the day care is if only its wealthiest employees can afford to use it. If Google had really wanted to do something path-breaking about its day care crisis, it would have spent less time creating elitist day care centers and more time figuring out how to “scale” day care for everybody no matter what their salaries.

Instead, Google has shown that it thinks about day care the same way every other company does — as a luxury, not a benefit. Judging by what’s transpired, that’s what Google is fast becoming: just another company.

I don’t want to be too hard on google. But running a company myself it is frustrating to be held up to this Roman concept of Ideal Beauty that is googleville. When in fact they are, as the article says, fast becoming just another company. Gravity affects us all.

If you have extra cash on hand, give your people a raise. Let THEM decide how to spend it. If they buy into the Montecito-with-integrated-pilates-and-physics-themed day care fad, so be it. But that is their decision, not mine. And as a CEO, I need to look out for the company’s people; not make promises I can’t keep.

Why is this ANY of my business? To use (misuse?) the words of Irving Goffman;

As soon as he (the chairman) has called the group to order and introduced the guest speaker, he is likely to serve thereafter as a highly visible model for the other listeners, illustrating by exaggerated expressions the involvement and appreciation they ought to be showing, and providing with advance cues as to whether a particular remark ought to be greeted with seriousness, laughter, or appreciative chuckles. Speakers tend to accept invitations to speak on the assumption that the chairman will “take care of them”. Pg 150

Google, if you are in the tech sector, is for better or for worse the functional “chairman”. Gates has abdicated the throne to save the world (in a good way). So when Chairman Google reacts to day care as child’s play, that affects the rest of us. We expect them to “take care of us” as Goffman would say.

What should Google do? Immediately reintroduce affordable health care alternatives or eliminate the health care option altogether. A meritocracy is OK, but an elitist faction subsidized by the masses is not appreciated. And it is a standard I cannot live up to.

Comments

[Dan Krohn]

Very well said. Though my kids are now old enough to where daycare is a memory - it's a tough memory because it cost a fortune. If out society were on its game, there would be decent daycare for everyone along with decent public schools.

Not that the suggestion would make the social darwinians among us happy. But I'm convinced it's in the enlightened self interest of our society.

[katie]

I personally don't think that a giant corporation having on-site childcare is such a wild idea really. Large companies are certainly no strangers to this benefit concept.

And still other large companies go the consortium center route (pairing with other area companies to offer a reduced childcare rate at a centralized approved daycare), it's a great perk. Employees still have to pay handsomely, but hey every little bit helps as many of the daycares actively look to partner up with nearby companies and offer company discounts (kind of like dry cleaners and sandwich shops near big business complexes).

Google's daycare problem seems to stem more from a very wealthy Google semi-figurehead who appears to be stuck on keeping the hottest daycare trends in the building for her own offspring. I mean really, kids need very basic things to function well in a daycare environment. None of these things should be hard for a company like Google to provide, or at least ensure are provided by a 3rd party daycare company.

If Google bit off more than they can chew with their admittedly odd/expensive daycare alternatives, this so isn't the solution!! You are quite right, they need to mend their ways and keep it affordable and available to the masses, or just get out. One would hope that at the very least, they Googleheads get creative in helping their employees find affordable decent childcare elsewhere for their displaced kiddos.

It's not all about M&Ms and bottled water...

[Kamala]

What blew my mind was that they took away the affordable CCLC option which was in place before.
What is wrong with having a tiered daycare system? Keep your super rich kids in your super rich private daycare and let the regular kids continue or transition into the national day care companies on-site. This way, everybody gets what they pay for. Why the naiveté and the outrage?
National day care companies make it their business to run an efficient shop with reasonable quality or they would not be in business very long. Cisco and Electronic Arts seem to have gotten this right because they partnered with day care facilities instead of building from scratch. It's basic business knowledge that companies should do what they are best at because they can do it for lower cost than anyone else.
What I want to know is which Google employee really thought running a day care was a good business for Google to be in? Are they going to sell ads spots to toy companies in there ? ;-)