While listening to Joan Didion discuss her latest wrting effort on a City Arts & Lectures program, broadcast on one of my local public radio stations KQED, I was reminded of the event that cemented the importance of new work places for me. The book, "The Year of Magical Thinking", recounts her during the illness of her daughter and after the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne.”T
The subject of dealing with illness was what recalled the event that occurred when I was working with Sun Microsystems on their Satellite offices. Sitting in one near my home, I was asking employees why they had chosen to work at the new site. One gentleman had a story that still resonates today. He was there because his wife had cancer. Working at this site, closer to home, allowed him to be near her if she needed help. That particular day, he was there to do some work while waiting to pick her up after a chemotherapy treatment.
Sun satellites were small alternative office facilities. Separate from the corporate campus in the California, they were located geographically closer to employees’ homes. Back then, in order for the general Sun population to log into Sun’s system they needed to be at a Sun Workstation. This made access from some place other than a Sun office difficult and working at home almost impossible. Some engineers had ISDN lines, but then laptops and broadband DSL or cable connections were in no way ubiquitous, for Sun employees or anyone. Hard to believe that was only a short time ago. Sun originally opened three satellite offices as prototypes for different places where employees could
“drop-in”, the name later attached to the sites. Much of the original intent was to mitigate commutes. Employees could stop at these workplaces, grab an open workspace, do email, make phone calls and then later, when traffic died down, continue on to their assigned office on campus.
As usage evolved, employee’s found various reasons to work at the facility. But this man’s story was so powerful it has always been the best example, and for all the right reasons, why different office places should exist. Empathy for another human being in
crisis, desire to help the employee and his or her family, true work/life balance enabling – all ways good companies want to treat their workers, yet rarely take the real steps to make the aspirations possible. If this man did not have this new type of workplace available, his options would have been limited or worse - ignore his wife’s needs because work was more important, try to commute back and forth to his office adding stress and worry resulting in less attention and quality paid to either entity – work and family, or the perhaps quit working completely.
Sun’s action, whether meant for this specific result or not, created a win-win for both. Tangibly, the company gained productivity, which might otherwise been lost, and the employee gained relief from stress and angst during a time of extreme hardship. The
intangible gains included mutual respect, trust, consideration and perhaps even today’s rare commodity of loyalty. As sincere the desire may be for companies to create the best place to work, good intentions are not enough. They must be followed by earnest actions – which means development of the actual infrastructure that brings intent to fruition.