Great article last week over at Quartz about Jeff Bezo’s thoughts on the Amazon corporate campus. The key takeaway for me is the idea in this thought:
Bezos said the urban campus is a “spectacular benefit” to Amazon’s employees at its headquarters, allowing 15% of them to live in the same zip code as their office, and 20% to walk to work. Contrast that with Google and Facebook who operate private buses to transport staff from San Francisco to Silicon Valley.
20% of employees at Amazon’s campus can walk to work. I was in Seattle just a couple of months ago for vacation and have visited a couple of other times on trips for work. It is a great city with great weather and a great downtown presence. I can absolutely see how this is an enormous corporate benefit.
Every company thinks about employee access to their offices. Is it accessible from subway or the interstate? Is there plenty of parking? What’s the average commute time to this location? All standard questions in the site selection process. However I rarely see the statement: I want my office to be in the most convenient location possible for my employees regardless of cost.
Think of the number of cities where this concept wouldn’t even work.
- Atlanta, Dallas and other large Southern MSAs – spread out cities without a concentration of workers in a single area.
- New York – too expensive for most employees to live near a downtown office.
- San Francisco – too much labor competition for the concept to work.
- Where else could it work? Portland – but labor force is very different from Seattle. Washington DC – but also has significant competition albeit not in technology specifically. Denver is always a unique situation.
It’s such a unique proposition. But unique propositions are what set businesses apart.