Work or health: how companies influence our habits

AVAlexander Volchek

This way of reasoning is the thought structure of someone who thinks on a large scale. This kind of thinking will lead you to completely different reflections in the future and set a mechanism in motion that lets you make the right decisions in the future: over the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years. Not to resolve the current situation you've landed in right now—because there are situations you can no longer get out of—but to resolve it in the future. A person who lives on a large scale, a truly expansive person, lives an enormous life of their own, a full, complete life, rather than within a short range of time. We have a very interesting subject today. Google created a large number of facilities its employees were supposed to use: gyms, yoga rooms, meditation rooms, and some others. After some time, it turned out that employees weren't going, or only a small percentage were. They hired someone specifically to study the situation and come up with a solution that would get employees to go. We were just walking and talking, and someone said to me, “Listen, I was thinking: what if the solution were to shorten the workday at Google by an hour—make it seven hours instead of eight, for example—but require people to spend that hour doing everything we've been talking about, from going to the gym to yoga?”

The person asked my opinion: would that be a solution? I suggest exploring this today, because it is very important for each person to look at how they make decisions, what they base them on, regarding the various activities in their life and their daily routine. This applies to everything, really: work, family, leisure, everything. The first thing to pay attention to in this discussion is where to start. Not why employees don't go to the gym, or why only a small number go, but why Google wants people to go there. When you encounter a discussion like this, start by looking at who initiated it and what they are doing. Not all companies want this. Not all companies build facilities for their employees. Even among the companies that provide these extras, many do it without any particular desire. They do it because it is a trend. Again, a huge number of companies don't have any of this. Why did Google want to do it? Various explanations will follow: Google is innovative, it cares about people, and all sorts of other things. Notice that someone might build these facilities because they want people to be healthier. Simply healthier.

They care about people and want them to be in a better mood or a better state. Someone else may want to build facilities so that people supposedly feel better and therefore work more. What, specifically, is the purpose? What goal is behind it? Then, when the company takes an action, does it understand the direct cause-and-effect relationship? For example, could attending yoga or meditation every day help an employee realize much sooner that they don't want to work for this company, and leave? For example. If the company set some goal at the outset... I'm not going to try to make an evidence-based argument here about Google's goal or why it did this. I'm not even sure whether any one person knows, or whether it is a combination of different things. Who came up with it? Who carried it out? Who initiated the next steps? How was it communicated, implemented, changed? There are an enormous number of different circumstances: what it turned into, what the original idea was, what it became later, and so on. There is a goal. When we know the goal as we study something like this, it is very important to examine how fully we understand the consequences of what is happening. What does understanding the consequences mean?

Let me give you an example. Yes, go on. I practiced boxing in 2013. There were periods in my life when I boxed—in, I don't know, 2005, 2009, and then in 2013. In 2013. My Business Molodost partner, Petya Osipov, and I went together. I remember that around the same time, I encountered a discussion with a Vedic astrologer who said the following. He told Petya that when Petya went boxing, he became calm: he released his aggression through boxing and returned to a calm state. That seems to be how it works, doesn't it? And it seems to be true for everyone. But this same person told me that when I boxed, I greatly increased my aggression and began tearing into everyone and putting pressure on them at work. Surprisingly, that really is how it was. But notice how the first case contradicts the second. Boxing relieves one person's aggression and develops another person's aggression. A particular action can have different consequences for different people. What's more, I can add something else.

At one point in a person's life, the same activity—boxing, for example—will develop aggression, while at another point, ten years later, for example, that same activity will calm them down instead. I'm not even getting into how the sessions are conducted, who is there, or what mood the person arrives in. A great many factors have an influence. So when a company adds social incentives and benefits—what we call a benefits package in Russian—with various additional facilities, it matters how well the people doing this at the company understand the causes and effects, and what, specifically, will happen. That is the first part of examining this subject. The second, equally important part is why people make particular decisions when they work at a company and are offered something like yoga. Again, look at the individual and their purpose in being there. Why are they in this place? Why did they come to work for this company? Why did they come to work at Google? Did they come to earn money? To earn some extra money and save it?

Did they come to develop professionally? To get a strong brand name on their résumé? To make new friends? To develop a particular skill, such as communicating, handling difficult situations, or handling easy situations? Did they come because the work is hard, or because it is easy? Did they end up there by chance? It might simply be a company that happened to invite them, even if they went through fifty interviews. Or did they want to join this particular company since childhood, knowing from the start that this was where they wanted to work? Or did they know they wanted to work at one of the world's top five or top ten IT companies by valuation? Did they come with the illusion that they are doing something useful—or without an illusion, because they want to contribute something useful? Did they come to this company because their wife made them, or their husband made them, or because they want to prove to their parents that they can work there? Why did they come?

Once you know a person's goal—and notice how different those goals can be—anything the company adds will play out very differently depending on that goal. Write in the comments about which side you are on. Reflect on this subject. Be sure to write it down. On this channel, I talk a great deal about how to grow as a person, how to become a person who truly thinks and lives on a large scale. Subscribe to the channel so you don't miss anything. Subscribe. The more videos you watch, the more of these building blocks you'll gain, the blocks that make up expansive thinking. Like the video. It really supports the channel's development; it helps a great deal. And of course, leave your reflections in the comments at the end. I recommend watching the video through to the end. Always build a complete picture. A person who wants to grow—

should try to study materials fully, broadly, across a wide range and from multiple angles. Let me give you an example. I've managed many different businesses in my life, and when hiring people, I often used a group assessment method. Ten, fifteen, or twenty people would come to an interview at once, and in one hour I would select someone from fifteen candidates. We hired salespeople, marketers, analysts—practically anyone—that way. Of course, there are roles that are difficult to hire for like this, but that isn't our subject today. That is a large topic of its own. I remember a group of analysts sitting in front of me when Andrey Rogachev and I were building a trading platform. Andrey Rogachev founded Pyaterochka, a large retail chain in Russia—the largest, or one of the largest. I liked hiring people for various roles, various roles, with a good analytical and mathematical education. I also wanted the person to be a young woman of a certain age, without much work experience. The interview was underway, with fifteen people sitting there. I said, “Ask your questions.” One young woman said, “Could you tell me...” She went on to work for me for a long time. Her name was Katya. I rarely remember such old moments, by the way, but for some reason I remember her.

She asked, “Could you tell me whether people at your company celebrate birthdays together and go to events together? Do you have many company parties, much socializing together?” By then, I'd been in business quite a while. This was, I don't know, around 2016. I'd been working professionally for at least twelve years, so I had a substantial, very broad body of experience. By that point, I no longer went to clubs or bars or played board games with employees, although there had been a time when I did. I said, “Yes, I suppose people do that. There are people who enjoy it. I see people interacting and becoming friends.” I didn't mention that many people got married, had children, traveled together, became friends, and so on. In fact, quite a few of my teams and employees from different companies got to know one another, mixed, married one another, and so on. So I said yes. We continued around the group, with people asking questions. Literally ten minutes later, another young woman asked—she also ended up working for me, by the way—“Can I come to work, sit down, and not talk to anyone or socialize with anyone?” Why did she ask that?

It was clear that she was very interested in the job. But after hearing the previous young woman, Katya, ask her question, she wanted to know whether she could avoid those spaces. She didn't want to be in a setting where she had to interact with other people. She saw work as a place to come and, I don't know, gain professional skills or earn money. I told her, “Of course. You don't have to socialize with anyone. You can simply sit and not socialize with anyone. You can just work. That is your own choice.” Personally, I didn't hire people so that they would talk, nor so that they would remain silent. I hired them to deliver results within their job responsibilities. I had no requirement that everyone talk a lot, speak well, or say very little. Some managers do have preferences like that. There was a very well-known manager in Moscow who made all his employees do very specific things: parachute off buildings, sit in meditation, go on retreats, and hike in the mountains.

Everyone had to do it. All the managers had to do it, and not just managers—the employees had to take part, too. Does a manager or business owner have the right to do that? Of course. It is their business; they do what they want. The main thing is to tell people about it. That is why, at that meeting, I explained that at our company you could socialize or not socialize. When things like gyms, yoga rooms, massage rooms, or other facilities appear, the company faces a question: do we hire people who definitely need them? There are always people who will appreciate them and say, “This is great.” Personally, I don't need them. I'm not against having them, but they aren't a requirement for me. If they're there, fine; if not, that's fine. Either we hire people who definitely need them, specifically select people who need them—specifically select them—or we don't pay attention to that. If we don't pay attention to it, we have to understand that there are people who will simply never need them. Some people will never need them. Again, remember that we talked about purpose, about why, about understanding the consequences.

Understanding consequences is a whole subject of its own. But it is important to look at what employees do and don't need. I don't know whether everyone watching knows this, but Google selects its people very carefully according to particular qualities and characteristics. There are people it would never, ever hire. Perhaps it would never hire me. Perhaps it wouldn't hire someone like me. Perhaps, for example, it would need someone who appreciates these things, stays in that environment, or is ready to stay at one company for twenty years. They definitely select people according to particular characteristics, qualities, and details. I'm not saying those are right. I'm not saying they get it right or that the criteria are correct. I'm not saying any of that. But at least they certainly pay attention to it, based on particular details. Other companies likewise select for their own qualities and details. At one company—Business Molodost—there was a time when I had every employee take a polygraph test. We had two hundred or three hundred people working at once. Naturally, we hired hundreds, because you keep hiring people and letting some people go.

Every employee took a polygraph test. Every director, salesperson, programmer, designer, driver, security guard, cleaner, secretary—absolutely everyone. Everyone took a polygraph test. That was our particular wish, or my particular wish or understanding, for example. I had an explanation for why I did it, what it was for, and what, specifically, I wanted to detect through that procedure. I was hiring people by filtering for particular qualities. So if we want to understand this issue as a whole and help the person Google hired solve the original problem, we first need to begin studying and observing it with this breadth. Study the company and its goal. Study how well the company sees causes and effects in relation to its goal. Seeing them doesn't mean they are real. It doesn't mean they are the truth. It doesn't mean that is what happens. For example, we were just discussing this: people go to the gym. I think it helps some people and injures others. It injures an enormous number of people. Many people run and ruin their health, especially over the long term. Some people don't run and ruin their health by simply sitting and doing nothing.

The question is: what does it help with? Does it increase stress, or give the person real freedom? And if it relieves their stress, what actually happens to them? Do they work better for the company, or do they start working worse? Many people deliver results for a company when they are under stress. As soon as the stress is gone, they immediately stop delivering results. When I spent a long time under stress, I can say that I definitely worked more effectively—at least in terms of the amount of time I worked, the number of meetings I held, the reports I created, and the technical specifications I wrote. My progress under stress was better in precisely those measures. That doesn't mean my progress was better in terms of effective decision-making. In some states of stress, a person will work better than in a state of freedom or relaxation. In that relaxed state, for example, they won't do it; they simply won't engage in it. There are many jobs they won't do. They won't; they won't be able to. Especially jobs involving the destruction of a person. If a job involves deceiving other people, for example, the person will be driven into stress so that they can deceive others and draw them into the situation.

Otherwise, they won't do it. Because if a person is in a state of freedom—personally in a state of freedom, real freedom, not an illusion, not just stress as some curious quirk, as a chemical property—

a chemical property of the body, some parameters rising... I'm talking about real stress and real freedom. A person with real freedom will never harm another person. It is impossible, impossible in any way. Is there a solution here? There is a solution only when these specific components are understood. How do you address it from there? Work on it. How well does the company's original goal align with the cause-and-effect relationship? Examine that relationship: does it actually work or not? Look at the people we hire and how we hire them, and adapt different combinations for them so that they do or don't take part. Again, I'm not looking for the right or wrong way to handle this situation now. In some situations, perhaps it really would be right to shorten work by an hour. In others, it might be to put an obligation to participate in the employment contract: if you don't participate, you'll be fired. We aren't discussing whether your country's labor laws allow that. We are discussing the general system of reasoning about this subject. That is what will let you arrive at a result. This way of reasoning is the thought structure of someone who thinks on a large scale. It is the thought structure of a person who lives on a large scale.

It doesn't matter which side you're on as you listen: an owner or manager implementing these things or wanting to implement them, or an employee experiencing pressure from the company—or, conversely, a lack of pressure, someone who wishes the company would offer them something. Observe these things. Look at them. This kind of thinking will lead you to completely different reflections in the future and set a mechanism in motion that lets you make the right decisions in the future: over the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years. Not to resolve the current situation you've landed in right now—because there are situations you can no longer get out of—but to resolve it in the future. A person who lives on a large scale, a truly expansive person, lives an enormous life of their own, a full, complete life, rather than within a short range of time.