Corporate campuses are dead; dense, urban environments are the future.
Hiring great people is hard. Convincing them to move to a new city or neighborhood is even harder. In recent years, we’ve seen Google and Apple take the decades-old approach of building isolated campuses that serve every need of their employees in order to attract people to work for them. They aren’t unique in the services offered. They tend to be things we all need in our day-to-day lives: dry cleaners, restaurants, or even bicycle repair shops. These companies offer them for free or heavily subsidized with the convenience of being within walking distance of your desk. They are typically run by staff or contractors of the company itself and therefore, not open to the general public.
We need to remove the isolation and replace it with an open, urban environment.
We are seeing a new breed of entrepreneurs moving from traditional tech hubs to smaller, downtown areas across the nation and the world. Need/Want moved from San Francisco to St. Louis primarily to enjoy a cheaper cost of living, but also because St. Louis has a lot to offer in terms of a “neighborhood-y” feel, with a great culinary scene and cultural experiences. Similarly, Austin is fueling incredible startup growth due to the strong entrepreneurial community and access to talented people.
None of the services offered at these large corporate campuses can compare with what these cities provide via small, local businesses.
A major difference between urban areas and isolated corporate campuses is how companies support and engage with the community. Instead of building walls and providing services internally, companies should start offering similar campus-like benefits by supporting the small business community in their immediate area. Work with local restaurants to offer cheaper payment methods than credit cards from your employees. The small business can save money, and your employees have more options and flexibility without your company investing in a full-service kitchen.
If the services you want to offer don’t exist in your immediate area, consider supporting initiatives to attract them. Whether funding a small business incubator or facilitating physical space, which is often tough for a new business, you can make a low-cost impact on incentivizing these local entrepreneurs to provide services for your people. A single company’s support feeds into the cycle of businesses that are open to the community at large, resulting in a stronger local economy.
This results in a net positive for everyone: the economy has more small business owners that succeed in the long term, the community has broader services available to more people, and companies have an advantage over competitors in the suburbs who have fewer services to offer their employees without the effort of in-housing them all.
