Corporate real estate professionals at the CoreNet Global Summit in Seattle this week learned that if they're not thinking about the kind of food their companies serve employees, they could be missing out on the hunt for exceptional talent.
“At Microsoft we're all about hiring the best and the brightest,” said Mark Freeman, Microsoft's senior manager of Global Dining Services. “The people coming out of school, they are looking at a dining program as something that's important to them. They are interested in food, perhaps more than they are interested in the 401K.”
Roughly 60,000 people work at the company's headquarters in Redmond, WA, making it nothing short of a small city; 40,000 meals are served every day. And so, Freeman has set about changing the way that food is processed and served at the headquarters campus.
First, there is onsite cultivation of produce, which provides locally sourced foods. Microsoft yields its own crop of lettuce that grows in 55 hydroponic towers interspersed across the campus.

The pilot program started in 2013. Today the annual harvest totals 15,000 pounds of lettuce and a ton of micro-greens including basil, cilantro and kale. The 2,000 cooks and other employees of contract dining services provider Compass Group USA pick the greens as they're needed.

And, this being Microsoft after all, the company's software developers have developed systems to remotely monitor factors in the growth towers — such ph balance, electricity, lights, and humidity – with cameras connected to the cloud.

“Now I'm managing 39 towers across the campus on a single Surface tablet. We now have one growth tower in Beijing and seven going to Israel, and they all will be monitored in Redmond,” Freeman said.

Second, the company has negotiated deals with local restaurateurs and chefs to bring Seattle's best dining experiences directly to the employees on the campus. Several restaurants — even a pub — serve exclusively Microsoft employees and their guests.

“We listened to our customers,” Freeman said. “It's nice to have a place to give people a reprieve, such as a full service restaurant. Peoples' work schedules are just so hectic that with an experience this, they don't have to leave campus, to come in and relax and be taken care of. Microsoft gave us the platform to help people restore.”

And if that sounds like a luxury, it isn't, said John Howie, Owner & Chef, John Howie Restaurant Group, who operates a restaurant on the Microsoft campus. “If you're not doing something like this, you are going to fall behind. You will have a much higher cost in your employee turnover. You have to look at this as a potential way to maintain your employee's longevity and reduce turnover.”

The CoreNet Global Summit is taking place this week in Seattle; roughly 3,000 corporate real estate professionals are attending. The views expressed are the author's own.

Instant Insights /

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