Google Employees To Keep Receiving Salaries Even After They’re Dead

Employees at Google will now be able to enjoy “death benefits” as part of the company’s ever-evolving employment perks, reported CBS News on Tuesday, after the company promised to pay half of an employee’s annual salary to his/her spouse or partner for 10 years after his/her demise.

Employees at Google will now be able to enjoy “death benefits” as part of the company’s ever-evolving employment perks, reported CBS News on Tuesday, after the company promised to pay half of an employee’s annual salary to his/her spouse or partner for 10 years after his/her demise.

“This might sound ridiculous,” told Google’s Chief People Officer Laszlo Bock to Forbes. “But we’ve announced death benefits at Google.”

“One of the things we realized recently was that one of the harshest but most reliable facts of life is that at some point most of us will be confronted with the death of our partners.”

[quote]“And it’s a horrible, difficult time no matter what, and every time we went through this as a company we tried to find ways to help the surviving spouse of the Googler who’d passed away,” he said.[/quote]

Consequently, the tech giant began the initiative that will not only pay a deceased Googler’s surviving spouse or partner half their salary every year for 10 more years, but also ensure that the employee’s children will get paid $1,000 a month until they turned 19 (or 23 for full-time students).

More surprisingly, the perk also did not have a minimum tenure requirement at the company, which means that even if you joined the company for just one day and met unfortunate circumstances the next, your family will still enjoy the “death benefits” that Google offered.

According to Fortune magazine’s list of the 100 best companies to work for, Google ranked first in the category of “Unusual perks”.

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Other unusual perks that the company offered in its headquarters in Mountain View, California include free gourmet food, free tech devices including Android Smartphone, and even an on-site laundry, dry-cleaning and alterations service.

Bock told Forbes that the company went to great lengths to determine exactly what perks to offer to its employees.

“Google People experts use three methods to tap into the needs of employees,” he said. “An annual survey called “Googlegeist” that measures the temperature of employees in every department and analyzes data to identify emerging trends, employee resource groups (read: clubs) where like-minded employees share ideas that are funneled up to HR (Bock says the most active are the “Grayglers,” the self-titled club for over-the-hill Googlers), and email aliases that run the gamut from financial advice to childcare options to café feedback.”

A recent editorial in the state-run China Daily also lauded Google’s employees benefits and said that Chinese companies had to work quickly to emulate the tech giant’s success.

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“Google’s generous employee benefits are not too high to achieve,” said the editorial. “Take the employees’ death benefit as an example. The cost is equal to a $1 million life-insurance policy for each employee, and the company needs to pay only $200 more for each employee a year if the average annual salary is $200,000. Many companies are able to afford this for their own employees.”

[quote]“In contrast, a majority of Chinese workers’ payments is comparatively low. Many employers even can’t guarantee the employees’ lawful rights, not to mention extra benefits.”[/quote]

“The companies should learn from what Google has done for its employees, and at least safeguard the workers’ rights and interests.”