Technology

Microsoft builds tree houses for its employees

Written by Uzair Khalid ·  1 min read >

Tech giants like Google, Facebook and Microsoft are known to provide different interesting perks to their employees. Like Google has high tech sleeping pods at their offices to keep their employees energized. Employees are allowed to sleep for hours in those sleeping pods. Moreover, they get free gourmet food at most of the offices. That’s not all, the employees at Google are also allowed to bring their pets to the office so that they can take care of them and play with them to relax.

Here’s how a Google Sleeping Pod looks like.

Google sleeping pods

Now Microsoft is building beautiful tree houses for their employees. Tree houses are being built so that employees can connect with nature and to each other.

Microsoft built a total of 3 tree houses and 2 of them are already functional. One of them serves as a meeting room and is located in the company’s Washington office. The Washington tree house features a round skylight and lets “just a bubble of blue” into the house. All of the three tree houses are open to all Microsoft employees and are equipped with electricity and high-speed Wifi. The trees are big enough for the employees to take a walk or have a relaxing moment on the balcony.

Microsoft acknowledges that being in nature improves creativity, focus, and happiness and therefore it built close to nature tree houses for their employees. The tree houses are a part of a larger new system of outdoor workspaces on Microsoft’s 500-acre Washington campus.

Here’s how Microsoft describes the new tree houses:

“The treehouses are part of a larger new system of technology-enabled outdoor districts connected to buildings around campus and empowering employees to work in new ways. On a recent sunny day, an employee perched, legs crossed, on a soft grassy knoll below a treehouse. For several minutes, she sat with her hands on her knees, eyes closed, head tilted toward the sky, breathing deeply. Then she grabbed her laptop and typed furiously. After a spate of work, she set her computer aside, rested her palms on her knees, gazed up, and then closed her eyes again.”

Here’s one of the Microsoft’s newly built tree houses in pictures.

Written by Uzair Khalid
Uzair has been very tech savvy since his childhood. He's a passionate writer for all things related to technology and a Computer Science graduate. Profile