Enhancing an Already Great Workplace
Everyone’s heard stories about the benefits of working at Google. It’s a company that routinely tops lists of the “Best Places to Work,” and it’s quickly become the blueprint for how to run a fun and creative office. You’d think that the multiple cafeterias offering free food daily, the game rooms, the “bring your pet to work” policy, and the long list of health benefits would be enough employee appreciation for any one company, but Google doesn’t stop there. They also regularly order challenge coins to distribute to their employees for a job well done.
For small companies, challenge coins are often used for branding purposes. But for a company as large and all encompassing as Google, branding isn’t the first thing you think about when it comes to challenge coin uses. And to be fair, Google isn’t getting custom coins made to deliver to the public in an effort to raise awareness about their brand. However, there’s some small comfort in knowing that even coins for a company as large as Google have to adhere to strict brand standards. With that in mind, here are some of the coins we’ve been fortunate enough to partner with the large tech pioneers in making.
Coins for Google Data Centers
One of the primary reasons companies get challenge coins made is to celebrate the completion of major projects. When you’re a company like Google, a lot of your major projects include coming up with impressive new technology and software that the world can’t live without. But one of the things Google most likes to celebrate with the creation of new challenge coins is the opening of new data centers.
As the world transitions to cloud-based services, Google is looking to capitalize on the shift. Doing so means opening more data centers in more places that can support those cloud services. One such data center exists in Lenoir, NC, and it’s the employees who work there who were the recipients of the coin above. The Lenoir coin might not be in honor of a new facility, but the people who work there, keeping the data center running smoothly, deserve to be honored all the same. New data centers get their own unique fanfare.
In 2019, Google dedicated $13 billion to opening a collection of new data centers across the world. In honor of that project, they had an entire challenge coin series created. A challenge coin series consists of a collection of coins in which one of the coin faces is the same across the order, but the other coin face is different. We see a lot of orders like that for years of service programs.
For this series, the obverse coin face retains the same branding we’re used to seeing from the company’s coins: the Google brand primary colors surrounding the uppercase G that makes up the Google logo. Meanwhile, the back of each coin in the series is dedicated to a new data center that the company opened, or is still set to open in 2019. It takes a lot of work to get one of these facilities open, and now everyone involved in the difficult process will receive a memento of their hard work.
Celebrating the People of Google
Google isn’t the only tech company that orders coins celebrating their data centers; Facebook is also prone to these types of challenge coins. But this also isn’t the only type of coin the world’s leading search engine orders. They also draw attention to some of their social programs.
Women@Google is an employee resource group (ERG) that focuses on issues of gender equality and making Google a great place to work for all women. In the male-dominated tech world, this is an important responsibility to have, and as the largest ERG in the company, it’s easy to see how it’s a topic Google takes very seriously.
The Women@Google ERG collects resources and works on ways to support the women who work there. They also participate in The Women in Tech Summit, helping to bring attention to the different issues and solutions to certain problems they face in the industry. It’s a lot of hard and very important work, and for their efforts, they more than deserve challenge coins.
In the end, there’s something humanizing about the fact that a company as massive as Google still makes use of challenge coins. It’s a quick and easy way to remember that even as the tech company powers so many different aspects of our day-to-day lives, there are real people behind the scenes, and the company they work for goes well out of its way to show them that their efforts are valued.
