And the salary payouts aren't the only death benefit Google has been providing to its employees' families. In addition to the 10-year pay package, Casserly reports, surviving partners will get all stocks vested immediately. And any children of the decease, furthermore, will receive $1,000 a month from Google until age 19. Which gets amended to age 23 if those children are full-time students.

Again. Let's take a moment to appreciate this.

Google's "death benefits" policy has been in place since 2011, and is the result of the company's desire, Bock says, to do right by its employees -- even when they're no longer employees. "There is, of course, research that show employee benefit programs like ours can improve retention, and appear to improve performance on some level," Bock tells Casserly. "But it turns out that the reason we're doing these things for employees is not because it's important to the business, but simply because it's the right thing to do. When it comes down to it, it's better to work for a company who cares about you than a company who doesn't. And from a company standpoint, that makes it better to care than not to care."

Yes! That's awesome and admirable. The other interpretation, though, is that death benefits do indeed accrue to the business. People always want to protect their families; in fact, they tend to care much more about that then they do about the freshness of the quinoa salad being served in the cafeteria. Google is leveraging that fact. It's essentially providing in-house life insurance to its employees -- insurance that's contingent, of course, on those people remaining employees. Leaving Google -- for Twitter, for Apple, for whatever -- also means depriving your family, eventually, of your weirdly lucrative death. For younger employees, without partners or kids to think about, that kind of calculation won't much matter. For older ones, though ... it could matter a lot.

So Google is playing a long game -- a really, really long game. And you could read its generosity not just as generosity, but also as an attempt to discourage employee mobility by fostering employee loyalty. Google, with all its perks, is treating its employees not just as employees, but as just what they are: investments. It hires top talent and then works to keep them at the top. As both a business and an employer of people, Google has an interest in being seen by its staff not just as a place of work, but as a way of life. Even in death.

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