单项选择题

It is the latest innovation from Silicon Valley: the employee perk is moving from the office to the home. Facebook gives new parents $4,000 in spending money. Stanford School of Medicine is piloting a project to provide doctors with housecleaning and in-home dinner delivery. Genentech offers take-home dinners and helps employees find last-minute baby sitters when a child is too sick to go to school.
These kinds of benefits are a departure from the upscale cafeteria meals, massages and other services intended to keep employees happy and productive while at work. And the goal is not just to reduce stress for employees, but for their families, too. If the companies succeed, they will minimize distractions and sources of tension that can inhibit focus and creativity. Now that technology has allowed work to bleed into home life, it seems that companies are trying to address the impact of home life on work.
There is, of course, the possibility that relieving people of chores at home will simply free them up to work more. But David Lewin, a compensation expert and management professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he viewed the perks as part of a growing effort by American business to reward people with time and peace of mind instead of more traditional financial tools, like stock options and bonuses. "They"re trying to get at people"s larger lives and sanity," Mr. Lewin said. "You might call it the bang for the nonbuck."
At Deloitte, the consulting firm, employees can get a backup care worker if an aging parent or grandparent needs help. The company subsidizes personal trainers and nutritionists, and offers round-the-clock counseling service for help with issues like marital strife and infertility. Deloitte executives, and other experts, said they believe that such benefits were likely to spread.
"The workplace was built on the assumption that there was somebody at home dealing with the home front," said Anne Weisberg, a longtime human resources executive who helped write a book about new kinds of workplace policies. Not only is that no longer the case, she said, but the work-life pressures seem to be building. "There"s a greater awareness that we"re pushing things to the limit and something"s got to give," she said. Some compensation experts argue these types of perks ultimately do little to attract employees and might obscure more fundamental problems at companies that have trouble retaining talent.
That is a challenge Stanford owns up to, given the brain drain suffered by academic hospitals, where relentless demands include treating patients, writing grants, doing research and traveling to conferences. So 18 months ago, Stanford hired a consulting firm called Jump Associates to better understand why so many academic doctors feel burned out. The company videotaped them from the time they woke up, through the workday and until they and their families went to sleep.
In one video, a kidney specialist told a story that shocked the researchers: while she was on maternity leave, she bought a minivan to ferry the children of friends and neighbors to school and sports practices. That way, the doctor explained, she would be able to ask for favors when she returned to work—and that, in theory, would enable her to juggle the dual demands of work and family. Dr. Valantine, a cardiologist, professor and associate dean at the Stanford School of Medicine, said the findings had led her to scrap the idea that people should strive for "work-life balance" and instead think in terms of "work-life integration".
That shifting mind-set—the idea that life and work must be blended rather than separated—is increasingly common, according to other doctors, scholars who study work habits and the generally well-compensated workers of Silicon Valley like Andrew Sinkov, 31, whose employer is paying to clean his apartment. The value of the perk is greater than the money saved, he said.
His boss, Mr. Libin, also gives employees $1,000 to spend on vacation, but it has to be "a real vacation". Mr. Libin added that he did not see these perks just as ways to keep his work force—and their families—engaged. He said he also tended to be frugal as a chief executive, preferring these types of peace-of-mind benefits to, say, business-class travel, which the company does not pay for. "Happy workers make better products," he said. "The output we care about has everything to do with your state of mind."
At Google, the company has expanded its benefits beyond free meals, dry cleaning and other services on campus to offering $500 to new parents. The company has also arranged for fresh fish to be delivered to the office for employees to take home. "What you"ve seen is benefits moving away from free food into thinking more holistically about individuals and their health," said Jordan Newman, a Google spokesman. "And a lot of that happens outside of the office." From the story of the kidney specialist, we can know that she did so because ______.