Forget Coffee Breaks, Try Reading a Novel

The Wall Street Journal has an amusing article this morning about companies getting creative with their proverbial coffee breaks. One logistics company forms a daily conga line and at a New York PR firm, the boss had employees team up to paint a kitchen mural of a monkey sipping a pina colada on the beach. But nothing tops a packaging company, where employees are free to lounge on an outdoor deck and read a novel for hours at a time. Here's the owner's justification: "Our philosophy is, we're hiring adults. I don't question why they're not working." Of course, he admits later in the article that some employees, who "weren't able to find a healthy balance between, say, video golf and finishing assignments," had to be let go.