Ikea’s boss solved the Swedish retailer’s global ‘unhappy worker’ crisis by raising salaries, introducing flexible working and subsidizing childcare
Cutting it off there just makes it seem like ikea thinks "more money = happy workers" when in reality it is more nuanced than that.
The alternatives generally suggested are to shorten the original title, omitting needless descriptives or words (e.g., counts, emotives, etc.) if possible, or barring that, to substitute alternative text, preferably from a subtitle or passage from the article (both to avoid editorialising):
dang comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9908533>
Guidelines: <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> ("In Submissions", title guidance.)
Something's got to give, though, and the submitted title is accurate so far as it goes.
If HN's readers can't be trusted to read even the title of an article, well, the whole premise of a an article-based discussion site seems somewhat imperiled. This may well be the case, of course ...
> IKEA solved ‘unhappy worker’ crisis by raising salaries, flexible schedules
It's not really grammatically correct I think, but otherwise seems like a good compromise: we only leave out childcare subsidies, which is another monetary compensation, and do mention flexible work schedules which is a non-monetary benefit and might be crucial to IKEA's strategy.
Ikea improves salaries, flexible working, childcare to solve ‘unhappy worker’ crisis.
Wordsmithing titles is a bit of an art and often a challenge.
As mentioned above, was trying to fit the title without editorializing....
Editorialising is NOT the same thing. It is replacing (or adjusting) a title not for length or clarity, but to give a specific slant to a subject or inject the submitter's opinion.
Dang: "Editorializing is editing a title to put one's own spin on it." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32085439>
And you did do a better job of it, as I also indicated a few minutes ago.
Kid aid plus dosh foils toil says Swede sofa shop boss
surely there's a command line tool for abstract2dailymail
78 characters
I am in favor of flexible work arrangements, and I have no idea if those have costs to the company, or how much more you'd need to pay the workers to accept the less flexible arrangements.
Although, one challenge with things like childcare is that if you applied this on a society-wide level you wind up with childless people having more money, thereby being better able to outbid parents for essentials like housing (this is why a housing scarcity is so insidious). Of course, whether that's a bad thing or not depends on perspective. I have two kids myself and despite living in Europe childcare was so expensive we dropped to one income.
> It's weird, in some ways, that we offer benefits.
In some cases it also makes economical sense. It can cost a company $1000 to give you a benefit, but to buy it yourself would cost $2000 (and the difference is even greater if the benefit isn't taxed at the same rate as cash would be).
Or the $200 the company spends on beers for me each year, many would perhaps say that they'd rather have the $200 to spend as they please. But in a sense, I get more value than $200 by getting to know my co-workers better and having a better time every day at work.
It's how villages worked in the past, most adults did non child related work much of the time, some adults and some older children kept an eye on what the pooled group of kids were up to .. watching, sometimes educating, sometimes leading them in "work" building things, cooking, hunting, clearing fields etc. in small ways.
It's a better use of labour than splitting every pair of adults into one for this type of work, the other always does child care.
1) We move close to my or her family.
2) We get a lot more money.
I don't see anyway around it, we need family support or money to pay someone else to help.
The average career length for teachers (not job, career) is 5 years and trending down.
The reason is not a secret: teaching is a brutal experience with sub-poverty wages. In most cases parents, students and the school administration are your adversaries. If it’s a public institution, political campaigns come crashing in annually with “us vs them” battles that make it awful no matter what side you are on.
It is not a job anyone should pursue.
Basically, the problem is that the current educational system doesn't scale well. It requires hundreds of thousands of teachers. Then people say "also, they should all be very smart, very empathic, well paid, etc." but good luck finding hundreds of thousands of people like that.
People understand why having a personal cook is expensive, so you either cook for yourself or you buy something mass-produced in a supermarket or you do a combination of both. Yet, we insist on everyone having a personal teacher. Not completely personal, but the ratio of teachers to students is something like 1:10, which is still too many teachers.
If we go even further, the school system has a dual purpose of cheap babysitting and education, but it is taboo to talk about the former, so we pretend that all teachers do it teach. If instead we admitted the dual purpose, we could have separate professions of babysitters and teachers, both operating at schools, but we would need fewer teachers, and the babysitters would not need to have university diplomas.
All contributions don't get paid, and all that get paid don't contribute.
I'm guessing this is some slur for rural areas. You know the ones that typically have large families?
You can buy double the house with 2 incomes instead of 1.
Raising kids is absolutely contributing to society.
In the US it’s a shame we so under/de value child rearing as somehow “less than”
It is better for the family: - it has more resources - it has more income diversification
It is better for the father: - he doesn't have to carry the weight of income-gathering alone
It is better for the mother: - she doesn't have to carry the weight of child-rearing alone - if things go sour, she can maintain herself and/or the family financially - sha has more choices in life
It is better for the child: - they get a wider variety of experiences - they socialize with other kids earlier, which helps in early school-life - they learn to socialize with more adults too - there are professionals who have seen many children, who will notice problems before the parents will
It is better for the childcare professional: - they have another job choice, helping them pick a job they enjoy
It is good for society: - father, mother and childcare professional can do something that matches their talents, instead of doing something suboptimal for them, thus delivering more value to society
It doesn't devalue child-rearing, it values it more, by having a professional help do it.
I'm always befuddled by that argument. I'm not devaluing plumbing work by hiring a plumber, nor am I devaluing medical work by hiring a doctor. Why would I be devaluing child-rearing by hiring a professional to help?
Who actually cares more about a child's well-being, an employee paid by the hour or their own parents?
As for caring about the child's well-being? The parents, which is why they should hire the best people they can afford to do various parts of taking care off them. Hire the best doctor for their medical care, hire the best dentists for their dental care, hire the best teachers for their education, hire the best child-care professionals for daycare.
If one parent is working, the other home with the kids, chances are that the one working can't take as much time off or has a harder time setting a healthy work-life balance (increasing your pay requires working harder).
Using myself as an example: the only reason I can pick up my kid early from the kindergarten and spend quality time with him is because I can afford to not work 9-5 every day due to my wife also working.
Housing costs have risen to match the switch to double income households. Now instead of 1, it takes 2 incomes just to be able to afford housing. This makes the family more brittle since if either parent loses their job both will lose the house.
And with the rise in housing costs people move further afield. Commuting times go way up and people waste more time in the car or on the train. Everybody ends up more stressed than ever before and further behind economically (compared to those whose wealth grows without working).
Plus they get the benefit of time with parents, parents can focus on doing things they think is valuable for the kid.
To somehow claim that childcare comes at no cost for kids is naive.
The keyword there is "can". They can, it's just less likely. Especially when a parent takes the "stay at home" part too literal.
> To somehow claim that childcare comes at no cost for kids is naive.
Well, my experience with my kids was that their daycare was beneficial for them. They did not always want to go, but they definitely enjoyed all their days there. And especially for the first one, they had a lot of experiences that my wife and I would never have even considered as an option.
Comparing them to their classmates when school started, they were way ahead in lots of things. Absolutely in language development, socialization and being able to focus. They were also just way less, for lack of a better term, worried about everything. They knew that the world does not revolve around mommy and daddy, and that they'd be fine in new environments.
And you're only counting the benefits of daycare, but ignoring the opportunity cost of less time with parents and the benefits that come from that.
I don't disagree that there are benefits to daycare, but where is the optimum? A few hours a day? Or the kids in daycare from 8am to 6pm, so they see their parents for maybe 2 hours a day before bed time?
This not optimal for many reasons:
- once the kids are going to school, regular "office hours" daycare is not needed and it skew the relationship even more by removing one task to one party. If that time is used for personal instead of household chores activities, that person not bringing the income is eventually seen as a partial freeloader by the one bringing the income.
- relationship can go sour quickly and if it doesn't work, the "dependent" one doesn't feel as free to end that relationship
- the person taking care of the kid's social life is usually not as rich
The elephant in the room being that in most case it ends up being the woman staying at home in an heterogender relationship in a society with an historically patriarcal model because of income levels which further increase the inequalities and dependentship.
IMO society is worse now with dual income + strangers raising children.
The only major benefits I've seen are 1) Woman have access to birth control 2) Women have equal rights. Everything else is debatable as "better".
I also felt that putting my daughters to daycare helped them socially.
In post-WWII US, it was generally easy for fathers to find stable, lifelong careers with a low risk of layoffs and a low risk of an untimely death, which allowed families to thrive on single incomes. But that was an outlier, not the norm.
In most places and in most periods of history, mothers have had to work (sewing, gardening, spinning, knitting, brewing, laundering, midwifery, etc., etc.) because fathers have not had widespread access steady, well-paying, low-risk work. Unless she was independently wealthy, a mother who did not bring in income was playing a very risky game with her children's lives.
The biggest difference is that, today, most work must be done outside the home, which is very difficult for mothers. Childcare helps close the gender pay gap and is necessary for a fairer, less sexist society — at least until/unless our economy returns to primarily home-based work.
E.g. if the company were going to pay $2k extra but it would be taxed $1k, they would have to pay $3k to get the equivalent "happiness" boost. The employee gets $2k / year either way.
$2k tax free -> $2k in your pocket
$3k + $1k tax -> $2k in your pocket
workplace nurseries are tax free as is any child care for lower incomes. other benefits are tax free up to a certain amount.
(If $Company is not big global retailer like IKEA, then things would probably be far simpler.)
But collectively it can work; the company may talk to the union and offer either X benefit which costs $Y or $Y applied to salaries.
In every other developed country everyone has healthcare, irrelevant of job - even people that don't have a job.
Healthcare is not tied to your job, it is a basic human right.
So this discussion makes no sense outside the US.
Such an american thing to say.
No, we don't mind having the company pay colleagues' children childcare on top of our (equal to theirs) salary. We'd hate to be in a society where such a petty mindset would be common, that would be living in some kind of social hell.
My anecdote: I worked for a company whose long-time CEO retired. After an involved search, the company found a replacement. She was onboarded and started getting in a groove, then 6 months in it was announced she would be leaving for a year of maternity leave. So we had to find another CEO. 10 months later the original hire decided she would not be returning to the role (she's under no obligation to). No problem, except the replacement CEO assumed this was a temporary position, so she already had another job lined up after her term. Once again, we were searching for a new CEO...
All of a sudden you're working for a company that's had 5 CEOs in 3 years. That's a hard thing for a company to deal with. People will say, "that can happen anyway!". Sure, but the strange thing here is nobody did anything wrong, and yet an incredibly destabilizing environment resulted and the business suffered.
And if anyone did anything for the business...
If anything subsidized childcare feels like charity and I don't want charity, I want to be paid well for my work, so I can take care of my family.
Only if we could generalize all the employees! I am sure there are some who feel better to have holiday gifts, holiday parties, token recognition rewards etc. And there would be some who just evaluate everything on the basis of cold hard numbers. A good company should have policies to cater to as many employees as possible.
For an analogy, one can be given money instead of being invited to a social gathering. One might feel offended, while other may feel happier.
More money = happy workers, unless of course, you don't give them money, but also other economic benefits that are equivalent to money. I'm not seeing the nuance.
Being forced to commute at peak time costs more - on a retail salary the difference between a peak and off-peak ticket can mean that the first hour or two of working is essentially pointless, as you're just paying back the cost of getting there in the first place.
Having to pay an extra surcharge to visit the dentist, because you can only go on a Saturday because you need to be at work other days. Flexible working would allow you to just take the Tuesday off no problem and go when it's cheaper.
I'm sure there are lots of other examples that apply to different lifestyles.
Generally though higher paid employees tend to have more sway within a company structure and likely don't need to miss these important events, the win here is that something that was generally true for mid management up for most companies now extends down through all the ranks.
In another way, if you present a worker with the option between two jobs with the same hourly rate, one having flexible working hours and the other not, which would expect to be more likely choice? You can then measure the value of this choice by changing the hourly rates between the two until you see changes in outcome and you would be able to estimate exactly how much "more money" it appears to be "worth."