Free food is such a no-brainer, if you're a manager. For £5 of pizza you can get £50-100 of work, easy, and the workers think they're getting the better deal...
Sure, free food is great and all. But we're not kindergarteners are we? I'm an adult and I like to take care of my own food (and such).
Free beer and pizza is for helping your friend move. Or for giving a talk at a *camp event. It's not for producing hundreds of thousands if not millions in value for your employer.
I think most people get more value you out of the free food than if they were simply paid what it cost to provide. In the case of free food I see it as where both employer and employee do better with the in-kind perk than the equivalent cash alternative.
But one too often sees perks like these offered as "Well, we're a startup, we can't pay you market rate, but we feed you". And that shit ain't right.
The other problem with free food is that it starts to feel like an obligation to consume it. I like eating out about once a week otherwise I brown-bag it most of the week with yogurt, fruit and some peanut butter crackers. If you make free food a perk (1) I don't feel like i'm maximizing my benefits (2) people start to think i'm not a team player because I don't want to eat pizza/burritos/chinese/indian/<Insert Food Here> five days a week.
Is sitting together and talking about your job ONLY beneficial to the employer? I feel like better communication and more discussion hopefully leading to doing a better job is also beneficial to the employee. Working on a more successful team probably leads to higher satisfaction and better long term career prospects. Even when I've worked in places that didn't provide food, all or almost all of the team still usually ate together, just because we liked what we were doing and enjoyed one another's company.
My point is employees aren't losing anything by taking or not taking the perk. We wouldn't pay someone more not to eat the food. Aside from all the weird bad team dynamics that would cause it would also be a net-loss to the company. When people work from home, we also don't pay them any more, despite that we order less food and they have to buy/cook their own.
Is sitting together and talking about your job ONLY beneficial to the employer?
Eating together can be accomplished through culture alone but providing food is probably easier and more successful.
I have worked at a lot of different companies, and an ad-hoc, employee-organized lunch run is very common. The person who commits to handling the cash and picking up the food decides on the restaurant, orders are placed by a deadline, and people eat it when it arrives. If a manager or admin staffer names the restaurant, they have to say whether the cost of the meal is on the company or not.
Occasionally, someone will name a sit-down restaurant and a time of day, and people simply show up.
People who don't want to participate on any given day don't participate. They eat the lunch they packed from home, or go somewhere else.
That's how grown-ups eat lunch. If this pattern does not arise naturally, there is some dysfunction in the workplace that should probably be solved directly, rather than trying to force the pattern into existence by providing catered lunches.
The company-supplied lunches lead to useful conversations in a place where you are able to judge their utility.
When people from your office go out and do not invite you, you are unable to know who is talking to whom, or what they are talking about. And you should not know, because that would make you a spying creep.
You can't discount opportunity costs. If Oprah was giving away cars to everyone who went out to eat lunch at a local strip mall, you can't reasonably say that a person who found a quarter on the break room floor benefited by staying in the office to eat lunch.
You only observed the conversation that you observed. You did not observe all the potential conversations that might have occurred instead of the one you heard. The value of such conversations is the result of an expected value calculation, based on the potential benefit multiplied by the possibility that such benefit would be realized. That involves a lot of guesswork, obviously.
On a different note, at my company, talking about work at lunch is pretty taboo unless the topic of the lunch was previously disclosed by the initiator to be work-related. Lunch is when we talk about all kinds of other bullshit and only talk about work if we're desperately spinning our wheels on something or want to vent.
Now people just sit at their desk and check Facebook/reddit/etc over lunch — or they break into cliques. As a junior employee, I found that free lunch leveled the playing field. Senior managers couldn't hide out with only other senior managers when you all eat at the same place.
They say that the family that eats together stays together and I think that's just as true for work families.
I don't see a problem with that. If I work overtime I can leave earlier on another day. Quite a lot of my coworkers leave at 12am on fridays.
> We provide free food because we see a lot of value in everyone eating together and employees get a lot of value in just not having to think about lunch or spend the time to go out and eat somewhere.
This is literally saying that your employees get free food so that they can stay at work and only think about work and only eat with people from work...
There's also tons of non-engineering stuff that benefits from being together, onsite. Stray comments might lead to huge import improvements. In my pervious company, there were always large things we'd find out when we'd have team leaders meet up. And this was a small 15 person business!
It takes a lot of directed effort to make remote work. The GP post about wanting people together has a lot going for it.
Define together? What does that even mean? Together in the same room? I'd have to completely disagree. Teams working together is extremely important. Teams _being_ together, as in co-located, is just a preference.
> Peopleware covered it and it was one of the top detriments
Peopleware has ideas that have stood the test of time. However their opinions regarding remote work have not. The tools available to teams and engineers today are far superior to those in 2000 (not exactly sure on that date)
> Something like a 50% penalty in project schedules when teams were remote
This has absolutely nothing to do with remote work. This is just pure mismanagement. You cannot half-ass remote work. It's either a company wide culture or nothing at all.
> There's also tons of non-engineering stuff that benefits from being together, onsite
Like what?
> Stray comments might lead to huge import improvements
Just because you're not co-located does not mean you're just in silence throughout the day. There are a slew of chat clients and voice applications that allow remote teams to communicate easily throughout the day.
> In my pervious company, there were always large things we'd find out when we'd have team leaders meet up. And this was a small 15 person business!
Just because you're remote doesn't mean you don't have meetings. It also doesn't mean you never meet with people in person.
> It takes a lot of directed effort to make remote work
It takes a lot of directed effort to make any company culture work. And what exactly does "work" even mean? I've seen companies that are a complete mess and they have everyone strapped to their desks. Doing remote work right takes no more effort that doing co-location right. You just have to recognize the difference.
It's like saying offshoring development is OK because "project management is hard and you have to be on top off things regardless".
But hey, I'm glad it works out for some people. A lot of my work is done remotely. But for core development or engineering on my own project, I'd want to be sure onsite meetings happened with fair regularity.
We don't tell employees what to think about or talk about at lunch. Sometimes it's work related and sometimes it's just shooting the shit. In either case I feel like both employee and company win.
We also have a good culture around it - people who don't feel like socializing frequently take food back to their desks instead of eating with everyone else, which I think removes some of the issues people take with the idea.
You can adapt to this environment, for example by coming in with prepared messaging of your own, and not meekly acquiescing to their first offer when their second offer is their first offer plus the food they were going to give you anyhow. (News you can use guys: this is also Standard Operating Procedure.)
Disclaimer: I'm married and a father.
The hilarity of maturing. At 19, pizza, soda and video games after work were sexy. At 31, a stable retirement plan is what gets me revved up.
I work at a company with rock solid health, vision, and dental benefits, very good working hours, and I can't wait to get out.
It's full of married employees with children that hope to retire here. It is an excellent place for pregnant women, but no good if you're young or have any kind of ambition.