Everyone likes to blame loose VC money for silly stuff like this, but I have a slightly more nuanced theory about ridiculous office perks:
Office managers/office teams have very few concrete metrics. Beyond a binary "is the office functional" (e.g. are there enough desks, does the electricity work) there is pretty much no way to measure job performance. That's not to say their work doesn't have any impact. Anyone who has worked in a poorly laid out office has dealt with the corresponding productivity drain. However, it's really hard to measure that boost/loss and nearly impossible to accurately attribute it.
The solution is for office managers to do ridiculous but easily quantifiable things like spend money on subscription water coolers, an on-demand smoothie blending machine [0], potted plants that cost $800 [1].
If you are an office worker frustrated by this trend, you should invent some performance metric for office managers and then sell something that improves it. You'll instantly suck up all the VC money going to these other startups.
That $800 plant isn't even a cactus as advertised (much less a desert cactus).
Cactus are native to the Americas. The plant in the photo is a
Euphorbia (closely related to the poinsetta sold around Christmas) and is from Africa. It looks like a cactus but isn't related at all.
One way to tell the difference between cactus and these "imposters" is that real cactus have spines protruding from a detachable pad that can be pulled cleanly off (the spines are an evolved leaf and detach in a similar way). The spines of the Euphorbia on the other hand are part of the main body of the plant and can't be cleanly detached.
Probably only a few plant nerds really care, but for $800 they shouldn't call it something it manifestly isn't IMOP.
Aha, thanks. Even though that would be IMOO, you switched the context for me. If the P had been omitted it would have been obvious to me. Perhaps it's just a typo.
I disagree. Have you ever done this? I've been on the other side of it. (I own my own company.) Get suggestions from staff & follow through. In the real world staff have lots of wants, nice ideas, and "wouldn't it be good if" suggestions. They have very little concept if other people are interested in their idea, if people would actually continue to use the idea once the novelty wears off, and so on.
In my office here's a list of "staff ideas" and how they turned out:
- "Let's have standing desks!" After the first six months, not a single person in the office has changed the height of their desk in over a year.
- "Let's get a microwave, so people will start bringing their lunch from home." The microwave gets used once a week (by the person who requested) and now it is one more thing that needs to be cleaned weekly.
- "Let's have couches, so people can work from places other than their desk!" The person who requested this used the couch every day. After he left the company, no one else has ever used it.
- "Let's buy more whiteboards and put them up in various places so it is easy to have discussions anywhere!" Of the 6 whiteboards, 5 of them have had the same writing on them for over six months. One whiteboard has had the same project diagram for over a year. The ink is so set I couldn't even erase it last time I tried. Only one whiteboard ever gets used -- the one we had before the suggestion.
- "Let's get croissants/yogurt/fresh fruit/whatever". In 90% of cases, the person who requested it is the only person who ever eats it. After a few months I have to discontinue ordering it because we are throwing away 90% of it.
How expensive are your staff? These all sound like wins or at least not losses to me given that even unskilled staff are super expensive compared to these things.
Microwaves are like what, $100? Couches? Another couple hundred? Whiteboards? Probably within the realm of $100 there again for a few of them. Food for one person? Stupidly cheap compared to a salary as well.
As long as getting these things could foreseeably have made only the one person who requested them even slightly happier, it seems worth it.
Standing desks are pretty expensive, I'll give you that. I have seen them used a fair bit though so having them might eventually pay off. Also staff might still feel better about having them even if they're not using them.
standing desks: People who want to stand will normally put 8 concrete blocks under their desk, then get a tall chair for when they don't wish to stand. This is cheap and effective.
microwave: Heh, we wore out many, and then got 4 restaurant-grade ones. We also have a couple toaster ovens. This is for a couple hundred people. For special occasions we also have a griddle, several 1-coil burners, and a propane grill.
couches: They get some use, mainly during meetings and when people play video games. Some people sometimes sleep in them.
whiteboards: The ones in weird places get used for polls, contests, etc.
croissants/yogurt/fresh fruit/whatever: This gets eaten. Bananas seem to get ripe late on Friday though, which doesn't end well, but at least they are cheap.
Those are totally normal and common things in the UK at least. My current company has them all, and the only one that I think makes little sense is the sofas (well it's more like armchairs, but yeah they are rarely used).
Everyone has standing desks and they are often used. Not all the time of course but most people use them occasionally.
Every company I've ever worked at has a microwave. Not having one would just be weird. Similarly every company I've worked at has whiteboards. They're cheap, why not have them?
My current company has fresh fruit and it all gets eaten. Just order less if it isn't getting eaten.
Anyway, I wasn't suggesting you immediately implement any suggestion an employee comes up with - you can survey your staff to see how many people agree. It's not difficult.
My point wasn't really about whether things are cheap or not. My point is that the post I replied to came across as typical developer "every other job in the world except mine is easy" that you constantly see in HackerNews.
"You don't need metrics - just a suggestion box." Implied: managing the comforts for humans in an office is easy! (So easy that places like Facebook and Google have entire Experience Teams dedicated to it....)
In the real world it is always more complicated. There are always tradeoffs -- if you put in couches then maybe there's no room for quiet pods or a PlayStation or a lunch room or whatever. Always have on-going maintenance costs (who orders & pays for the fruit when the office admin is on holiday? Yet another thing to always remember and have to handover), and just the mind space required to deal with things. How do you know the office manager isn't picking the most expensive option every time? How do you know you're serving the vast majority who won't put something in the suggestion box? Etc.
How about something even more basic and central: your manager/boss/CEO has to balance challenging you to push the boundaries of what you can do without making you hate him and/or the company or burning you out.
Motivating someone to the near peak of their ability is generally the goal, but it's not easy... quite a bit harder than figuring out where to put the couch.
I'm a programmer at a manufacturing company and our offices all have (well we actually have two) canteens attached, Microwave, 4 rack toasters and a paninni maker.
Coffee/Tea/Water are available from a machine (you just put your token in and select what you want).
We don't have Sofa's but everything else we do have, I have a whiteboard behind my desk (though that is because what was a meeting room is now just my office).
The perks you describe are actually pretty basic compared to the over-the-top silicon valley world, but they still get the same point across. The CEO/boss is hiring you for your brain, and keeping you happy and reducing stress makes most people's brains work better.
So no matter if your office has a personal sushi chef or just decent coffee, management's ability to empathize, see the pain, and compensate in some tangible way (not necessarily monetarily) can often be a huge motivator / confidence booster.
Beyond a quiet place to work (which I have) and decent management (which I have) I'm really not fussed about perks.
My boss insists I don't work over time (and if I need to do anything on a weekend I get the time back in lieu).
So while yeah they are basic perks I'll take no perks if I can have the above every day of the week.
For me as a programmer, 9-5 Mon to Friday every week, week in/week out is perfect - Work/Life balance is the best I've ever had since I moved to working as a programmer full time.
For a contrast, my company made a public suggestion page (with upvotes and downvotes), resulting in all the things listed here--and it has made the environment noticeably nicer. I adjust my standing desk at least once daily to my comfort. I now microwave my lunch and eat the available food, which has definitely had a positive impact on my health and all the things that come along with that. The couches are a nice place to relax with coworkers at the end of the day, especially after a stressful day. A lot of the time, people will come by asking the same sort of questions, and it's useful to have the project diagram you drew from the last time up right next to you. If the writing gets set in easily--don't you think that's the reason they would all have the same writing?
I was not the requester on any of these things, and in fact I was skeptical toward most of them at first, but each one was noticeably good, and over time has made me happier. These are precisely the sort of things I would look for the presence or absence of if I were to look for a job elsewhere.
How big is your company? How do you measure usage? Are you sure it's not just confirmation bias ("look at Alice using the microwave she insisted on having")? I would find it pretty surprising if you put out croissants and all but one person ignored them! If 90% of food is going uneaten... then maybe look for less perishable snacks and buy less at a time?
Is there a way to have an anonymous voting system? I mean, not all suggestions by individuals have to be immediately implemented, do they? If no one else feels as enthusiastic on microwaves or couches or what have you, then wouldn't voting avoid the problems you describe?
I know a lot of people who say this as a sort of implied "maybe not do any of this", but the alternative solution is "do all of this"
There are obviously sometimes conflicting requests, but imagine if you had staff whose main job was making sure employees enjoy their working environment and you just shifted stuff in and out of the office as requests changed. Almost every employee would have their pet want fulfilled and you could be experimenting with new stuff every day.
Sounds really expensive, but imagine what something like that might to do turnover if done well
EDIT: it sounds like you did try a lot of stuff, didn't mean to imply you didn't. I just wonder what the logical endpoint of this idea is and whether it is workable
Hiring a full time staff to do this? Yeah, that happens at big, rich companies. It doesn't happen at actual startups. Instead the founder or the office admin does it on top of everything else they're supposed to be doing.
Also, anecdotally, adding those things didn't affect my turnover at all. What did affect my turnover? Having (or not having) interesting projects for people to work on.
Love this post, for very personal reasons. My family were German Jews living in Germany for generations, and in the 1930s before it got really bad, they moved to the USA and started a water cooler business.
Back in the day, water coolers were expensive to manufacture, roughly $500-1500 per unit. The company was ostensibly a water company, but would sell water with a minimal profit. Their real money renting out the water coolers at $10-20/month.
Then in the late 1990s / early 200s China came online. Those $500 water coolers all of a sudden were being sold for $70. Obviously, it's pretty difficult to rent out a $70 piece of equipment for $10/mo. So the business had to shift from making money off of equipment to water, a much lower profit margin business.
A few tips for any entrepreneur going into this business:
- Obviously sell hard during the summer when it's hot
- Asian folks often prefer hot water to cold, so have some solution that caters to them.
- The bottles themselves can become a relatively large expense. Think about how to deal with them.
- Moving heavy bottles of water is extremely labor intensive. Your workforce will eventually become unionized, build that into business plan.
- Drinking spring and/or purified water is often subject to trends. Have a plan for when municipal water becomes "hip" or when customers demand that you reduce your carbon foot-print and stop shipping in water from out-of-state.
- A common complaint about water coolers is that people find bugs in their water. More often than not, this has nothing to do with you water, and has everything to do with the location in which it's placed. You won't be able to fix every situation, have a plan for this.
I gave some suggestions to the manager of the cowork space where I go. She was very friendly and said yes thank you, but it was clearly not what she thought to be important. So no real improvements. Even though others tell me the same (and also switch to the much cheaper plan because that is the more rational thing to do then).
So suggestions only work if it clicks with the other person (people). One guy asking an IoT water cooler could do the trick ;-)
Office managers cant tell the company is doing better just by looking? How about asking for a simple report if it's really that hard.
Or... they could just not change things and waste money unnecessarily because they feel they have to. If there's nothing else for them to do, then is there even a need for an office manager in the first place?
I've seen way too many 20 person startups that have more HR/office staff than actual product related people.
I agree. Metrics have side effects as well. Optimizing for particular metrics can make an organisation incur tunnel vision, and leads to some really perverse and inefficient practices that don't really achieve the spirit of the metric.
Think hard about what to measure and not measuring anything at all is totally valid. Just talk to the humans in your org to see if they're happy and if they need any particular changes.
I don't think you necessarily even need to measure job performance, just ask some people what they think actually distracts or disturbs them, read some studies, try something, and see if it at least seems like it has some impact. Almost anything is better than buying and installing random leisure and refreshment equipment hoping for an effect you can't name or describe.
As I get older, I really wonder why people do this to other people. In this case, I'm talking about the manufacturer of this product. They know other human beings are going to spend a lot of money to use their products? It's important to make money, but at what consequence?
It's like evolution. Why does some weird, seemingly useless creature exist? Because it fills some crack in the ecological economy. Someone was willing to buy this piece of shit and that is explanation enough for its existence.
I read about apples exported from China, covered in a toxic paint so they look red and beautiful, even though it is harmful, all to make a buck. I just wonder why humans have not evolved to, at a minimum, actually show some caring attitude toward others of their same species.
Humans are capable of both wonderful and terrible things. We're letting the ones who are willing to do terrible things for personal gain run wild with little accountability.
What is worse? The people doing that harm at least do it for personal gain. But the rest of the "bystanders" actively avoid taking action or raising any alarms because they "don't want to be that guy"....
No, we're fine. Malice is surprisingly rare, but people will cut corners to make a buck. Effective regulation makes cutting corners more expensive than doing things the right way.
Most western consumers have a justifiable trust in the food they eat. They walk into the supermarket, load up their trolley and don't give a moment's thought to whether their meat is tainted, their milk is watered down or their flour is bulked out with chalk. They don't worry about whether their candy has been dyed with toxic cadmium or cobalt pigments. They don't worry about whether their wine has been sweetened with lead acetate. They know that food is being rigorously monitored for safety throughout the supply chain, because the cost to a business of non-compliance can be catastrophic.
European consumers often worry about "e-number" additives in their food, but the entire point is that e-numbers are given to additives that have been rigorously tested for safety. I don't have the first idea what dodecyl gallate is, but I know that E313 is safe to eat.
Red apples usually are coated in ground up beetle to give the bright redness colour. It’s considered non toxic. Donno if that’s the same as what you’re referring to. I think it’s called Shellac.
Shellac is a colourless or amber substance, derived from a secretion of the lac beetle. It's used as a coating on many food products (including apples and citrus fruits) to inhibit moisture loss and enhance shine.
Cochineal is an insect-derived red food dye, but I haven't heard of it being used to colour apples. It's often labelled as carmine or natural red 4.
reminds me of the story where a chinese plastic factory created lots of small white pellets and sold them as rice, making a fortune. (might be wrong on the factory detail, but the plastic rice definitely happened)
Urban legend--some combination of plastic pellets for another purpose (injection molding, or fake rice for Japan-style food models) getting misinterpreted as fraud, and/or deliberate misinformation.
Don't you think it's more like some sort of genetic mutation that's just benign enough that it does not kill the organism immediately? (Lord help us if this one breeds.)
I think you're overcomplicating it: people often prefer their gain to others' gain.
And especially in the business mindset, the impact of the work you do is pretty much always downplayed. Same reason autoplay videos exist. It's very hard for a business structure to say no to an increase in profit due to a negative that's hard to quantify and that won't also result in an increase in profit.
Blame is shared: ask whoever signed the contract why. In this case, I'd find more blame in whoever willingly accepts this nonsense, rather than the one trying to sell it.
To be fair, better implementations of this (mix your own flavored sparkling water machines) are pretty nice to have around. I'm not sure they're worth $1000/year but they do cut down on waste from plastic soda bottles and cans.
Office design is highly vulnerable to bikeshedding. It _seems_ obvious so everyone has an opinion without realising the implications.
I saw a costly office refurb that made everything open plan including the kitchen/breakout area. Within a week there were noise complaints from nearby teams and memos not to hang around, in the space that was literally designed to be hung around in, because open plan is currently fashionable.
This seems to be a Sodastream made to be barely functional.
A Samsung fridge with built in Sodastream seems a far better home for $1000, or even just an actual Sodastream which would leave enough change for a few years worth of flavours.
His comments on the radiator grill aren't fair. The temperature of steam won't exceed 100 degrees C which some plastics are fine with. And the downward slope is to stop spilt water dripping inside. The fan (if it's working after that error!) will push the air through enough.
I remember reading the book, the inmates are running the asylum. Where it talks about how Engineers take things like the alarm clock which just works but we make it over complicated.
> I think Bevi is pretty great - cuts down on La Croix can wastage at the office.
This sounds way entitled.
But there are carbonated water machines that are not "smart" (meaning they aren't online and don't cost an arm an a leg to have a sw button running on a tablet)
What's entitled about that? La Croix is just flavored seltzer water, you can buy a 24 pack for $10 at costco. It's not like they have champagne on tap.
How many [somewhat efficiently recyclable] cans of fizzy drink product would it take to match the sunk cost of building this thing, with its own plethora of [recyclable?] components requiring periodic replacement?
Things like this make me wonder about our Keurig, which could have been replaced years ago with a Bunn dual burner for less money and probably better coffee. Plus if everybody went to the breakroom at 9, 12 and 3 for coffee, collaboration would improve.
Something like this showed up in our gym about a month ago. Individuals pay $6.99/month for fancy water. The dismay says “9 bottles saved from landfill”.... ouch....
Office managers/office teams have very few concrete metrics. Beyond a binary "is the office functional" (e.g. are there enough desks, does the electricity work) there is pretty much no way to measure job performance. That's not to say their work doesn't have any impact. Anyone who has worked in a poorly laid out office has dealt with the corresponding productivity drain. However, it's really hard to measure that boost/loss and nearly impossible to accurately attribute it.
The solution is for office managers to do ridiculous but easily quantifiable things like spend money on subscription water coolers, an on-demand smoothie blending machine [0], potted plants that cost $800 [1].
If you are an office worker frustrated by this trend, you should invent some performance metric for office managers and then sell something that improves it. You'll instantly suck up all the VC money going to these other startups.
[0]http://getreplenish.com/#1 [1] https://www.leonandgeorge.com/plants/large-desert-cactus/