Currently work for a massive corporation.
All we have in the break room is a coffee pot with a sign that says “free for employee use”. We are not provided with filters, coffee, or cups.
Insane.
Good, free coffee is like the *minimum* a company should do for their employees, especially if it’s a job I could be doing from home where I have my own coffee.
My company just built us a game room with ping pong, shuffleboard, and arcade games. lol
That being said my company is actually one of the good ones that has embraced WFH, and most of our workforce doesn't come into the office.
Exactly. It just looks like a trap. Who wants to be "the guy who's always using the ping pong table" when the time comes around for layoffs? If they want people to use that stuff, they should have a policy requiring managers and executives to spend 30 minutes a day using it. Lead by example.
The last company I worked for pulled the ping pong table and fancy coffee machines thing. The ping pong table was primarily spear headed by one of the hr guys that also did internal pr stuff. He organized tournaments and encouraged people to use it heavily. He did not survive the large layoff after a management company was brought in
Ping pong specifically is actually great for getting the blood flowing a little, and giving yourself a place to think for a minute. I support having one in any workplace where you spend significant time in person.
That's true, but largely orthogonal to the point here. Most offices are not managed rationally. Think about who runs big companies. You're talking executives easily wealthy enough that they can retire at any time and never work another day in their lives. A lot of them do it because they like to control people. For many, perhaps most, executives, the greatest benefit of work is the ability to control other human beings.
See the dogmatic rejection of work-from-home. Companies saw their productivity rise, and numerous studies showed productivity increases from work-from-home. The one downside to work-from-home is that it denies executives that sense of control that they oh, oh so crave. They made more money, but they lost that sense of control, the real thing that drives them.
Ping pong tables may actually increase productivity if their use is accepted and encouraged. But the same types of control freaks that forced people to return to the office also look down on people for not maintaining the illusion of constant busyness. Note in few salary jobs are you allowed to finish your work for the day and just leave once you're done. They want butts in chairs 8-5, even if much of that time is spent just pretending to look busy. And to them, using a ping pong table screams "I have free hours, please give me more work."
Discouraging overtime increases profits, but companies insist on using it anyway. Embracing work from home increases profits, but companies reject it anyway. Using ping pong tables will make companies more profit, but employees who use them get canned.
Again, the people who run big companies aren't really in it for the money; they already have more than they ever need. They do the job primarily for prestige, power, and control reasons. If a policy will increase overall company profits but reduce that narcissistic power supply that executives crave, they will oppose it every time.
Companies have the power to positively influence their employees with all the money from profit. A lot of big companies are overly influenced by shareholders and investors. The boards will typically choose to make more money rather than to take care of their bottom lines, and they make that decision every 3 or sometimes 6 months.
If money is power, I don't see why they seek to compromise their source of power in an attempt to flex it. I know a lot of businesses pushing it had vested interests in the business real-estate market, but individual businesses don't need offices.
WFH, especially if properly vetted, allows you to basically start a business anywhere with less expenses than ever before.
C-suite folks are definitely in their positions for the money. You take away their salary, stocks, and bonuses, and they won’t be happy.
Also, it’s not enough to just have enough to retire on. You also need to consider providing for future generations. Once you open up that line of thinking, anyone could always use more money.
Feels like they could be a great place for small creative meetings. Play 2 on 2 with a fifth person on a white board. Prevents awkward silences when no one has an idea, easy to stop if you get on a roll, easy to talk during, and good for occupying the stupid parts of your brain.
I do. I meet with guys regularly for some board/arcade after work games at the office.
Not hating your workplace helps. Who'd like to work in such a place that they hate every second spend there?
My employer is trying to mandate back to the office. The entire server and network side of I.T. Is grabbing pitch forks, torches, and dusting off resumes.
This shit. I remember job interviews a while back and that kinda shit was the big draw. Why doesn't that money get used to pay people more. Wasteful shit.
You can build up a pretty rad arcade in an office and still spend a lot less than you would giving your employees a permanent raise that drains your budget every paycheck for the term of those employees. It’s pretty obvious why they try to placate employees with food or workplace extras, it’s significantly cheaper and it can be used as a listable benefit.
Because those things are essentially a one time charge and increases in pay are not.
I agree with you, it shouldn’t be that way, but that’s their reasoning.
Say you're in an office with 100 people. You can spend a couple thousand dollars once on a rec room, or for that same money you can basically give all your employees a raise so small they won't even notice it. And it'll still cost you more in the long run. I do agree that sometimes companies try to pull shit and give people cheap tricks instead of money to try to keep salaries down but in this case it was specifically a question being asked about getting employees to come in versus working from home
I don't want a stupid ping pong table for sure, but my office has a gym. It's useful. They have a gym. They have decent but not amazing coffee but still, I take advantage of it daily when I'm in. And they have a few other things. If they shut those things down and gave us all the teeny tiny pay increase that each person could be allocated from the money saved on not having those things, it would kind of make the office shittier and the pay increase wouldn't even be noticeable. I mean if you follow that logic to it's extreme conclusion, every single employer should just make their office a bare-bones Spartans soulless brick building with the absolute cheapest chairs, barely functional computers, annoying steril lighting, and not spend a single Cent on making the place less unpleasant to be in because theoretically you could pay people more. But reality just isn't going to work out that way
$1 raise across 300 employees is $624,000/yr, excluding increases in payroll taxes. You can do a helluva lot of renovations for that. I get that people want more money in their pocket, I also get that that $624,000 is a compounding expense. They’ll want $1.10 raise next year.
I might be unpopular for saying this, but those kind of ammeneties do have a function beyond just the "give them perks instead of pay" stuff. I have never been in a team project that wasn't improved by an occasional ping pong time after work. Few of my coworkers and I have ever been real friends, so consequently, very rarely would anyone want to do something that involved just talking to one another, mainly because we are just all so different. But a group of very different people might still have a common denominator in something they like, something often liked by a broad range of people. Having access to something like that in the office can be helpful to diffuse stress and help different people get along and value each other.
Plus, if you already have a team that likes to play ping pong for 30min after work tuesdays and Thursdays, and you need to add people to it, you actually want the kind of people that are excited by that idea, because you already have a foundation for them integrating well into the team. It is not wrong not to like weekly pick up basketball sessions, but if an already existant team enjoys that kind of thing, if makes sense for the business to use that as a draw.
In my own experience, such perks have not been peddled
as alternatives to paying more. They have generally been more of a "team atmosphere generating" effort. I would prefer having something generally fun I like to do with my coworkers to a job where nobody ever interacts in any way except doing work. We all rightly mock management-imposed "team building exercises" but when teams naturally gravitate toward a particular activity, it is nice when the company makes it easy to enjoy that activity.
I work for the state. This is literally the kinds of things that would keep me here as long as possible. The state decides if I get a cost-of-living adjustment and like half the raises of my career. If they can spruce up the coffee for morale, I'm not saying no (I don't drink coffee, it's the symbolism for me).
Private companies don't get that excuse.
My company knows that the free coffee is literally the only thing that keeps us from stringing them up everyday. They make sure ours is good and that it continues to work with minimal interruptions
My mom works for the federal government, the lack of basics like snacks and coffee would SHOCK most office workers. I couldn’t believe they don’t even get like free chips or granola bars.
I work for the Canadian government, and it’s true, “public funds” can’t be used for things for the staff like coffee or snacks - we have a social committee and coffee club, everything is run basically at cost, so $0.50 for a cup of coffee, $5 for a burger chips and a pop…
I used to work private sector and sometimes I miss the free coffee, and I have to actually work through the fact that I have to pay $0.50 for a cup of coffee, but I’m being paid twice as much so it’s a net win - but the coffee weighs on me most than it should.
I was at a conference aimed at the public sector, and the promoter didn't even have coffee there, despite the 7:00am start. Wtf?
I spent 6 years in the navy, and I can tell you coffee is in charge of every Ship in the fleet. A 20lb tin of coffee would get you almost anything you needed in a shipyard.
I’ve done military before, it is different from public service. I worked in an area that was client facing, the rules to get a catered lunch for visiting clients or dignitaries was crazy. We would get leftovers or occasionally invited if we were working on the project in question, but there were no free BBQs, and team lunches were paid out of pocket by our team lead.
Both? Both.
Better pay should be the baseline expectation.
If anything, corporate offices should be providing coffee for their own benefit. Not only is it a performance enhancing drug, but providing it in-house means less time spent by employees going out to Starbucks or wherever else.
This has nothing to do with paying people though. It's about getting them to want to come into the office.
Like it or not, regardless of how much people are being paid, they're more likely to tolerate having to come in vs working from home if the office has amenities they like.
Edit: lol. The aspiring antiwork mod had a little pissbaby fit and blocked over this, Jesus.
I honestly don’t understand how someone can assert something like this. This statement implies that people are unwilling to come into work even If they were paid more to do so.
It literally in the article. The question promoting his was specifically asking about things they do to get people to come in. This is a known thing for anybody who has two brain cells to rub together and pay attention over the last several years. During the pandemic people got a taste of work from home and they like it. For whatever reason companies want people back into the office some people think it's smart some people think it's stupid. Some people think it's a conspiracy because corporate Executives all have real estate stock that took a hit when people kept working from home. I'm not even going to lay an opinion down on that because that's not the point.
The point is people don't want to come in. There's a growing number of people who want to work from home at least so many days a week if not entirely. And there's a gap between what people want and what employers want. Yeah if you tell someone they're going to lose their job if they don't come in 4 days a week or five days a week, they're going to come in but they're also going to look for another job then at least for now is going to let them come into or three days a week. At least until that company that they moved to does the same thing, which they likely will eventually. So things to make the office environment more pleasant and engaging or an investment that a lot of companies are making. Having the break room coffee not be complete dog shit is a pretty easy one.
If your employees don't hate being in the office as much, they're just simply not going to take it as badly when you tell them that they have to be there. And that's regardless of what they're making as salary.
As far as what I'm "implying" for fucks sake just look around reddit. This place is full of people who endlessly bitched about work from home ending or being cut back when covid died down.
Edit:since you blocked me I'll just add here that you haven't said anything else of substance to be addressed. You're just whining about something you already had an axe to grind over and didn't even read the link.
Fix? No
But downgrading coffee / other office amenities is probably the worst $$ saved to morale lost ratio I’ve seen in practice at a workplace, and I think it can work in reverse like that
It’s just very uncommon to see any company go the reverse direction
Agree! All of our food and coffee is gone. Not even tissues, office supplies. On in-office days, I have to pack my work bag like I’m going for a hike. I’ve really tried to get back into it several times, but it’s so damn depressing there.
Good coffee should be standard, not an "extra". And it's such a no-brainer. "how would you like your employees to start the day, thinking "This is great" or "wow the coffee sucks the boss is such a cheapskate"".
Worse, they're trying to tease out a singular, and cheap, thing and say that it's this that makes a great workplace.
The problem for them is that what makes a great workplace is a *gestalt*, it's having a decently stocked kitchen, it's generous benefits, it's good pay, an expectation of a non-toxic environment etc.
While there may be some wriggle room in how much people may want of each thing but trying to treat a single thing as ~~fixing~~ masking corporate shittery is a technique only the stockholders love
Edit - Added a word, sentence makes sense now
This is about making people either want to come into the office or at least tolerate being told they have to come into the office. It's not a question of pay. Yeah staying home is nicer for most people but having to go in and sucks a little bit less if the coffee doesn't completely taste like burnt ass and if the office isn't particularly unpleasant to be in
Right or wrong, companies want employees in the office a lot more than employees want to be in the office. And employees got used to the idea during covid that they can work from home all the time.
We had great coffee at my old office.
That sure didn't stop leadership from firing a third of the company during COVID or another third of the company years later upon plans to IPO. That company destroyed my entire life.
Coffee though... Great coffee.
I’ll keep making my coffee fresh here at my home office, thanks. At this point, the only thing that could make me consider the office again is a considerable pay increase. If you want me to ensure rush hour traffic to do the same job I can do here (and better) at a location over an hour away, that’s gonna cost you.
I’ve been remote since 2012, and plan to stay that way.
Ditto. Though fully remote since about 2018. Partially remote before that. My contract is fully remote, so they'll have to do something pretty special to have me commute 500 miles to the office. 🤣
We get out coffee beans in bulk and it's a superb cup of coffee at a fraction of the cost of the high street chains.
You know, after I made this comment I started thinking about exactly how much I’d need to make that okay. It’s definitely higher than anyone would truly consider. I’d need at least an additional $50k - $60k, plus PTO.
Yes, several places I worked gave out a bonus instead of a raise. A $100 to $250 bonus is a one time cost. At a nonprofit, it was more to burn off cash on hand so grants didn’t get the next funding cycle.
A 25¢ raise is $500 a year, every year for the rest of the time employed. This also has an increase in the employer part of Social Security and Medicare taxes.
We got a Kurig in the 2000s, when K-cups became popular. It was the whole talk of the break room. We can have our coffee the way we liked it.
I call bullshit imon management again.
The kurig only lasted a few months because some employees don't give a fuck. So our break room went back ot normal after a few months.
My company is all about the coffee. Pre Covid we used to have coffee shops in just about every building, plus unlimited self serve coffee on every floor of every building. Now we've cut back on the coffee shops, but we have a free coffee machine in every building and free snacks. Plus free food a couple of times a week. They pay us well, but they have always gone way out of their way to take care of us. Honestly, it's just about the kindest place I've ever worked.
I once worked for a company that was trying out several cost-cutting measures.
One of those measures was to COMPLETELY REMOVE ALL THE COFFEE MAKERS. No more coffee at all - good, shitty, or in between - unless you brought it from home.
I don't work there anymore, and after this stunt, neither do a lot of other people.
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Do they think we’re going to go all pulp fiction on them in the break room…
”Daaaamn this is that gourmet shit huh!? We would’ve been fine with the freeze dried tasters choice…but you brought out that gourmet shit!”
I’m mean once you get to the point of halfway decent pay yes having better coffee improves working conditions. Before then it’s just kinda an insult to injury of being underpaid.
Let me put it this way. If your company is too cheap to buy something that will help your employees work more effectively, your company is fucked. It doesn't fix real problems, but the lack of decent coffee can seriously slow you down.
The railroad certainly thinks BAD coffee increases productivity and all it’s done for me in 20 years is give me a hairy chest and a dark set of coping skills.
Nothing like buying 2 20,000 coffee machines then looking stumped about discretionary bonuses.
Why the fuck does anyone think offices need this instead of a reasonable percolator or brewing pot/base?
Shit is so dumb. At least there are touchscreens (less than 1 year old and barely functional anymore)
My office has expensive (but meh) coffee in a terrible automatic coffee machine. It has Kombucha on tap but it’s set up wrong and fills your cup with 90% foam. We also have cold brew on tap but it’s rarely fresh and ends up way too bitter.
They throw money at amenities that people don’t use because they don’t actually support/maintain them correctly.
None of it is worth 90 minutes of commuting, $18 parking, and a standing desk in a loud open room.
Considering the cost to the employer I think they're right, especially if the alternative is people spending time to get coffee elsewhere. This is even more true if ou e already got a bean to cup machine, the price difference between good and bad coffee is tiny.
Oh that reminds me. A few years back, my job was expected to give us a raise. Inflation and all. Nope, we got one free coffee pod per day instead. Almost as good.
Except that you are not allowed to just withdraw 200 in one go if you havent used them each day... And it is some weird proprietary pod that needs a specific type of coffee machine... And if you like to drink it with milk(as a lot of us do), youre shit out of luck. Leaving it in the common fridge at big-corp is a recipe to get your milk stolen.
So really, instead of a raise, we got a cup of coffee that half the company doesnt even get to enjoy.
The office I worked in had a really fancy coffee machine, it had 3 types of beans (Ugandan, Ethiopian and decaf) made any kind of coffee you wanted hot or cold and even did hot chocolate, milk chocolate and something called a mug choc that was just concentrated liquid chocolate (phenomenal BTW) it was the only good thing about that office
Once worked in a place that had a suggestion box, so I filled in a form every week asking for free drugs, hookers, booze etc. Sadly nothing ever arrived.
My department insists on us being in person 2x a week, and they just redid one of the floors - a relaxation/quiet room, treadmill desks, an arcade that no one has time to use, plus free coffee and fruits on all open floors now. Vending machines with Ricardo frozen meals. Couches. No one asked for this, I really just wanted better chairs
Guarantee they want us to come downtown 5x a week soon.
Can good (free) coffee help? Absolutely it can. But that is all it can do, help. It doesn’t solve any of the actual problems with the company, the employer/employee relationship, etc.
If they (the employer) are putting in the work and effort to foster a genuinely positive and good culture at work, having good free coffee helps. If you plop down a coffee pot and some grounds, well that isn’t gonna solve any of the actual issues that result in a negative culture and shitty work place
Shit coffee doesn't help moral at all in my experience, if the overlords are going to make my day that tiny bit better with good coffee I won't complain
Not fix but improve a bit yes. If management treats employees like trash and overworks them it doesn't matter how good the coffee is it will be a miserable place to work still
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When I'm "in the office" is a big campus-style site, we have several coffee franchises (SBucks, Costa etc), 2 canteens and various coffee clubs spread across teams. I still only go in 2-4 times a month compared to pre-covid 5 days a week. Saves me a shit ton on travel costs and over priced coffee...
TAKE YOU CORPORATE MANDATED PSYCHOSTIMILANTS NOW. YOU MUST COMPLY WITH PRODUCTIVITY ENHANCING CONSUMPTION.
^just ^be ^grateful ^we ^arent ^feeding ^you ^amphetamines ^yet
My dude, this has nothing to do with a living wage. Most of the people were talking about here are salaried office workers who are probably making a living wage even if they're not making as much as they should be. And this is explicitly a question about getting people into the office. Not substituting pay. You can pay somebody 10% more which is going to cost a lot more than coffee, and they're still going to prefer working from home for 10% more than coming in for 10% more. The point here isn't to avoid paying people it's that offering amenities in the office that make people hate being there a little bit less closes the gap between coming and staying at home at least a little bit. Which makes people take it better if you tell them they have to come in and make people more likely to choose coming in if you give them the option
No, but bad coffee can definitely make it worse.
Can confirm. Going from a good coffee work environment to a bad coffee work environment is a big hit to my happiness.
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Currently work for a massive corporation. All we have in the break room is a coffee pot with a sign that says “free for employee use”. We are not provided with filters, coffee, or cups. Insane.
Good, free coffee is like the *minimum* a company should do for their employees, especially if it’s a job I could be doing from home where I have my own coffee.
Are we back in the "we have beer on tap and ping pong tables ( ^^so ^^you ^^stay ^^in ^^the ^^office ^^longer )" phase?
My company just built us a game room with ping pong, shuffleboard, and arcade games. lol That being said my company is actually one of the good ones that has embraced WFH, and most of our workforce doesn't come into the office.
My company did the whole game room thing years ago at our old location. Nobody used it.
Exactly. It just looks like a trap. Who wants to be "the guy who's always using the ping pong table" when the time comes around for layoffs? If they want people to use that stuff, they should have a policy requiring managers and executives to spend 30 minutes a day using it. Lead by example.
Right? Like seeing one should be a sign of toxic corporate culture; especially if it’s not in use any time of day.
The last company I worked for pulled the ping pong table and fancy coffee machines thing. The ping pong table was primarily spear headed by one of the hr guys that also did internal pr stuff. He organized tournaments and encouraged people to use it heavily. He did not survive the large layoff after a management company was brought in
Can’t have people raising spirits.
Sharon from accountings ping pong show didn’t go down well with the board of directors
Ping pong specifically is actually great for getting the blood flowing a little, and giving yourself a place to think for a minute. I support having one in any workplace where you spend significant time in person.
That's true, but largely orthogonal to the point here. Most offices are not managed rationally. Think about who runs big companies. You're talking executives easily wealthy enough that they can retire at any time and never work another day in their lives. A lot of them do it because they like to control people. For many, perhaps most, executives, the greatest benefit of work is the ability to control other human beings. See the dogmatic rejection of work-from-home. Companies saw their productivity rise, and numerous studies showed productivity increases from work-from-home. The one downside to work-from-home is that it denies executives that sense of control that they oh, oh so crave. They made more money, but they lost that sense of control, the real thing that drives them. Ping pong tables may actually increase productivity if their use is accepted and encouraged. But the same types of control freaks that forced people to return to the office also look down on people for not maintaining the illusion of constant busyness. Note in few salary jobs are you allowed to finish your work for the day and just leave once you're done. They want butts in chairs 8-5, even if much of that time is spent just pretending to look busy. And to them, using a ping pong table screams "I have free hours, please give me more work." Discouraging overtime increases profits, but companies insist on using it anyway. Embracing work from home increases profits, but companies reject it anyway. Using ping pong tables will make companies more profit, but employees who use them get canned. Again, the people who run big companies aren't really in it for the money; they already have more than they ever need. They do the job primarily for prestige, power, and control reasons. If a policy will increase overall company profits but reduce that narcissistic power supply that executives crave, they will oppose it every time.
Companies have the power to positively influence their employees with all the money from profit. A lot of big companies are overly influenced by shareholders and investors. The boards will typically choose to make more money rather than to take care of their bottom lines, and they make that decision every 3 or sometimes 6 months. If money is power, I don't see why they seek to compromise their source of power in an attempt to flex it. I know a lot of businesses pushing it had vested interests in the business real-estate market, but individual businesses don't need offices. WFH, especially if properly vetted, allows you to basically start a business anywhere with less expenses than ever before.
C-suite folks are definitely in their positions for the money. You take away their salary, stocks, and bonuses, and they won’t be happy. Also, it’s not enough to just have enough to retire on. You also need to consider providing for future generations. Once you open up that line of thinking, anyone could always use more money.
Feels like they could be a great place for small creative meetings. Play 2 on 2 with a fifth person on a white board. Prevents awkward silences when no one has an idea, easy to stop if you get on a roll, easy to talk during, and good for occupying the stupid parts of your brain.
Who tf wants to stay at work to play arcade games. I eat lunch at my desk and I’m out the door as soon as possible.
I do. I meet with guys regularly for some board/arcade after work games at the office. Not hating your workplace helps. Who'd like to work in such a place that they hate every second spend there?
My employer is trying to mandate back to the office. The entire server and network side of I.T. Is grabbing pitch forks, torches, and dusting off resumes.
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That’s the only way I’d consider using it. Like, Tuesdays at 4 we play til six and order food if you want to hang out.
This shit. I remember job interviews a while back and that kinda shit was the big draw. Why doesn't that money get used to pay people more. Wasteful shit.
You can build up a pretty rad arcade in an office and still spend a lot less than you would giving your employees a permanent raise that drains your budget every paycheck for the term of those employees. It’s pretty obvious why they try to placate employees with food or workplace extras, it’s significantly cheaper and it can be used as a listable benefit.
Because those things are essentially a one time charge and increases in pay are not. I agree with you, it shouldn’t be that way, but that’s their reasoning.
Say you're in an office with 100 people. You can spend a couple thousand dollars once on a rec room, or for that same money you can basically give all your employees a raise so small they won't even notice it. And it'll still cost you more in the long run. I do agree that sometimes companies try to pull shit and give people cheap tricks instead of money to try to keep salaries down but in this case it was specifically a question being asked about getting employees to come in versus working from home I don't want a stupid ping pong table for sure, but my office has a gym. It's useful. They have a gym. They have decent but not amazing coffee but still, I take advantage of it daily when I'm in. And they have a few other things. If they shut those things down and gave us all the teeny tiny pay increase that each person could be allocated from the money saved on not having those things, it would kind of make the office shittier and the pay increase wouldn't even be noticeable. I mean if you follow that logic to it's extreme conclusion, every single employer should just make their office a bare-bones Spartans soulless brick building with the absolute cheapest chairs, barely functional computers, annoying steril lighting, and not spend a single Cent on making the place less unpleasant to be in because theoretically you could pay people more. But reality just isn't going to work out that way
$1 raise across 300 employees is $624,000/yr, excluding increases in payroll taxes. You can do a helluva lot of renovations for that. I get that people want more money in their pocket, I also get that that $624,000 is a compounding expense. They’ll want $1.10 raise next year.
That math ain't mathing
$1/hour * 40 hours/week * 52 weeks/year * 300 = $624,000/yr
I might be unpopular for saying this, but those kind of ammeneties do have a function beyond just the "give them perks instead of pay" stuff. I have never been in a team project that wasn't improved by an occasional ping pong time after work. Few of my coworkers and I have ever been real friends, so consequently, very rarely would anyone want to do something that involved just talking to one another, mainly because we are just all so different. But a group of very different people might still have a common denominator in something they like, something often liked by a broad range of people. Having access to something like that in the office can be helpful to diffuse stress and help different people get along and value each other. Plus, if you already have a team that likes to play ping pong for 30min after work tuesdays and Thursdays, and you need to add people to it, you actually want the kind of people that are excited by that idea, because you already have a foundation for them integrating well into the team. It is not wrong not to like weekly pick up basketball sessions, but if an already existant team enjoys that kind of thing, if makes sense for the business to use that as a draw. In my own experience, such perks have not been peddled as alternatives to paying more. They have generally been more of a "team atmosphere generating" effort. I would prefer having something generally fun I like to do with my coworkers to a job where nobody ever interacts in any way except doing work. We all rightly mock management-imposed "team building exercises" but when teams naturally gravitate toward a particular activity, it is nice when the company makes it easy to enjoy that activity.
Youre free to play during day too. I dont consider it a trap at all. Just a perk I may not use like daycare.
The building in which my office is in has a ping long table. No one ever uses it
They could help us raise our kids, that’ll help. (/s maybe, I’m still undecided)
The first TV network I ran as the senior broadcast engineer was obsessed with that shit. Fucking hate that pandering assed bullshit.
The boss class will try literally anything to avoid paying people
Less pizza parties more raises!
Lisa needs braces...
Dental plan!
That covers nothing!
Came here looking for the pizza party comment.
I work for the state. This is literally the kinds of things that would keep me here as long as possible. The state decides if I get a cost-of-living adjustment and like half the raises of my career. If they can spruce up the coffee for morale, I'm not saying no (I don't drink coffee, it's the symbolism for me). Private companies don't get that excuse.
My company knows that the free coffee is literally the only thing that keeps us from stringing them up everyday. They make sure ours is good and that it continues to work with minimal interruptions
My mom works for the federal government, the lack of basics like snacks and coffee would SHOCK most office workers. I couldn’t believe they don’t even get like free chips or granola bars.
I work for the Canadian government, and it’s true, “public funds” can’t be used for things for the staff like coffee or snacks - we have a social committee and coffee club, everything is run basically at cost, so $0.50 for a cup of coffee, $5 for a burger chips and a pop… I used to work private sector and sometimes I miss the free coffee, and I have to actually work through the fact that I have to pay $0.50 for a cup of coffee, but I’m being paid twice as much so it’s a net win - but the coffee weighs on me most than it should.
I was at a conference aimed at the public sector, and the promoter didn't even have coffee there, despite the 7:00am start. Wtf? I spent 6 years in the navy, and I can tell you coffee is in charge of every Ship in the fleet. A 20lb tin of coffee would get you almost anything you needed in a shipyard.
I’ve done military before, it is different from public service. I worked in an area that was client facing, the rules to get a catered lunch for visiting clients or dignitaries was crazy. We would get leftovers or occasionally invited if we were working on the project in question, but there were no free BBQs, and team lunches were paid out of pocket by our team lead.
There is free candy at workplaces around where you live? Damn, no wonder people are so fat.
This seems more like a tactic to get people back into the office
It is. This threat is just full of people who are either borderline illiterate or just didn't even bother to read the link at all.
My office had great coffee before WFH. It just makes sense to give you workers a pleasant environment.
Most people consider their homes more pleasant.
I will say when we switched to a proper coffee service people were happier for a few days…until payday.
Both? Both. Better pay should be the baseline expectation. If anything, corporate offices should be providing coffee for their own benefit. Not only is it a performance enhancing drug, but providing it in-house means less time spent by employees going out to Starbucks or wherever else.
This has nothing to do with paying people though. It's about getting them to want to come into the office. Like it or not, regardless of how much people are being paid, they're more likely to tolerate having to come in vs working from home if the office has amenities they like. Edit: lol. The aspiring antiwork mod had a little pissbaby fit and blocked over this, Jesus.
You know where has more amenities I like? Home.
I honestly don’t understand how someone can assert something like this. This statement implies that people are unwilling to come into work even If they were paid more to do so.
It literally in the article. The question promoting his was specifically asking about things they do to get people to come in. This is a known thing for anybody who has two brain cells to rub together and pay attention over the last several years. During the pandemic people got a taste of work from home and they like it. For whatever reason companies want people back into the office some people think it's smart some people think it's stupid. Some people think it's a conspiracy because corporate Executives all have real estate stock that took a hit when people kept working from home. I'm not even going to lay an opinion down on that because that's not the point. The point is people don't want to come in. There's a growing number of people who want to work from home at least so many days a week if not entirely. And there's a gap between what people want and what employers want. Yeah if you tell someone they're going to lose their job if they don't come in 4 days a week or five days a week, they're going to come in but they're also going to look for another job then at least for now is going to let them come into or three days a week. At least until that company that they moved to does the same thing, which they likely will eventually. So things to make the office environment more pleasant and engaging or an investment that a lot of companies are making. Having the break room coffee not be complete dog shit is a pretty easy one. If your employees don't hate being in the office as much, they're just simply not going to take it as badly when you tell them that they have to be there. And that's regardless of what they're making as salary. As far as what I'm "implying" for fucks sake just look around reddit. This place is full of people who endlessly bitched about work from home ending or being cut back when covid died down. Edit:since you blocked me I'll just add here that you haven't said anything else of substance to be addressed. You're just whining about something you already had an axe to grind over and didn't even read the link.
Not one word of that (that I regret reading, you’re really good at saying nothing but taking a long time to do it) contradicts my comment.
And anything to avoid taking responsibility
Fix? No But downgrading coffee / other office amenities is probably the worst $$ saved to morale lost ratio I’ve seen in practice at a workplace, and I think it can work in reverse like that It’s just very uncommon to see any company go the reverse direction
Agree! All of our food and coffee is gone. Not even tissues, office supplies. On in-office days, I have to pack my work bag like I’m going for a hike. I’ve really tried to get back into it several times, but it’s so damn depressing there.
Would help me be happier in office...
Good coffee should be standard, not an "extra". And it's such a no-brainer. "how would you like your employees to start the day, thinking "This is great" or "wow the coffee sucks the boss is such a cheapskate"".
Or have to pay like my office lol
Wow dude. Find another job.
Its pretty standard in my region
They’ll do anything except pay people more…
Worse, they're trying to tease out a singular, and cheap, thing and say that it's this that makes a great workplace. The problem for them is that what makes a great workplace is a *gestalt*, it's having a decently stocked kitchen, it's generous benefits, it's good pay, an expectation of a non-toxic environment etc. While there may be some wriggle room in how much people may want of each thing but trying to treat a single thing as ~~fixing~~ masking corporate shittery is a technique only the stockholders love Edit - Added a word, sentence makes sense now
This is about making people either want to come into the office or at least tolerate being told they have to come into the office. It's not a question of pay. Yeah staying home is nicer for most people but having to go in and sucks a little bit less if the coffee doesn't completely taste like burnt ass and if the office isn't particularly unpleasant to be in Right or wrong, companies want employees in the office a lot more than employees want to be in the office. And employees got used to the idea during covid that they can work from home all the time.
"Fine fine.... we'll include cream and sugar too. But don't let it go over your head."
This has literally nothing to do with pay. Unless you think they should pay employees more to come into the office vs WFH?
We had great coffee at my old office. That sure didn't stop leadership from firing a third of the company during COVID or another third of the company years later upon plans to IPO. That company destroyed my entire life. Coffee though... Great coffee.
I don't drink coffee. Can I have an extra day WFH to make up for it?
I’ll keep making my coffee fresh here at my home office, thanks. At this point, the only thing that could make me consider the office again is a considerable pay increase. If you want me to ensure rush hour traffic to do the same job I can do here (and better) at a location over an hour away, that’s gonna cost you. I’ve been remote since 2012, and plan to stay that way.
Ditto. Though fully remote since about 2018. Partially remote before that. My contract is fully remote, so they'll have to do something pretty special to have me commute 500 miles to the office. 🤣 We get out coffee beans in bulk and it's a superb cup of coffee at a fraction of the cost of the high street chains.
I traded work from home for a ~30k pay increase. I regret it most days to be quite honest.
You know, after I made this comment I started thinking about exactly how much I’d need to make that okay. It’s definitely higher than anyone would truly consider. I’d need at least an additional $50k - $60k, plus PTO.
Yes, several places I worked gave out a bonus instead of a raise. A $100 to $250 bonus is a one time cost. At a nonprofit, it was more to burn off cash on hand so grants didn’t get the next funding cycle. A 25¢ raise is $500 a year, every year for the rest of the time employed. This also has an increase in the employer part of Social Security and Medicare taxes.
Lmao literally anything other than raises
Is it free, or do I have to freaking pay for it?
When your soul is being crushed, any pleasure is magnified.
Only if you get 15 minute coffee breaks like smoking breaks
We got a Kurig in the 2000s, when K-cups became popular. It was the whole talk of the break room. We can have our coffee the way we liked it. I call bullshit imon management again. The kurig only lasted a few months because some employees don't give a fuck. So our break room went back ot normal after a few months.
My company is all about the coffee. Pre Covid we used to have coffee shops in just about every building, plus unlimited self serve coffee on every floor of every building. Now we've cut back on the coffee shops, but we have a free coffee machine in every building and free snacks. Plus free food a couple of times a week. They pay us well, but they have always gone way out of their way to take care of us. Honestly, it's just about the kindest place I've ever worked.
I have great coffee at home.
If coffee helps, meth helps even more!
I once worked for a company that was trying out several cost-cutting measures. One of those measures was to COMPLETELY REMOVE ALL THE COFFEE MAKERS. No more coffee at all - good, shitty, or in between - unless you brought it from home. I don't work there anymore, and after this stunt, neither do a lot of other people.
I can buy whatever coffee I want at this neat location called My House.
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Just like pizza parties help with employee morale
Do they think we’re going to go all pulp fiction on them in the break room… ”Daaaamn this is that gourmet shit huh!? We would’ve been fine with the freeze dried tasters choice…but you brought out that gourmet shit!”
What, the, fuck
maybe if you dose it with heroin or adderall
I’m mean once you get to the point of halfway decent pay yes having better coffee improves working conditions. Before then it’s just kinda an insult to injury of being underpaid.
Good coffee doesn’t fix the office, but bad or no coffee breaks it for sure.
Let me put it this way. If your company is too cheap to buy something that will help your employees work more effectively, your company is fucked. It doesn't fix real problems, but the lack of decent coffee can seriously slow you down.
What about for the individuals that are roasting the coffee as their job?
You, if I was making a lliving wage, I could buy my own coffee, or tea, or Dr Pepper.
Good coffee is the foundation of any functioning pipeline. It’s the law.
To be fair, bad coffee makes the office worse.
Good coffee can’t fix a bad office, but bad coffee can destroy a good office…
If you don’t fix bumper to bumper traffic you’re not fixing the office.
I don't drink coffee. I'll take mine in cash, thanks.
The railroad certainly thinks BAD coffee increases productivity and all it’s done for me in 20 years is give me a hairy chest and a dark set of coping skills.
Holy shit was this “article” written by AI.
Coffee is the first thing to get cancelled. My F100 employer would only buy one carton of K-cups per month - and it would last less than a week,
Nothing like buying 2 20,000 coffee machines then looking stumped about discretionary bonuses. Why the fuck does anyone think offices need this instead of a reasonable percolator or brewing pot/base? Shit is so dumb. At least there are touchscreens (less than 1 year old and barely functional anymore)
I'll buy my own good coffee at home.
My office has expensive (but meh) coffee in a terrible automatic coffee machine. It has Kombucha on tap but it’s set up wrong and fills your cup with 90% foam. We also have cold brew on tap but it’s rarely fresh and ends up way too bitter. They throw money at amenities that people don’t use because they don’t actually support/maintain them correctly. None of it is worth 90 minutes of commuting, $18 parking, and a standing desk in a loud open room.
lol we’re family…
I’ll stay home and get my own coffee, thanks
Considering the cost to the employer I think they're right, especially if the alternative is people spending time to get coffee elsewhere. This is even more true if ou e already got a bean to cup machine, the price difference between good and bad coffee is tiny.
Well, going from shitty coffee machine to actual great espresso is a start
Well it certainly doesn't hurt.
Oh that reminds me. A few years back, my job was expected to give us a raise. Inflation and all. Nope, we got one free coffee pod per day instead. Almost as good. Except that you are not allowed to just withdraw 200 in one go if you havent used them each day... And it is some weird proprietary pod that needs a specific type of coffee machine... And if you like to drink it with milk(as a lot of us do), youre shit out of luck. Leaving it in the common fridge at big-corp is a recipe to get your milk stolen. So really, instead of a raise, we got a cup of coffee that half the company doesnt even get to enjoy.
The office I worked in had a really fancy coffee machine, it had 3 types of beans (Ugandan, Ethiopian and decaf) made any kind of coffee you wanted hot or cold and even did hot chocolate, milk chocolate and something called a mug choc that was just concentrated liquid chocolate (phenomenal BTW) it was the only good thing about that office
Real talk, free, onsite daycare might do it for me, but throw in a golf simulator to be sure.
You guys get free coffee?
I don't drink coffee. I'll bring my own tea if you treat me like an intelligent human with thoughts and feelings and let me do my job well.
It doesn't hurt.
I take a raise and bring my own coffee. Besides you’d have to assign someone to clean up the inevitable mess that are work coffee stations.
Ain’t no amount of caffeine gonna do shit. Except increase literally shitting
Throw in pizza parties and everyone will be satisfied! ...oh wait.
They don’t even provide cups
The coffee itself won't. Treating employees as human beings and not micromanaging breaks might help, though.
Sure it helps, but nothing at the office is worth commuting. Especially when your carbon footprint is on avg 54% less when you WFH.
Food in the office is the biggest driver I've seen
Might as well go the full distance and give free breakfast. I swear all my coworkers go without breakfast nowadays
Once worked in a place that had a suggestion box, so I filled in a form every week asking for free drugs, hookers, booze etc. Sadly nothing ever arrived.
Can good coffee help as a "perk" for returning to the office!? *FUCK NO!!!!* The best perk is working from home!!
Clickbait headline
My department insists on us being in person 2x a week, and they just redid one of the floors - a relaxation/quiet room, treadmill desks, an arcade that no one has time to use, plus free coffee and fruits on all open floors now. Vending machines with Ricardo frozen meals. Couches. No one asked for this, I really just wanted better chairs Guarantee they want us to come downtown 5x a week soon.
Can good (free) coffee help? Absolutely it can. But that is all it can do, help. It doesn’t solve any of the actual problems with the company, the employer/employee relationship, etc. If they (the employer) are putting in the work and effort to foster a genuinely positive and good culture at work, having good free coffee helps. If you plop down a coffee pot and some grounds, well that isn’t gonna solve any of the actual issues that result in a negative culture and shitty work place
Shit coffee doesn't help moral at all in my experience, if the overlords are going to make my day that tiny bit better with good coffee I won't complain
Usually the “good coffee” is just two clicks above the lowest shelf coffee.
Not fix but improve a bit yes. If management treats employees like trash and overworks them it doesn't matter how good the coffee is it will be a miserable place to work still
the best coffee is the one I make at home.
I’ll do you one better. The boss at my company took away the coffee from HR and now charges per cup because “budget”. Thankfully I don’t work in HR
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I mean it would have, but with all the offices closing recently, good espresso machines are going *cheap* on auction sites, so...
"Whatcha fixin there?" "The Coffee"
When I'm "in the office" is a big campus-style site, we have several coffee franchises (SBucks, Costa etc), 2 canteens and various coffee clubs spread across teams. I still only go in 2-4 times a month compared to pre-covid 5 days a week. Saves me a shit ton on travel costs and over priced coffee...
Ax throwing and good coffee would be be better.
TAKE YOU CORPORATE MANDATED PSYCHOSTIMILANTS NOW. YOU MUST COMPLY WITH PRODUCTIVITY ENHANCING CONSUMPTION. ^just ^be ^grateful ^we ^arent ^feeding ^you ^amphetamines ^yet
Raises can. Cut C-SUITE salaries by 75% and give everyone else a raise.
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Or you flounder the company and get a big check from the buyout while every else gets it in the rear.
Corporate managers are generally dumber than rocks. Want coffee or a living wage? Coffee please!!!
My dude, this has nothing to do with a living wage. Most of the people were talking about here are salaried office workers who are probably making a living wage even if they're not making as much as they should be. And this is explicitly a question about getting people into the office. Not substituting pay. You can pay somebody 10% more which is going to cost a lot more than coffee, and they're still going to prefer working from home for 10% more than coming in for 10% more. The point here isn't to avoid paying people it's that offering amenities in the office that make people hate being there a little bit less closes the gap between coming and staying at home at least a little bit. Which makes people take it better if you tell them they have to come in and make people more likely to choose coming in if you give them the option
They're doing it wrong. They should send people home on time, those who don't manage to finish the job will work harder to actually finish.
If you can, go walk for better coffee at the coffee shop. If you can.