This is a great point about bringing in diverse hires. If you optimize your perks to appeal to you, then you're likely to bring in people with the same interests as you, and there are often strong correlations between interests and demographics. I would certainly rather work somewhere with neutral-seeming perks than a place where everyone was bonding over a bunch of perks I couldn't care less about.
One of my friends is in an office environment where they play Quake III for an hour a day. This perk is actually a mandatory bonding session. I love Quake III, but he doesn't, and he feels like it's both a waste of time and a reinforcement of a specific type of company culture that he doesn't really relate to. He doesn't really mind it, but he has specifically listed it as one of the reasons he is considering finding another job.
Having a more typically "professional" office setting, combined with some more flexible perks (like flex funds for wellness), strikes me as a good way to avoid filtering people out and inadvertently selecting for an overly specific company culture.
In particular, if you're worried that hackers who fall outside of the white/male/straight/cis gendered hacker stereotype are not coming to your company in sufficient numbers, you want to avoid sending implicit signals that your company is only into things that seem to appeal to this stereotype. Perks are one source of those implicit signals.
I've been a gamer for most of my life, but this would horrify me as a perk as it's completely exclusionary (which backs up your point)
Imagine being the employee that doesn't play games, it's like mandatory doing office sports
Even worse, imagine being the employee who is a veteran with PTSD, or the employee who was a refugee from a war zone like Bosnia who associates the sound of gunfire with their parents being killed.
This is an extraordinarily good insight.
> I love Quake III, but he doesn't, and he feels like it's both a waste of time and a reinforcement of a specific type of company culture that he doesn't really relate to.
Even if I did love Quake III proper (hey I am prone to OpenArena from time to time :)) I could not imagine anything that would force me to hate any given thing more than doing it as part of Mandatory Fun Time.
There are just so many people who are happier, healthier, and do better work with a brief nap during the day. Unless you are walking distance from work, splitting your workday like that is infeasible without an office culture that supports it.
And consequently unlike most perks, it can't be offset by a simple salary increase.
Or just respect for sleep (and other forms of tuning out), on- or offsite, period.
Including such forms as "I came in at 11 today, because there were no meetings scheduled. And for some reason my body wanted me to stay under until 9 or so this morning, instead of the usual 7-730a, and to chill for a bit and rise gently instead of jumping out of bed. So that's what I did. Being as this is clearly the way our species was designed to operate, if we are to achieve long-term optimal performance."
"But then again, it's not like I have to explain that to you. We're all adults here, so as long as work gets done no one thinks twice about, or even stops to notice really, what time people come in in the morning."
Offices also diminish the impact of bringing a dog/cat/chinchilla to work and the need for TV rooms (if you don't have everyone looking over your shoulder, watching netflix on during break from your computer isn't an issue)
Though offices also run contrary to "Start up" being some hyper growth focused company, if you plan on doubling the head count every year offices are completely unfeasible.
Of course, this is not ideal, but it's a baby step in the right direction.
We informally had a dog policy at our old office, which was an offshoot location. I'd bring my dogs in, until we hired a woman who had grown up in an area of the world where wild dogs were a real problem, and was deathly afraid of them. My co-workers loved having them in the office, but where you work should provide an environment where everyone can do their best, and given dogs weren't germaine to our business, it was best they were left at home from that day forward.
If you're talking about a dog though, it is usually impossible for the person to avoid the dog.
Offices and other workplaces with sensitive individuals are already doing that.
Our office is "dog friendly", but we have some rooms where dogs are forbidden to make sure allergic employees have a space to go to. Still don't really like this policy.
No, I don't actually think it is workable, the two arguments that will pop up immediately are :
1) Just give me more money.
2) I don't want you to know which perks I use
You're right that it would be cool if we could customize it. Give people "perks cards", which come out of company expenses (takes advantage of the above avoiding-income-tax multiplier) and let them spend it on whatever.
Who cares about anti-perks or perks if you're expected to work crazy hours?
I think the idea is to add another opportunity to stretch, go out, socialize, and talk about something other than work, which is probably beneficial when working hard problems.
A consistent more than 40 hour work week is a deal breaker for me. I’ll work 50-60 hours on a project if I know I’m spending 20 hours trying to ramp up on a new technology or I’m trying to do something that’s new to me, but that feels different than management expecting you to get 60+ hours of work done
Nice perk of working 8h+ per day! Love perks like these!
That said, one thing I have an issue with is this: "“Mandatory fun” office events".
If we're talking a once-a-week thing, then yes, that's way over the top.
But if we're talking a company day out or something similar every half year or so, I think it's incredibly important. I think the bonding effect is good, but more importantly, if it's not coordinated, then there are people who will miss it. For one thing, for people married with children, going to a random "people in the office decided to go out today" is usually much harder than going to a "scheduled 2 months in advance mandatory event". For another thing, it is easy for this to devolve into some people bonding and everyone else not being part of it. So I think it is beneficial to have a once-in-a-few-months bonding experience.
(I also think lighter forms of this, like an in-office "happy hour" once a week, is a pretty good idea too).
and isn't it cheaper for us to provide dog walking services/chef services/kegs etc to everyone, than each person access to their own individual dog walker, paid lunch and paid for bar tab?
> "Don’t get me wrong — Even has plenty of perks. Our team is offered paid vacation time (with a minimum number of days off)"
Is paid vacation time really a perk? Is vacation time usually unpaid in the US or something? Or maybe the perk is the minimum number of days off?
Oh comon, it's entirely expected in the white-collar world. The difference is it's not federally mandated.
Many people certainly do not get PTO, in particular retail workers and non salaried employees. I don't believe I have a single friend who is salaried and who does not receive some kind of PTO. For example, public school teachers get paid time off in addition to summer break (where they are generally not paid).
Heck, I even received a week's paid vacation as a crew chief (not even a manager) at a McDonalds when I was 17.
The minimum number of days off is pretty much a BS perk too.
I wouldn't call it a perk, but it's in the interest of the business to help prevent burnout.
So if you get $10 worth of perk (assuming it's something you'd buy anyway), it only actually costs you somewhere between $5-8 depending on your tax bracket.
> Based on learning that people needed room for more styles of work and levels of collaboration, we added private rooms, shared offices, and flex spaces to our existing open layout.
1/10 would not work for.
If you're okay with that, might as well let the pet owners work from home, no?
I love my dog, but tend not to bring her to the office unless I absolutely need to (maybe we're getting some work done at home or something). The dog loves it but my productivity tends to nosedive since I'm keeping an eye on her to make sure she's not pooping under someones desk or something!
Maybe a "Bring your dog to work" day once a year/quarter, but more frequent I feel just becomes problematic.
I think it's a great policy to not provide free poison to your employees, let them pay for that themselves.
IBM's office culture was basically built around two ideas: 1. that everyone working on a team would be spread around the globe (not necessarily at first, but certainly as IBM had to send them around to do sales engineering.) And 2. that workflows should be designed to accommodate people with disabilities.
This led to a number of "features" that I will miss in any future startup:
• The offices have some "open-office"-like areas... but also cubicles, and individual closed offices, and meeting rooms. All of these—except for some of the cubicles—are flex-allocated. You just sit down at an empty one, and clean up after yourself when you go. IBM even has "work centres"—offices just for people (and entire teams) travelling, with no permanent staff other than ops+janitorial. This office design style resembles EC2 (far moreso than your average co-working space): you can "allocate" part of a floor to be a team's office on any given day, and that space will be some other team's office on some other day. This is just as much about the culture (you don't "stake your claim" to the space, any more than you would a library desk) as it is about the amenities.
• Everything is done online, mostly over text. (Yes, yes, Lotus Notes. But also, increasingly, Slack.) You don't have to come to the office; you can work at a coffee shop, or from home, or from any other IBM office/work centre. You just need to sign into the IBM VPN and you're good. Even weekly meetings are electronic (though often over voice- or video-conference rather than text.) You know who this is great for? People in a wheelchair. People with a sprained ankle. People with social anxiety. New parents, past their leave period, who still want to spend most of their time with their kids. People who don't speak English well but can type and read it just fine. A hundred more types of people, who SV never bothers to hire.
• There's a no-pets policy. There's a no-perfume policy. There's a no-music policy. There's probably a bunch more. The spirit of these isn't "no silliness"; it's "make allowances for people with sensory processing disorders, even if you aren't aware that anyone you know here has one, because it's their right not to tell you."
• IBM offices don't offer amenities like food (other than some meh coffee), and they usually aren't close to anything, rather being in an office park that with low land-values. If you're going to the office, you eat breakfast before you go, and you bring a lunch with you. You eat dinner after going home. Which, of course, means that everyone wants to go home at a reasonable hour, so that they'll still have time—and energy—to make and eat dinner. Going to the office is like taking a day-trip. You pack for it.
To sum up, IBM basically assumes that everyone working there is a responsible adult with a private life that is important to them, that is respected as private by others; and that, while at work, they'd like to get some freaking work done so that they can be done with it and go home.
If anyone has heard of a start-up that follows this philosophy, I'd love to work there. (Otherwise, I'm open to starting a chain of co-working spaces that operate like IBM's work-centres, and give all their member-startups a VPN Intranet and a PBX for voice-conferenced meetings.)
Disagree, given the observation that pets (provided they're well-behaved, are well-groomed etc) reduce stress and promote empathy. It's just a question of measure - somewhere between "once" and "every day" there are these notions of "once in a while" or "from time to time". Which I suspect would be optimal, for this particular indulgence.
If you're in an office where dogs are peeing and barking (and no one knows what to do about it) - then clearly you have a people problem, not a dog problem.
Would people who are burdened by an office dog please share your experiences?
I like dogs and I will make it a point to befriend the ones in the office but at some point it becomes disruptive.
A bunch of dogs turns the office into a dog park.
I love dogs, have two of em, wife is a key member of a dog rescue, and I loved bringing my dogs in the office. But no way do I want a bunch of dogs at the office.
At least the cavalry types no longer ride their horses to work.
