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Why not just ban alcohol at work? Why can't work be work, and social stuff can happen outside of it? I know it sounds a bit extreme. But, after reading "It doe

• savanaly 8y ago
  >Why not just ban alcohol at work? Why can't work be work, and social stuff can happen outside of it? I see this sentiment a lot (especially on HN!) and I share it. I usually skip team dinners when I can. But there's no accounting for taste, and humans in general seem to have a taste for mixing work and "social stuff", so why shouldn't companies encourage it in that capacity?
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • philipodonnell 8y ago
    We already single out certain social things as just not a good idea in the workplace/events even though its common socially: public displays of affection, having lots of kids around, single-sex activities... Its isolating/disruptive if you can't/won't take part. Its unfair when based on things not in the job description (relationships/kids/gender respectively). I don't see why alcohol (excludes non-drinkers) or team-building activities outside of business hours (excludes those with family commitments) couldn't be one of those things.
    • stickfigure 8y ago
      By the time you've excluded all the possible activities that someone could find isolating, you've got a pretty boring work environment. Here's the box you will be working in. Don't forget to turn off the light when you leave Friday.
      • ben509 8y ago
        Where do I sign up?!
      • myle 8y ago
        That's OK. We are also supposed to have private life. If work is not fun enough without those events, maybe it is not fun in general.
        • barrow-rider 8y ago
          I'll take it a step further -- why does work need to be fun? It's my meal ticket, not my hobby; it needs to be tolerable. The "fun at work" meme is, IMO, a way to keep people in the office longer a la the GOOOOG's Gilded Cage.
          • eriktate 8y ago
            I think it depends on how you define fun. For me personally, does a workplace need to have alcohol, video games, bowling alleys, and ping pong tables? Probably not. It does need to be interesting though. And my co-workers/team need to be enjoyable to be around, both professionally and personally. If I'm not consistently having a good time at work, which could be construed as having "fun", there's very little reason for me to stick around. Especially in the tech scene, there's always a better place to work, so it's competitively advantageous for companies to have "fun" workplaces.
        • stale2002 8y ago
          That might be ok for you, but not for me. I am not going to work anywhere that I don't enjoy. I will instead quit and go somewhere else. You are free to do otherwise. But just be aware that people have fun at work because they like to do so. And many people would quit if they didn't enjoy their work
      • ofxartem 8y ago
        What is wrong with that? It keeps minds focused on what should happen at work: work.
    • zdragnar 8y ago
      Having lots of kids around? One of my favorite jobs had a group of parents who would come in on the weekend for play dates (in designated areas). The company supported them, often organizing age appripriate maker type events.
      • philipodonnell 8y ago
        Its not the thing, its the impact on the "normal" 9-5 worker. Its great that the company did that on the weekend, but they clearly didn't think it was good during the normal work week, which was my point.
    • Aeolun 8y ago
      I don’t see how the presence of alcohol excludes others? Most places that serve alcohol are perfectly capable of serving juice.
      • philipodonnell 8y ago
        Its not the presense of the thing or the ability to decline, its the impact on those not taking part. If colleagues consuming alcohol exclude non-drinkers by their intentional or unintentional actions or make them feel like less of a team member (by say getting real drunk which is always annoying to non-drinkers), and drinking is not in the job description, then companies should not make it a part of a work event (IMO).
  • mcguire 8y ago
    "I usually skip team dinners when I can." The other side of that is the question, "How much damage has skipping employer social events done to your career?" You'll probably never know the answer.
    • llampx 8y ago
      On the flip-side, you usually hear about people who crater their reputation due to their antics at office parties. I'm sure they didn't have "get drunk and make everyone listen to their inappropriate jokes or worse" on their mind when they left the office.
• tdb7893 8y ago
  Having a beer is I engrained in American work culture. Also I've worked at multiple companies where they had work functions at dinnertime and no one got that drunk (generally there were 2 drink maximums, which probably helped) so it's definitely possible to fix the issue without just banning it
  • reaperducer 8y ago
    Having a beer is I engrained in American work culture Ummm... no, it's not. Having had dozens of jobs in five industries over the decades, I've never worked for one where drinking on company time isn't a fireable offense. The only exceptions were at the company Christmas parties, and overnight DJ's who were tolerated doing lines of coke off of CD cases. But that's another problem altogether.
    • tdb7893 8y ago
      I'll concede that maybe America is too broad to generalize here but the point still stands that you don't need to completely disallow alcohol to have people not really drunk at basic work functions
    • logfromblammo 8y ago
      Definitely not. I am currently in an industry where getting drunk off the job can (eventually) get you fired. Mostly because drunkards are potential security threats with a well-proven recipe for developing and exploiting the opening. Our Christmas parties are as boring as a carbide drill bit.
    • amatecha 8y ago
      "Beer o'clock", typically on a Friday afternoon, is a very common phenomenon in North American software & game companies. :)
      • int_19h 8y ago
        That's exactly the point - it's common in software, but virtually unheard of everywhere else. So it's the software industry that's out of touch with the broader American work culture here.
• reaperducer 8y ago
  I know it sounds a bit extreme. Not extreme at all. Except for salespeople having business lunches, in the United States, drinking on company time is pretty much verboten outside of the tech bubble.
  • dec0dedab0de 8y ago
    in the United States, drinking on company time is pretty much verboten outside of the tech bubble. I don't think this is true, especially for company parties. I have also heard of people in other industries drinking in the office, usually these were smaller companies, or the people doing the drinking were upper management.
  • philip1209 8y ago
    WeWork banned meat at company events or on company expense accounts [1]. Would it be that hard to do something similar for alcohol? Then, bringing it back to Google, if people misbehave after having alcohol - then they bought the drinks, and came to a company event while intoxicated. When I was at OpenDNS, @davidu used to say something along the lines of, "When you try to host a big company party with over 100 people, you expect to have to fire somebody for their behavior there. Don't be that person." Maybe the costs don't outweigh the benefits of work parties. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/13/wework-meat-events-expense-ban https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/13/wework-m...
    • throwawaymath 8y ago
      Wow, WeWork won't even allow employees to expense meals that have meat in them?! That's ridiculous. The environmental situation with beef is a little more complex than "less beef eaten -> fewer cows -> less methane -> less climate change." What's even more ridiculous is that beef is the costly meat from an environmental perspective, but they've also banned poultry and all other types of meat. I can understand not serving meat, but not allowing employees to expense meals involving meat would make me reconsider working there - especially because of the heavy handed way they did it.
      • deleted 8y ago
• misiti3780 8y ago
  Why not NOT ban alcohol at work, and when an employee fucks up, just fire him ? Is that really not a solution here ? at the end of the day, people should be accountable for their own actions, and i should not be punished if i want to have a beer after working hours with colleagues because a tiny minority of people at my company cant drinking responsibly
  • RankingMember 8y ago
    I agree, though I think a warning for a first offense is more reasonable. It seems like every company would rather set policy based on the worst possible interpretation rather than leaving things a little looser and dealing with problems/oversteppers directly.
    • mcguire 8y ago
      I don't know. It seems like either you're responsible for your behavior, or you are not. Having a first-offense warning just shows that the company isn't really serious about dealing with the problem.
      • Aloha 8y ago
        Zero Tolerance Policies, generally also mean Zero Thinking Policies. The punishment should fit the crime, and most situations are warrant only a warning or a minor punishment - and if behavior improves, all is well.
        • mcguire 8y ago
          We seem to be backing off of the whole "personal responsibility" thing. If you start off with the policy that "we trust all of our employees to behave like mature adults" and they don't, they've demonstrated that you can't trust them, no? If you have that policy and then start down the road of first-offense warnings, or trying to match the punishment to the crime, you end up in exactly the place where a lot of companies are now. (This isn't a new idea; it's how companies have always operated.) Without a specific set of policies, the company literally cannot do anything right: If you fire someone because his coworkers say they cannot work with him, everyone starts frothing at the mouth. If you pay someone else to leave because he's too important to fire, everyone digs out their pitchforks and torches. If you do nothing, it blows up in your face, spectacularly.
• ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Most employers don't allow drinking at work. Some allow it at company events, provided it doesn't become a problem. The funny thing is about a lot of Silicon Valley companies, I think, is that they decided in their attempt to reinvent work that they'd throw out a couple hundred years of learned experience on what does and doesn't work in a corporate setting. The "fun places to work" eventually figure out that fun for some is often at the expense of others, and that most things corporate environments have ruled out were ruled out a long time ago because they didn't work well.
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • ppod 8y ago
    Ever worked in the UK or Europe? Some things are culturally particular.
• Kiro 8y ago
  Social stuff should be banned.
• zaroth 8y ago
  Feel free to ban anything you want at work. And the people who work there will select for if they want to be a part of it by becoming or remaining employees. (There are, of course, things that are illegal to ban) I personally want to work somewhere who values me as a responsible human being, and expects me to behave like one. The more a workplace feels like they have to micromanage their employees like children, the more I would expect their workplace to be filled with people who act like children. And I personally wouldn’t want to work somewhere like that. Hire intelligent, respectful, ethical, empathetic, mature adults to do interesting work. Fire the ones who don’t live up to it. I expect workplace requirements to be spelled out in terms of expected behavior, expected performance, expected results. Define the outputs. And take responsibility up the chain. IMO the right policy is not to ban alcohol entirely. Rather, if an employee behaves inappropriately the employee is responsible, but if the manager created the environment which lead to the behavior (whether that be approving the purchase of a keg and cheering for a keg stand, or not stopping that engineer from being verbally abusive at the daily stand ups) the manager is also held to account.
  • Spooky23 8y ago
    The positive aspect of banning alcohol consumption is that it's an objective measure. If somebody is a drunken lout pawing his employees, save the victim more exposure by drumming him out for the alcohol. With the possible exception of salespeople entertaining clients, there's no need to drink on duty, and if you do, there is a consequence.
    • Benjammer 8y ago
      I don't think the parent comment is at all disagreeing with the existence of any utility in "banning alcohol" here. The gist of what the parent comment is saying, is that, if you have a policy in place to "compensate" for a certain "negative trait," what you are actually doing is inviting _more_ of that trait, because you are signaling that your company will put effort in to help deal with that, which means that someone who needs help monitoring their alcohol consumption would be _more likely_ to work for you, thus accomplishing essentially the opposite of what you wanted. Mature adults who do _not_ need someone else to monitor their alcohol consumption are far more likely to inherently present with the responsible, adult behaviors that you desire. But, a mature adult who can already sufficiently moderate their own alcohol consumption is going to be _less likely_ to want to work at a place where said consumption is heavily, outwardly regulated/enforced, because why would they want to be constantly told something that they have already fully incorporated into their mature, adult habits and personality?
• cpeterso 8y ago
  An incremental step would be for a company to not pay for alcohol. Don't allow employees to expense alcohol. For catered company events, the company could charge people per alcoholic drink or just not serve any.
• x0x0 8y ago
  The policy includes attending google-related events. Not being able to have a beer at a mixer at a conference Google sent you to or sponsored is a pretty shit limitation. Not being able to have a beer at lunch or dinner is also pretty crummy, because the vast majority of people are adults and comport themselves accordingly.
• spurgu 8y ago
  20 percent.... it's hardly the main issue.
• JJMcJ 8y ago
  Once upon a time, most companies banned alcohol completely from worksites, and certainly for company meetings, except for offsites like picnics and dinners and parties.
• habosa 8y ago
  [Googler here] We have much less company-provided alcohol at work than most tech companies that I'm aware of. Mostly beers once a week, and most people don't participate. This change is mostly talking about work social events that take place off site. My team's company holiday party last year was piloting this and gave each person two drink tickets upon entering. I think banning alcohol completely would reduce the attendance of these social events, so this is a good step where we can keep the social benefits without letting it get out of hand. For instance the holiday party I mentioned was on a Friday night. I really enjoy having a few drinks on a Friday night, and I'm much more likely to attend a Google party with 2 drinks tickets than one with zero. I know that sounds silly and immature, but it's honest.
  • fhdhehfhzhe 8y ago
    Wow, piloting a program for drink tickets?! Crazy! My team at OtherBigCo did that a decade ago...
  • jiveturkey 8y ago
    piloting? drink tickets have been a thing at google since 2005 ish
    • habosa 8y ago
      Huh that's interesting! Been here for ~5 years and this drink ticket thing is only ~1yr old in my experience.
• BrandoElFollito 8y ago
  It also depends on the culture of the country. In France it is common to have a small party (pot) during work hours when some people would have one drink. Max two. These also can be at the end of the day but then usually this is by someone who is leaving.