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You provide free food because you get more working time out of your employees. Any other benefit your pushing is quite honestly, bullshit. They're sitting toget

You provide free food because you get more working time out of your employees. Any other benefit your pushing is quite honestly, bullshit. They're sitting together? Great; odds are they're talking about their job and that's only beneficial to the employer. The other problem with free food is that it starts to feel like an obligation to consume it. I like eating out about once a week otherwise I brown-bag it most of the week with yogurt, fruit and some peanut butter crackers. If you make free food a perk (1) I don't feel like i'm maximizing my benefits (2) people start to think i'm not a team player because I don't want to eat pizza/burritos/chinese/indian/<Insert Food Here> five days a week.

cornellwright 12y ago
I fully embrace that we get more value out of providing free food than it costs us. That plus the fact that almost everyone seems to like it is enough of a reason to do it. Is sitting together and talking about your job ONLY beneficial to the employer? I feel like better communication and more discussion hopefully leading to doing a better job is also beneficial to the employee. Working on a more successful team probably leads to higher satisfaction and better long term career prospects. Even when I've worked in places that didn't provide food, all or almost all of the team still usually ate together, just because we liked what we were doing and enjoyed one another's company. My point is employees aren't losing anything by taking or not taking the perk. We wouldn't pay someone more not to eat the food. Aside from all the weird bad team dynamics that would cause it would also be a net-loss to the company. When people work from home, we also don't pay them any more, despite that we order less food and they have to buy/cook their own.
- Mandatum 12y ago
  Is sitting together and talking about your job ONLY beneficial to the employer? Yes, yes it is. Unless of course they're talking about leaving in which case it might not be.
phamilton 12y ago
In an organization that enables and embraces employee initiatives, I have found that eatting together greatly benefits me, the employee. Cross team socializing has led to many new initiatives that were profitable for the company and for me personally (promotions and raises came as a result). Eating together can be accomplished through culture alone but providing food is probably easier and more successful.
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  Putting a basket in the break room, filled with menus from nearby take-out restaurants, is even easier. I have worked at a lot of different companies, and an ad-hoc, employee-organized lunch run is very common. The person who commits to handling the cash and picking up the food decides on the restaurant, orders are placed by a deadline, and people eat it when it arrives. If a manager or admin staffer names the restaurant, they have to say whether the cost of the meal is on the company or not. Occasionally, someone will name a sit-down restaurant and a time of day, and people simply show up. People who don't want to participate on any given day don't participate. They eat the lunch they packed from home, or go somewhere else. That's how grown-ups eat lunch. If this pattern does not arise naturally, there is some dysfunction in the workplace that should probably be solved directly, rather than trying to force the pattern into existence by providing catered lunches.
  - phamilton 12y ago
    I think your suggestion works well at a smaller company (<50 employees), but as the company starts moving to multiple floors/buildings and departments become a bit more isolated then the organic lunches tend to be intra-department vs inter-department. We have lunch brought in once a week. On the days we don't have lunch it is very much as you describe within each department, but on the day the company provides lunch it is very common to see engineers eating with the account management team and that is when the useful conversations happen.
    - meddlepal 12y ago
      I don't know, This is more or less how my company works (~150 people). It scales well, because even in a larger company there is a certain amount of intermingling between teams as developers change roles over time. For example, I know a lot of people in my company because I have moved across several different teams during my four year tenure. I just throw the people I want to hang out with at lunch on a Skype group chat. Sometimes they join and sometimes they do not. On a different note, at my company, talking about work at lunch is pretty taboo unless the topic of the lunch was previously disclosed by the initiator to be work-related. Lunch is when we talk about all kinds of other bullshit and only talk about work if we're desperately spinning our wheels on something or want to vent.
Gurkenmaster 12y ago
>You provide free food because you get more working time out of your employees. I don't see a problem with that. If I work overtime I can leave earlier on another day. Quite a lot of my coworkers leave at 12am on fridays.
- itsybitsycoder 12y ago
  I would be pretty upset if I was still at work at 12am on any day, Friday especially...
  - gknoy 12y ago
    In the context of "leaving early", I suspect he meant that some of his coworkers left at lunchtime on Friday, after having worked longer earlier in the week.
    - Gurkenmaster 12y ago
      Yes. I messed up the time format. I would have said 0:00 If I meant midnight in germany.

cornellwright 12y ago

I fully embrace that we get more value out of providing free food than it costs us. That plus the fact that almost everyone seems to like it is enough of a reason to do it. Is sitting together and talking about your job ONLY beneficial to the employer? I feel like better communication and more discussion hopefully leading to doing a better job is also beneficial to the employee. Working on a more successful team probably leads to higher satisfaction and better long term career prospects. Even when I've worked in places that didn't provide food, all or almost all of the team still usually ate together, just because we liked what we were doing and enjoyed one another's company. My point is employees aren't losing anything by taking or not taking the perk. We wouldn't pay someone more not to eat the food. Aside from all the weird bad team dynamics that would cause it would also be a net-loss to the company. When people work from home, we also don't pay them any more, despite that we order less food and they have to buy/cook their own.

Mandatum 12y ago
Is sitting together and talking about your job ONLY beneficial to the employer? Yes, yes it is. Unless of course they're talking about leaving in which case it might not be.

phamilton 12y ago

In an organization that enables and embraces employee initiatives, I have found that eatting together greatly benefits me, the employee. Cross team socializing has led to many new initiatives that were profitable for the company and for me personally (promotions and raises came as a result). Eating together can be accomplished through culture alone but providing food is probably easier and more successful.

logfromblammo 12y ago
Putting a basket in the break room, filled with menus from nearby take-out restaurants, is even easier. I have worked at a lot of different companies, and an ad-hoc, employee-organized lunch run is very common. The person who commits to handling the cash and picking up the food decides on the restaurant, orders are placed by a deadline, and people eat it when it arrives. If a manager or admin staffer names the restaurant, they have to say whether the cost of the meal is on the company or not. Occasionally, someone will name a sit-down restaurant and a time of day, and people simply show up. People who don't want to participate on any given day don't participate. They eat the lunch they packed from home, or go somewhere else. That's how grown-ups eat lunch. If this pattern does not arise naturally, there is some dysfunction in the workplace that should probably be solved directly, rather than trying to force the pattern into existence by providing catered lunches.
- phamilton 12y ago
  I think your suggestion works well at a smaller company (<50 employees), but as the company starts moving to multiple floors/buildings and departments become a bit more isolated then the organic lunches tend to be intra-department vs inter-department. We have lunch brought in once a week. On the days we don't have lunch it is very much as you describe within each department, but on the day the company provides lunch it is very common to see engineers eating with the account management team and that is when the useful conversations happen.
  - meddlepal 12y ago
    I don't know, This is more or less how my company works (~150 people). It scales well, because even in a larger company there is a certain amount of intermingling between teams as developers change roles over time. For example, I know a lot of people in my company because I have moved across several different teams during my four year tenure. I just throw the people I want to hang out with at lunch on a Skype group chat. Sometimes they join and sometimes they do not. On a different note, at my company, talking about work at lunch is pretty taboo unless the topic of the lunch was previously disclosed by the initiator to be work-related. Lunch is when we talk about all kinds of other bullshit and only talk about work if we're desperately spinning our wheels on something or want to vent.

Gurkenmaster 12y ago

>You provide free food because you get more working time out of your employees. I don't see a problem with that. If I work overtime I can leave earlier on another day. Quite a lot of my coworkers leave at 12am on fridays.

itsybitsycoder 12y ago
I would be pretty upset if I was still at work at 12am on any day, Friday especially...
- gknoy 12y ago
  In the context of "leaving early", I suspect he meant that some of his coworkers left at lunchtime on Friday, after having worked longer earlier in the week.
  - Gurkenmaster 12y ago
    Yes. I messed up the time format. I would have said 0:00 If I meant midnight in germany.