On the one hand, you want to provide perks that offset personal cost to your employees AND reduce the amount of time it takes for them to do something like lunch with the result in increased productivity (ostensibly simply due to removing factors such as travel-time-to-lunch-place).
The company store comes to mid, as well.
There are many great benefits that companies do provide: free commute costs (bus, bike and ferry service) as well as on-site food...
Perhaps a way to quash any misgivings about such services would be to provide a daily per diem for services as pay, where you get the per diem pay UNLESS you partake of the companies service instead.
So you badge into each service and thus get that per-diem pay redacted from your check.
If you use NONE of the company's services, then you get that same portion of pay back.
This also has its problems, though.
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What I would far prefer, though, is tech services system that companies can buy into:
Want your employees to be able to bus from SF to MTN VIEW: pay in and let them badge into that service.
Why should all the tech giants run separate services that are basically all the same routes? Let a company run that, and let ANY company add users and pay based on badging.
Let companies have a "groupon" of sorts for restaurants in their area, where the per-diem lunch allowance is spendable at any restaurant within a radius of the office. The employee will get a % of their meal paid for by the company, and they pay for anything they personally want over the base?
Allow for perks that are not walled to the campus/office/etc.
Heck, Path.com employees had a monthly Uber allowance they could spend...
This should be encouraged in Silicon Valley, to allow startups to share services at a discount which both provides revenue, data, testing, users, validation, etc....
There's a lot of value to Google in having everyone on a Google bus being a Googler. You can have sensitive conversations on the bus (also, your employees are less likely to jump ship due to meeting more interesting people...)
Google doesn't actually run the bus themselves; it's Bauer.
(I hate the SV culture of having sensitive meetings in public cafes and restaurants, especially ones frequented by all your most likely competitors! Internal compartmentalization is also a bad extreme, but having a hard "insider vs. outsider" boundary, and then specific short-term projects with their own borders, and all communications about those happening in secure spaces, is my default.)
Kind of funny how your statement is the exact oposite of the famous open office idea: "we have a flat mgmt structure and desks in an open office so the collaboration and free flow of ideas can occur!"
SHARED BUSSES!?!?? Wtf! Do we want tech employees sharing ideas and getting poached?!?! What is this communist Russia???
Uh. I want free flow of information inside the company, or of certain kinds of information between companies (or company and general outsiders). You absolutely do not want to share your most sensitive company discussions with your direct competitors. There's also some information which is regulatorially or legally sensitive and can't be shared outside the company before "everyone" has access to it.
Another source of daily irony is I dislike open plan offices in general as a developer; I'm now more a product manager (although I do tech stuff as well, and conference papers, and such), which is a role which does strongly benefit from open plan, and I've also we've built monitorhenge at a pod of desks in open-plan, out of Seiki 39" 4K and portrait-mode 24" U2410 monitors. It's essentially a re-creation of my favorite work environment; a private office shared with a small team.
> On the one hand, you want to provide perks that offset personal cost to your employees AND reduce the amount of time it takes for them to do something like lunch with the result in increased productivity (ostensibly simply due to removing factors such as travel-time-to-lunch-place).
Yes, it does make things incredibly convenient. No doubt about that.
But what about just doing it the way it's done in Europe? Where employers are required by law to be paid X amount per month for lunch, X amount of transit, and so on. Company gives you the money, you spend the money whichever way you feel.
I'm not against perks, I'm against hiding them behind some feel-good crap about how much free stuff you get. It's not free, it's part of your paycheck. And it's cheaper for companies than just paying you more, to boot.
I also like the idea of just having a conveniently located lunch place (internal or external business entity, doesn't really matter) that employees go to and pay for stuff with money. It can even be cheaper than going outside because said business has a guaranteed customer base.
Guess that's along the lines of your "allowance" idea. But even less wishy-washy.
PS: when you think about it, it's really kind of funny how all these perks and stuff that magnificent Silicon Valley companies offer their employees, are taken for granted in Europe because they've been there since workers' rights movements
But what about just doing it the way it's done in Europe? Where employers are required by law to be paid X amount per month for lunch, X amount of transit, and so on. Company gives you the money, you spend the money whichever way you feel.
That's called a "salary". The only difference between those subsidies (as we call them here in the European country I live) and regular salary is for tax purposes.
PS: when you think about it, it's really kind of funny how all these perks and stuff that magnificent Silicon Valley companies offer their employees, are taken for granted in Europe because they've been there since workers' rights movements
Europe's a big place. We certainly don't have on-site daycares, healthy food by a good chef, life insurance, concierge service, rental cars, gyms, buses with Wi-Fi and such. The only perk I can see is the maternity leave, which has a similar duration (120 days) but doesn't have gender discrimination, and probably the vacations.
There is this thing called public transit. It's where government takes tax money from all companies and their workers and subsidizes a train or bus to go into most neighborhoods and commercial areas... Some companies even provide transit passes to cover the unsubsidized portion. (And then get a tax break for doing so).
For restaurants, this exists in Europe. Your employer gives you a monthly number (around 20) of $10 vouchers that are accepted as cash only by restaurants (though there was a small black market for them). One that I saw in France is called http://www.groupe-cheque-dejeuner.com/en.html
One of my employers reimbursed my work-from-home expenses (ISP, extra landline, printer and toner), and I get to deduct my home office expenses from my income for taxation purposes (percentage of my habitation costs, proportional to the percentage of my office floor space).
On the one hand, you want to provide perks that offset personal cost to your employees AND reduce the amount of time it takes for them to do something like lunch with the result in increased productivity (ostensibly simply due to removing factors such as travel-time-to-lunch-place).
The company store comes to mid, as well.
There are many great benefits that companies do provide: free commute costs (bus, bike and ferry service) as well as on-site food...
Perhaps a way to quash any misgivings about such services would be to provide a daily per diem for services as pay, where you get the per diem pay UNLESS you partake of the companies service instead.
So you badge into each service and thus get that per-diem pay redacted from your check.
If you use NONE of the company's services, then you get that same portion of pay back.
This also has its problems, though.
----
What I would far prefer, though, is tech services system that companies can buy into:
Want your employees to be able to bus from SF to MTN VIEW: pay in and let them badge into that service.
Why should all the tech giants run separate services that are basically all the same routes? Let a company run that, and let ANY company add users and pay based on badging.
Let companies have a "groupon" of sorts for restaurants in their area, where the per-diem lunch allowance is spendable at any restaurant within a radius of the office. The employee will get a % of their meal paid for by the company, and they pay for anything they personally want over the base?
Allow for perks that are not walled to the campus/office/etc.
Heck, Path.com employees had a monthly Uber allowance they could spend...
This should be encouraged in Silicon Valley, to allow startups to share services at a discount which both provides revenue, data, testing, users, validation, etc....