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To boost its bottom line, Sprint decided last week to end the era of free office snacks for its employees. The move represents a tiny fraction of the struggling telecom's effort to cut $2.5 billion from its total operating expenses. Axing the free food will shave $600,000 from the budget. But at what cost?
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From the most cynical point of view, however, this isn't just a case of corporate largesse. Snacks keep workers in the office working instead of out foraging for sustenance during working hours. A 2011 study by Staples found that half of all workers left the office to get snacks at least once a day, with some people making as many as five trips to get their munchie fix. Snack runs account for 2.4 billion hours in lost productivity in the U.S., according to the study. It should be noted, of course, that Staples and your boss have a shared interest in keeping more people in the office.
There has been no economic study on the elasticity of perks. Proposing Phoenix's Law: "When free coffee, soda, and snacks go, so should you."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Knowledge Troll on Friday November 13 2015, @07:15AM
Arrrgggg misfire on preview.
is the fact that almost nobody is productive for more than 4 to 6 hours.
Six hours is actually the holy grail for productive work performed by an employee in an 8 hour typical day. When teams start performing time tracking and are actually honest about it then two hours of actual real work being done in a day is not an entirely unreasonable value. It needs to be improved but it should not shock anyone that most employees waste most of their time or have most of their time wasted by others at most of the places.
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It seems entirely reasonable to bring in a Clif bar instead of expecting to be paid to leave.
I suppose for an hourly employee it would be important to clock out before you left the premises to get some food, or drinks, or what ever. It has been a long time since I have punched a time clock. I wonder though if you are thinking in terms of hourly or salary wages with the employee that is leaving to pick up drinks or smokes or what ever. Because in the case of a salaried employee this isn't logical at all.
A salaried employee is supposed to not have hourly requirements and it is not supposed to only be a one way street (though it is commonly abused) where people work for free because they made $N over 40 hours before at an hourly wage, got a "promotion", and now work 50 hours a week for 40 hours pay. In fact if the salaried employee role is working well you might have highly compensated individuals that you hardly ever see because they appear to do very little.
If you sweat a guy taking off for 20 minutes to buy a coke because he is getting paid to do it something is wrong. Can they do their job? Are they doing they job? Are there blocking issues that originate at them? Can they meet their responsibilities? Is stuff on time? Are they predictable?
Being gone from the office isn't a problem. Not being able to or simply not doing your job is a problem.