- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@lemmy.ml
- antiwork@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@lemmy.ml
- antiwork@lemmy.world
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Middle of the road: pay your employees in ping pong tables, increase monthly ping pong table quota.
Wild. They both “might” help. They both cost the company money. They should both be correct.
Wtf are you talking about? Employees work office jobs 9 to 5 because they love to work. Like all good employee’s. Heck, if they weren’t getting paid they’d still the work for free because they love it so much. It’s only out of the pure goodness of my heart that I decide to pay them minimum wage/s
They work because they’re family, right? Not for money.
The only thing that makes less sense than your comment is people upvoting it.
Morale and pay are both factors, your sarcastic comment makes it seem like you believe everyone only cares about pay and nothing else…
Some people make good money, so that’s not their primary motivation when picking a job.
It’s obviously sarcasm…
Maybe that’s why I said it was sarcastic?
Someone can be sarcastic and still not make a point…
What exactly do you think sarcasm is?
If needing to pay for basic necessities weren’t a factor in people getting jobs, I highly doubt the majority of people would work the kinds of jobs of today. I don’t know a single person who is excited to go into their retail job and deal with shitty customers all day or sit in a bland cubicle all day making spreadsheets that nobody really cares about.
I know more people who would much rather devote their time to learning and playing instruments, or making something with their own hands, or writing stories, or spending time raising their families.
Not everyone works entry level retail jobs…
And some people already make enough to live comfortably…
Which is why I said that.
Some people make good money, so that’s not their primary motivation when picking a job
I now completely understand why something as stupid as what I replied to got upvoted tho.
Have fun here
sit in a bland cubicle all day making spreadsheets that nobody really cares about.
I actually enjoy making those spreadsheets. I wouldn’t do it for free though.
Hey if that’s your jam go for it, personally I’d like to live in a world where someone can elect to do that sort of work and not have to worry and stress about housing, food, bills etc or take on that kind of work despite hating it in order to put food on the table.
You clearly missed “/s” at the end of his post, OR you don’t know what it means.
It’s funny how many people are telling me I missed the sarcasm when I literally said it was sarcasm…
your sarcastic comment makes it seem like you believe everyone only cares about pay and nothing else…
Someone can attempt sarcasm and still fuck it up bud
Agreed, but the above comment is not one of those times. Just admit you missed it and go on with life. Nice edit with both comments, lulz
When you edit on Lemmy it resets how long ago the comment was made…
If I edited it, your reply to me would show a newer timestamp…
No idea why so many people in this sub have no clue what they’re talking about, but it looks like I’m just blocking the whole thing
And when you edit within a minute of a reply that was made within a minute of your comment nothing changes. Just suck it up and admit you missed it, dude.
In fact all three are valid answers. Cruel manipulation as it is, additional even uncompesated responsibilities often do drive retention as people are invested too deep and too stressed out to consider switching or find time for the process.
share this with workreform. they’ll love it. I would link but forgot how
It’s true that it’s not always about the money, but it’s probably never about a ping pong table
It’s not ever not about the money around 0% of the times.
Eh. Toxic work culture can drive people away regardless of the pay. Obviously some people suck it up but not everyone. Ultimately the goal is to treat employees well all around. Good pay, benefits, and work culture will keep people happy.
Ping pong tables are loud as fuck and disrupt the whole office. If they invest in a soundproof room to put it in, sure. Otherwise it just makes you feel like a massive douche.
Especially if your coworkers play like pros.
Thwack
thwack thwack
Thwack
I was at my last job for 10 years.
If I had been well paid and treated well I would not have ever started that job search. Further even just having one of those two thing might have kept me from looking.
At that job I hit the tipping point of both. It’s was getting shittier everyday and the pay wasn’t budging year after year. Finally mid-Covid the power flipped to the employee and jobs were much easier to get. I started looking and jumped shipped.
This
It’s always about autonomy, one way or another. People want to be able to control how they work and what they can get out of it. For some that does mean more money, for some it would mean less stress, for others it could means less meetings.
It’s pretty easy for management to address all of it by just giving people more power over what their work lives are like, but that could mean less control over their workforce. No “owner” wants that, to them, they own their employees’ time/work life.
Indeed.
It’s telling that “basic dignity” or “managers who aren’t dicks” didn’t make the list.
Yeah. In my experience, “A manager who doesn’t suck” is most of the list.
Source: I’ve been the manager who did suck, and the one who doesn’t. I have some data points.
Well, hypothetical speaking, if there were two completely absolutely identical jobs, but the one had a ping pong table. I might choose the one without and ask them to get a Foosball table, since I’m no good at ping pong.
I’m all about the air hockey table.
It also depends on whether it’s about a pingpong table in the office, or whether I get one for at home and we’re talking a fully remote job.
Getting a free pingpong table isn’t a bad bonus! I’d prefer a decent crokinole board though, tbh
It’s a bad bonus if you don’t have space for a ping pong table. Speaking from experience, I got a free ping pong table for Christmas once…
Same here. In the past 5 years, it’s seen maybe 10 games, and a whole lot of laundry.
I’m cannot deny that “where should we mail your crokinole board?” would work on me.
What is Crokinole?
Shut up and sit down has a video where they rave about it. It’s a dexterity game that uses a large board and sliding pieces.
It seems simplistic, but it is genuinely amazing to paly.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=XMKzeg78peg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
If they put in any kind of clackball table, I’m demanding noise canceling headphones and my own office.
It is if you’re managing an Olympic ping pong team
My employer really covered their bases. We have ping-pong, pool, and foosball. That guarantees that everyone has something that will keep them from quitting.
I wanted a foosball table dammit!
Dammit, you beat me to it!
That’s the game of the debil!!!
Damnit Bobby what did I tell you about foosball!
I would quit if my employer got a ping pong table. I don’t mind ping pong but at the office? No.
Most places that have HR like this work their employees too hard for them to have time to use a ping pong table anyway, so it’s really just a hollow gesture.
A company I used to work for had a fucking arcade of all sorts of video games, I NEVER saw anyone playing them
My last job had a pingpong table. We’d even use it occasionally. That is, until people started getting pissy when they’d see us playing pingpong. Then management started bitching that we were playing pingpong instead of working. Eventually, nobody was allowed to use the pingpong table - it just sat there, in the middle of the room, with brand new paddles and packs of balls that we weren’t allowed to use.
The money was okay - not great, but not terrible. After some management fuckery, I left for a $10000/yr raise and 100% work from home. I’ve gone up $20K since then, been promoted to senior, still have upward trajectory, and still work 100% from home. I have a desk in Memphis somewhere, but I’ve never actually seen it.
I doubt most people leave because of a lack of ping-pong table.
How about giving them a raise in pay, and if they really want it, they can buy the ping-pong table out of their own pocket flips desk
That’s stupid. Wouldn’t the smarter thing to do be to buy the ping pong table and Dock everyone’s pay because of it? That ping pong table cost the company a fortune. And no, those bite marks on the leg of pool table aren’t from my dog/s
I think I am bad at capitalism.
It’s true, most people don’t care about money.
They care about what money can help them buy, like another day of survival.
It was never about the money. It was about maslovs heirarchy of needs; which, at the very bottom, is a foosball table.
There’s two kinds of money: Enough money, and more than enough money.
If you don’t have enough money, that’s all that matters. A nicer day at work means very little.
Once you have enough money, more money matters very little. Now it’s about enjoying work etc.
This is brilliant!
Tangentially related, I heard another about enough money:
When you already have enough money, do you really need 2x enough money?
As a person with enough money, yes, I would love double my income.
Your baseline can change.
You may be fine with $1000 a month. You have everything you need: food, bed, apartment, electricity, etc.
Now you get a new job and have $2000. You try out more expensive food options and realize you like them better. You move into a bigger apartment and start enjoying the freedom.
You may never wanted this if you didn’t try it, but now that you have, you don’t want to go back. You may not have noticed that your mental and physical health was degraded due to your previous living conditions until you get better after raising your standards.
I interpreted enough as really enough, when you are really well off and can afford the good stuff/vacations/good cars whatever.
But you are right. The definition of enough changes through ones lifetime quite a bit. I would have a really hard time going back to broke (student).
I’m like mid-career and I can’t afford vacations. There’s always some other priority for the money and I would feel guilty for spending it on something that is by nature temporary and ephemeral.
That question isn’t the best way to frame it, because yeah… 2x “enough” is pretty reasonable. That’s still well within the high returns of happiness phase.
Do you need 1000x enough, though? Or 1000x that? I’d love a high end espresso maker, or a nicer car, or to be able to afford to take more time off, but there comes a point where more is just pointless.
Ah but what is enough money for you or I is not enough money for the bigwigs. And since they’re obviously more important, as they’re at the top, we have to have sure they get enough money even if that means you don’t.
But they’ll get you a ping pong table so you can stop thinking about how you don’t know what you’re going to feed your family tonight
It’s actually second from the bottom, above Pogs.
Yeah like, cmon, what do you think the pyramid sits on. On the floor??? No, on the holiest of of foosball tables!
Eh, I dunno. You can wipe your tears with money, light cigars with it, sew clothing from it. Many uses! :P
deleted by creator
I interviewed once for a part-time job at a potential startup, and the two people running it spent 75% of the time talking about how they had a pingpong table and how that meant it was a fun company…
The job wouldn’t be in the office tho, so for my position (and pretty much every employee) would only be able to use it off the clock.
They were very excited about the ping pong table tho, because their job was in office and they played a lot.
I didn’t take the job.
And the startup never opened.
You are a wise man, keep it up
I’ve worked in at a smaller startup with a ping pong table and my anecdote is we were all obsessed with ping pong. So their excitement could really be genuine. It’s not always a ruse.
Capitalism stops when it comes to salary. Then it’s all about culture and warm fuzzy feelings. Those are the only incentives an employee needs.
A ping pong table? What for? So HR can punish you when you use it?
seriously，who has time to use a ping pong table at work? It’s like a decoration to remind you you’re not having fun.
Where do you live, where taking breakes is frowned upon? That’s crazy.
Here in Denmark, I’m being reminded to take breakes and go home. I have been asked if I’m sure it’s not hurting my work/life balance, before getting overtime approved.
It’s also common to stay at work after hours to hang out, if there’s a nice place to do that.
Every shitty company in France is like this. And I’ve seen a lot like that.
I know that the American capitalism thing is a meme at this point, but working in software, every company I’ve worked for isn’t against you taking breaks or doing whatever as long as things get done. I’ve played foosball with my VP during normal hours before, and it was slightly awkward but good fun.
The usual issue I see in my industry is that you constantly accumulate more responsibilities without any corresponding increase in pay. It’s especially bad for morale when you see someone leave, and their responsibilities get distributed to the team, but no one gets any part of the old person’s salary as a raise to make up for the added responsibilities even when the higher ups refuse to hire a replacement since you’re all clearly handling it fine.
Ok, calm down there, commie. Maybe you’d better go check in with your “family” and your “adequate housing”. The rest of us are here to make money… For other people.
Come over to America! A magical place where you are only worth the money you make for your corporate overlords, and despite being told by your boss that they are SO glad that they hired you, your performance review is a 3/5 because they don’t want you getting too comfortable and “there’s always room for improvement!”
Ah, here it’s very different. In multiple companies I’ve gotten consistent 5/5 and told by my own manager that I should really get a promotion, but they can’t give me promotion or even a raise. Just the 1-2% salary adjustment everybody gets.
Feels so good… 🙄
You guys get 1-2% salary adjustments?!?
At least for me in IT, everybody usually gets an adjustment that’s on average above inflation. So if you work the same place for ten years without ever getting a raise, you still keep up with inflation.
I think my lowest was 0% and my highest almost 3%. Some years slightly below inflation, but in any 3 year period I think I’ve been above inflation.
Then any raise is on top of that.
Listen, speaking as an American, we know Danes have better quality of life, but we’ll be damned if we will sacrifice capitalism to get there! Our motto is “if you’re not working, you’re losing money!” That only applies to the lower ranks, of course.
Seriously tho, I would love to live in a society that expects companies to hold the well-being of their employees over profits (not that these two are mutually exclusive), and the culture is changing slowly, but we’re not there yet.
Exactly, that’s the thing. Here in Denmark, many (most?) companies think that happy workers are more productive.
I might be colored by mostly working in places where it’s very expensive to replace an employee, but then again, for Americans I mostly talk with people in a similar kind of job.
Denmark is capitalist. High investment rates are literally their biggest internal economic driver.
from Wikipedia:
The labour market is traditionally characterized by a high degree of union membership rates and collective agreement coverage.
Well, there’s the problem. Our capitalists say that’s stupid, they’ll just lose money!
I’m a capitalist and unions are dope. The two are clearly not incompatible.
Let’s get union reform like these countries too
I agree. I wish more capitalists in charge did!
My guess is USA or UK
Source: live in USA. Taking breaks is seen as being lazy. As is taking days off when your sick.
I’ve been told multiple times to take more sick leave.
Usually when I come back from sick leave, I’ve been told I should have taken a day more to recover fully. But after days in bed, I just really want to start doing something, even if I’m tired.
this sounds like a sci-fi novel
Same in my office in the UK, I got asked if I was not taking enough breaks or doing work outside of work hours as I was doing more than they expected and my manager was worried about me burning out, but having a chill atmosphere and a nice place to hang out and chill in the office just means that I can be more productive and happier at work so it’s a win-win… A lot of HR types don’t realise that it takes a nice office in both material and culture to make people productive and just go for the former which has the lower effect of the two when used alone.
That’s nice and all, but staying after hours to hang out sounds awful. I don’t want to befriend those losers, I want to get on with my life. They can all rot in hell for all I care, I’d sell them out in a heartbeat.
That’s fine, I can’t expect everybody to like that kind of stuff.
But it’s still important to have that for those that do. And of course that people more like you, get what you want.
This is so true, and I don’t even have a pingpong table at work
You can only enjoy the perks during your 45 minute lunch break. Food or fun, your choice …
I can’t afford groceries for the 3rd time this month, but did you hear they’re putting a ping pong table in the lounge!?
As a professional in this field, top reasons would be…
- Dissatisfaction with pay
- Limited/No career progression
- Dissatisfaction with environment/culture
- Dissatisfaction with management
- Poor work-life balance
- Poor job design/expectations of role
- Poor taining quality/knowledge management
- Inadequate tools/systems
Edit: I should also point out we have about half a dozen ping-pong tables scattered around my work and our turnover figures were bang on average for annual benchmarking against the sector. I consider the average too high, though, and will be targeting better retention over this year. We’ll need at least double the amount of ping-pong tables.
My top reasons for leaving a job:
- Too little pay
- Too many responsibilities
- The possibility of career progression
The three Big Nos. My optimal work-life balance is 0.1-99.9. If they trust me to be able to do even one thing, that pay better be huge.
you really a pro, I’m looking for other jobs precisely because of 1 and 2, even though the rest are all great at my current job
I don’t see pizza party or ping pong table on that list so you’re obviously not a professional.
A real professional knows employees want pizza parties instead of higher pay and they want more responsibilities with the same pay!
:P
Pizza party solves everything!!
Or…a lemon party!
But I have no money and lemons are expensive! If only there was a way we could acquire lemons without paying for them… Anyone know where I could find a lemon tree?
Consult our mutual friend, the Lemon Stealing Whore
I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?
Make lemonade, obviously
Make some kind of lemon powered rocket launcher and force life to take it’s lemons back!
So ping pong table falls under the third point right? More ping pong = more fun = better culture? Right? /s just for clarity
Very correct. You can solve bad culture by throwing more money at the problem. Preferably all at once with zero maintenance budget or governance so that the amenities in question can become non-functional monuments to your superior culture. Future generations will find these and marvel at your ingenuity from the safety of the water cooler.
Almost all of these applied to the last job I left, so I guess it’s pretty spot on.
Obviously right? I mean this post is definitely a joke
There’s some new research that shows raising pay is not great for retention. Studies say it’s better to take that money and put it into a long-term benefit line a pension, profit sharing, while life insurance with a cash out value, etc.
Raises and bonuses had about a 3-month effect.
That seems highly suspect.
Was this research sponsored by the association for research into golden parachuting out of a pillaged company?
What field?
Strategic Workforce Planning. It’s a bit different to HR in that there’s a lot of data analysis. Typically we would use data to identify retention issues (reasons, areas, seasonality, etc) and figure out how to improve it. We’d then hand that over to HR to
implementfuck up.
If they put a ping pong table anywhere within earshot of my desk I’m going apeshit
So… this is pretty stupid, a raise in pay certainly might help.
However, from the perspective of a career spent managing teams, often organizations with hundreds of employees, if you think your people are all solely motivated by compensation, you’re going to do a very poor job as a manager.
Everyone wants more money, but that’s not all they want – and there are plenty of people who quit high paying jobs that treated them poorly or gave them no opportunity to grow.
Think about appropriate compensation as necessary, but often not sufficient – and think about the best boss you ever had. They probably did more than just pay you fairly, that’s the bare minimum.
Seriously. Another comment pointed out there’s “not enough money” and “enough money” for wages. Depending on which side you’re on money may not be the reason someone quits. My previous job paid me enough, but the business partner was so dangerously incompetent, reckless, agressive, and unwilling to do their own job that I quit out of frustration. I made it very clear to my boss’ boss that it wasn’t about money, and I wasn’t going to tell them what my new compensation was. It isn’t his business. My issue was the business partner. Within a few months a few other people quit working there too for the same reason.
Yeah, I get what you’re saying, but between more money and a ping pong table, which do you think most people would choose? If they wanted to imply a more casual/fun/less-stress environment, they should have said that, but implying a ping pong table would motivate people to stay is like thinking dangling your keys in front of a baby to stop its crying will keep it happy forever. At least a pay raise is helpful to me.
Exactly. "Pay people enough, " is table stakes. It’s good business strategy and it’s a basic moral duty. "Grossly over pay people, " is probably not good business strategy; even if you do, it isn’t going to make up for being a shitty place to work
I’ve seen reference to research showing pretty much what you’re saying: Inadequate pay gives dissatisfied employees, but raising pay above a certain level only gives very short term increase in employee satisfaction. The conclusion was that pay has to be high enough that people feel fairly compensated, but further increasing it has little to no long-term effect.
Yep. It’s why companies can offer ridiculous salaries and still have crazy employee churn (see: amazon, tesla).
What the list needs is “fire their toxic manager” or “ask them what they need to be happy and successful in their career”
Right… “perform an actual exit interview” would be good
This totally doesn’t look like something fake with its lack of source or context that was just made to spark rage, not at all
If definitely seen shit like this on menial job applications in the past. Typically as pary of a “personality test” that tries to root out commies. USA obv
