What 'Severance' Gets Right About Infantilizing Office Perks (nytimes.com) 66
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an opinion piece written by Elizabeth Spiers, former editor in chief of The New York Observer and the founding editor of Gawker: Among the many brilliant touches in the dystopian workplace thriller "Severance," on Apple TV+, are the perks offered by Lumon Industries, the cultlike, fluorescent-lit corporation where the series takes place: company-branded Chinese finger trap gag toys; cheery if mediocre caricature portraits; a baffling "waffle party"; the much-discussed "music dance experience"; and, more than once, a melon-ball buffet served on a rolling bar. It's hard not to see real-world analogues -- in the table tennis and kombucha taps of Silicon Valley, and especially in the post-pandemic flurry of office happy hours and gift card giveaways, as companies try to lure white-collar workers back to offices. At the high end, a real estate data company offered employees who returned to the office a daily chance to win $10,000, a trip to Barbados or a new Tesla; more common incentives are company swag, pop-up snack stands, Covid personal protection gift bags and stress balls.
Companies aren't wrong to perceive a reluctance to return to offices among some workers. Even if bosses see the return as simply a resumption of the terms employees had agreed to, workers are increasingly aware of the ways that those terms have shortchanged them. After two years, those who were able to work from home have seen real benefits -- reclaiming time from commutes, flexibility for family responsibilities, freedom from perpetual distractions and restrictive dress codes -- and now they can't unsee them. Surveys taken last year indicated that two-thirds of workers would prefer to have continued remote work options and would sacrifice $30,000 in raises to keep them. Somewhat higher percentages of women and Black knowledge workers say they are reluctant to return to offices.
But among executives and managers, there's still a strong perception that in-person work is the only real work. So as younger workers in particular resist company mandates to return to their desks in the overly air-conditioned offices where many had never felt comfortable, companies are trying to sweeten the deal. [...] I've come to think of these corporate toys and rewards as the work equivalent of the cheap prizes you win at a carnival after emptying your wallet to play the games. The difference is that the point of the carnival is to have fun, and the prizes are incidental. In the workplace, this is just a laughably terrible trade-off. Who wants to give up the two hours a day they gain by not commuting for a coffee mug? "Putting in long hours at the office is often conflated with a strong work ethic and more productivity, though it may not be indicative of either," adds Spiers. "To make employees feel this approach is reasonable, many employers blur the line between work and the rest of life, while offering little diversions here and there to approximate fun."
Companies aren't wrong to perceive a reluctance to return to offices among some workers. Even if bosses see the return as simply a resumption of the terms employees had agreed to, workers are increasingly aware of the ways that those terms have shortchanged them. After two years, those who were able to work from home have seen real benefits -- reclaiming time from commutes, flexibility for family responsibilities, freedom from perpetual distractions and restrictive dress codes -- and now they can't unsee them. Surveys taken last year indicated that two-thirds of workers would prefer to have continued remote work options and would sacrifice $30,000 in raises to keep them. Somewhat higher percentages of women and Black knowledge workers say they are reluctant to return to offices.
But among executives and managers, there's still a strong perception that in-person work is the only real work. So as younger workers in particular resist company mandates to return to their desks in the overly air-conditioned offices where many had never felt comfortable, companies are trying to sweeten the deal. [...] I've come to think of these corporate toys and rewards as the work equivalent of the cheap prizes you win at a carnival after emptying your wallet to play the games. The difference is that the point of the carnival is to have fun, and the prizes are incidental. In the workplace, this is just a laughably terrible trade-off. Who wants to give up the two hours a day they gain by not commuting for a coffee mug? "Putting in long hours at the office is often conflated with a strong work ethic and more productivity, though it may not be indicative of either," adds Spiers. "To make employees feel this approach is reasonable, many employers blur the line between work and the rest of life, while offering little diversions here and there to approximate fun."
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More like:
Step 1: Take a voluntary pay cut to get the benefits of working from home.
Step 2: Tell employees the wfh experiment is over, come back or you're fired. No restoration of pay.
Music dance party (Score:3)
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Very odd word that's used to indicate Table Football.
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Answer. [duckduckgo.com]
It would have taken you less effort to type that exact question into DuckDuckGo's search, and you would have gotten an immediate and complete answer.
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Redundant managers pretending to be needed. (Score:3)
If it's something artistic and intangible, then the human element does play a role. But that just means creatives should meet with each other, not need authority physically present.
But being present makes the authority figure feel secure, so there's a perverse incentive for a company to confuse its bottom-line interest with the psychological interests of managers they mostly don't need.
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It's amazing how many managers can cram themselves into a single team if they try.
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You don't want to know how many 'managers' there are in your HR department.
Strangely enough, they are the ones who decide which posts count as managers.
Re:Redundant managers pretending to be needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite being a non-negotiable party in the hiring process at my last job, they were the slowest part of the machine, and actively kept qualified individuals I'd personally recruited from appearing on the the list of applicants sent to my boss for consideration. Slow, opaque, unresponsive, incompetent... all words my boss used when describing our HR rep responsible for recruiting, which is a misnomer, since they didn't recruit anyone themselves. They instead managed a pool of head-hunting agencies who did the actual recruiting. This made them a needless middleman who's only possible contribution could be to slow things down.
Corporate HR representatives view their job as supporting those managers most likely to get promoted, so that those managers can then help the HR person advance as well, possibly increasing HR numbers at the same time. Actually got into a discussion with a friend in HR, and instead of refuting any of my criticisms, he said something to the effect of "I will never support a plan that reduces HR head-count". In essence confirming everything I'd said about what was wrong with how HR functioned at our organization.
Boards don't want to deal with the messiness that is a human work force, and so they outsource that responsibility (along with an absolutely enormous amount of autonomy) to their HR departments. "I don't want to know, just keep us out of the press" is the general mandate. So much so that HR departments can have veto power over board approved business plans. We had a business plan predicated on 4 new personnel, board approved it, but HR refused to give us the head-count because they had board driven target for head-count growth company wide. HR got to decide which board approved head count was granted (HR requested head count of course being at the top of the approved list, followed by head count in divisions that did a lot to get HR people promoted), and which was rejected (ours - head count that could have actually helped MAKE money).
Most large corporations could benefit wildly by hiring someone to go through and audit their HR departments for actual utility. Gutting those who are busy all day doing nothing actually productive, or actively slowing down the processes necessary to keep the money-making units functioning (hiring, promotion, etc.).
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Actually got into a discussion with a friend in HR, and instead of refuting any of my criticisms, he said something to the effect of "I will never support a plan that reduces HR head-count". In essence confirming everything I'd said about what was wrong with how HR functioned at our organization.
That's how every department works. Almost nobody will support a plan that reduces the head-count in their own department because they know their head may be the one that winds up on the chopping block.
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Also, that really isn't true. I've had several supervisors who've opted to not replace people who've left, or to c
Re: Redundant managers pretending to be needed. (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s ironic that the one department that is supposedly there for you is the most despised in any company.
HR are there to protect the company from its employees, nothing more.
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Make no mistake, HR is there to protect the company. If you are acting in the best interests of the company, then yeah they may help you to, but if not, then they will side with the company every time. And if necessary they will pretend to be your ally in order to better know how to best throw you under that bus on behalf of the company.
If it comes down to you vs another employee, they will assess who is more valuable to the company (gener
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When I started, three departments were overseen by a single manager.
And they operated at a relatively high standard given the constraints.
Now management has grown by over 600% (with rumblings of adding even more as they just can't seem to get it together) while staff has decreased by 20% (and their duties have increased).
Cost over-runs are rampant, standards have declined dramatically, and if it were not for the fact I have retirement on the horizon, I'd be out the door.
Anywhoo, management's fix to all the
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Everyone wants to be Tom Sawyer.
Re:Redundant managers pretending to be needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I am astounded how many people think that IT jobs aren't creative jobs. Indeed, most managers seem to think that IT is a conveyor belt job... thus idiocy like agile happens.
IF you had a company that was doing everything "by the book", all standardized and neatly best practices. Also every product you buy just does what it is advertised to do and never makes an error. Problem with that is that it's a unicorn. No such company exists. And no such products exist.
Thus comes the part where we have to be creative to make that work which the customer insists he needs with things our managers insist can do the job. And whenever shit goes wrong, we need to be creative because putting yourself inside a complex system to find out what went wrong by the rules of that particular system is a VERY creative endeavor.
I have started laughing at interviewers when they started listing all the "perks" they offer. My usual question is "How does your company make sure it gets out of the way of me getting my job done?".
That plus hours and salary is ALL I care about.
Re:Redundant managers pretending to be needed. (Score:4, Insightful)
IT can be a bit like architecture (but see my sig): There is a highly creative part where an architect plans a building to meet the varying needs of its users and its surroundings, and there is another more structured part where he thinks about material strength, depth of foundations, ducting and cabling and so on. Those two aspects of the work cannot be seen in isolation but are intertwined, and in IT it is no different. That's why the ever continuing compartimentalization and hyper-specialisation in IT are a bad thing, IMHO.
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Absolutely correct. Of course parts of IT are structured and straight forward. The problem is the way the two aspects are intertwined BREAKS you when you give IT staff either too much freedom or too little.
Only too much freedom seems to be a rather seldom problem compared to too little.
Re: Redundant managers pretending to be needed. (Score:2)
If you think agile is a problem, you probably ran into the loony bin that thinks agile means replacing the name of project leader with product owner. Yeah, bad stuff happens in those cases.
I mean, I get that there are complete lunatics doing ""agile"" but you really don't want to judge a good practice by the worst implementation of it. Otherwise you'll never improve anything.
Agile is all about delegating authority to the lowest possible level, and short development cycles. If you cannot handle that, the pro
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If you think agile is a problem, you probably ran into the loony bin that thinks agile means replacing the name of project leader with product owner.
The problem results from the fact that that agile doesn't fit every kind and type of work. It just doesn't. I'm in one of those fields and agile doesn't really make sense for us. Yet they're trying to force us into the Agile Mold and make us Agile even if it kills us.
I know people would love it to and will insist to their dying breath that it can and will, but it doesn't.
When agile is imposed on a non-agile kind of work, only bad shit happens after that. Some people do work that doesn't require a Standup me
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"How does your company make sure it gets out of the way of me getting my job done?"
Kind of funny, but in a way you've inadvertently defined 'happiness' in my mind.
There are many possible ways to define happy, and what makes us happy...and one that really resonates with me is essentially to 'not be interrupted'. I know that makes me happy personally. Basically as you put it: to get shit done.
And then as you mentioned, layer on hours (ideally fewer work hours, so I can have more uninterrupted personal time w
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Thanks, I'll have a look at it although I'm really hoping "Vegan Cyclist" ist means as a joke otherwise I'll have to go and rethink my biases :D.
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Yup, I'm vegan and make bikes go fairly fast, sorry to spoil your bias!! ^.^
Ya, but ... (Score:3, Interesting)
workers would prefer to have continued remote work options and would sacrifice $30,000 in raises to keep them.
It can actually cost a company less to have you work from home -- not having to maintain an office/cubicle space for you, etc... Unless they're maintaining it anyway.
desks in the overly air-conditioned offices
I can confirm this where one has a desk/cubicle in a more common area, less so if one has their own office.
"Putting in long hours at the office is often conflated with a strong work ethic and more productivity, though it may not be indicative of either," ...
I've worked in offices and from home (more of the former than latter) and have been more productive in each setting in different ways, especially as a software engineer. As a Unix system administrator (for larger systems), usually more productive actually in the office.
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People who have to be there a fixed number of hours per week have to fill that time with something or else they look like they are not working. Pointless meetings, manual execution of tasks better automated, reserving of key information so that everyone else needs to come to you for help, organizing social activities, participation in worthless corporate initiatives are all ways people with too little real work to do go about
Useless managers (Score:1)
If the higher ups were actually paying attention, they'd have fired the thousands of useless managers who have proven they're not worth keeping around. How many millions of dollars in salary did companies waste during this pandemic on parasitic egomaniacs that did nothing but whine about employees not coming to the office and hold pointless Zoom meetings, desperately grasping for ways to look busy while the company chugged along with people working from home? Cut these fucks loose and let them find work doi
Importance of water cooler chats (Score:3)
Re:Importance of water cooler chats (Score:5, Insightful)
Water cooler chats are indeed great. What's not so great is, when you are deep in your construction of a model of the problem, someone wanders by and says "Heeeey, how's it going" ... and your model crumbles to dust. ... OMG)
I've been working from home for years, and I find it productive, if a little lonely.
(And don't get me started on Agile
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Working from home does not mean you cannot have these kinds of serendipitous interactions. It just changes who you are having them with.
Jim from accounting may be filled with fascinating anecdotes, but so is Margret from the deli down the street from your house, or Juan who just moved in next door. It takes a bit more effort, since at work there is a presumption of "we are all on the same team", but if you think about it, the same applies for your neighbors. You are all in the same community, dealing
Re: Importance of water cooler chats (Score:5, Insightful)
Very much agree. In fact it was a major driver for me to get back to the office. I think this has a lot to do with the office culture that is fostered. I work for a small scientific research company that is highly collaborative, from engineers all the way up to the CEO. Things like having lunch together or getting a cup of coffee are important opportunities to discuss ideas in low-stress situations. We have scheduled meetings as well, which are productive, but there's a different sort of creativity that comes out when discussing something on a whim over lunch.
We have some people in the company who have opted to continue working from home after we fully reopened (for now), but it's a small minority of employees.
In terms of perks, I don't care much for free swag but I certainly appreciate having occasional company-sponsored parties. These haven't been aimed at keeping people in the building so much as keeping a positive working environment for those in the office. Of course I can't speak for other companies' motivations for these perks.
Re: Importance of water cooler chats (Score:2)
Its certainly a benefit to my employer, no doubt. But I and most scientists in the company actually enjoy what we do. We want to talk more about it, we want to collaborate, because we like doing science. When we can trade ideas in an informal, creative way, it's all that much more enjoyable. So yeah, we do benefit from it. Of course there's a limit, and sometimes we do want quiet lunches or to leave work at work, but it's great to have a work culture that enables these interactions.
We spent almost two years
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Staff turnover and hybrid working (Score:3)
In my area (support) we're seeing more people jumping ship this year. Spring is traditionally when we see the most turnover, but this one is going to be interesting.
My best guess is that while Covid was affecting the economy people would rather be in a nice safe job than taking their chances in a new role which could disappear without warning. In addition companies were more cautious about hiring because they didn't know how Covid would affect their revenue streams. So we've had a couple of years with very low turnover, and now everyone's looking for change. There's only so much we can do to manage this.
My personal view is that informal feedback from the people you work with is an important part of building a team. It is not the same as the 'enforced' feedback from managers and it gives people a better gauge of how they are doing on a day-to-day basis. This doesn't happen on Zoom calls or in e-mails so there is still a significant benefit to meeting the rest of the team on a regular basis. It's an important part of what makes people feel they belong, and hopefully will make good people more likely to stay.
I'm hoping that we will implement a hybrid work pattern with each group having one mandatory day in the office (Tues, Weds or Thurs) and two optional days either side. That would give the maximum benefit in terms of people seeing their immediate colleagues, with the minimum lifestyle disruption for those who have adapted well to working from home. Some people will do all three days, some will just do the mandatory one, but I think this offers us the best compromise between office based and w@h.
Just my thoughts,
Keith.
P.S. I'm in the UK, this may not apply in America
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Sorry, forgot to mention that in most cases office perks are a distraction from the business of finding, employing and retaining the right people. It's the people who make the working environment, not the toys.
Re: Staff turnover and hybrid working (Score:2)
My personal view is that informal feedback from the people you work with is an important part of building a team. It is not the same as the 'enforced' feedback from managers and it gives people a better gauge of how they are doing on a day-to-day basis. This doesn't happen on Zoom calls or in e-mails so there is still a significant benefit to meeting the rest of the team on a regular basis. It's an important part of what makes people feel they belong, and hopefully will make good people more likely to stay.
This is true, but there's no reason why this can't be done remotely. Actually, there is one: namely management imposing an artificial barrier along a power gradient, i.e. "me here, general" and "you there in the ranks, foot soldier" style of management.
But that's nothing that holds a manager back from descending into "lower ranks" and having a clear idea of the real-world everyday shop problems and the solutions the team attempts. And when they do, they can use the same mechanism the team does: remote stan
The TV show has a nice trailer (Score:3)
Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
"Putting in long hours at the office is often conflated with a strong work ethic and more productivity, though it may not be indicative of either," adds Spiers.
All indications from the reduced work-week studies would indicate that productivity plunges after around the 7th hour in any given working day and that reducing the working week to somewhere in the 32-35 hour range would be better. (No, reducing further won't help. The relationship isn't linear. Net productive work strictly exceeds zero up to about that point, but that's when it drops to below zero. In other words, work after hour 7 will cost the company more than the company will gain from it.)
Since reducing work to this sort of range would increase profits, there's no reason why companies should not be required to pay the same or more per week even though the hours worked would be less, so there's no reason why employees should lose out or suffer financially.
However, it would mean that people would have to finally kick the obsession with working harder/longer. And, since the work has to get done in the fewer hours available, it would also mean managers would have to kick the habit of holding superfluous or excessively long meetings. Communication slows work down and meetings actually reduce intelligence as well as burn hours, so it would need to move much more to being as-needed rather than for-show.
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Scientific studies of worker productivity have been turning up that little fact since at least WWII. People who run businesses aren't (always) stupid, they know it just as well as you do. The logical conclusion is that having as many people at work as much as possible isn't about productivity.
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I suspect you're right.
sorry (Score:3)
...maybe I'm entirely off-meme but my office is more productive in the office. They just are. Whether it's focus, connection speed, ability to occasionally interact...we just are.
I'm vastly more productive at the office than home, which is why I go in every day, and have throughout covid. I don't make them come in and probably wouldn't if I could, but I can't stop recognizing that there is CLEARLY an impairment of their productivity from when we were all in the office.
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I love being home but I need regimen and scheduling in my life. I like the rituals and routines around getting ready for work and coming home is an event to look forward to.
It helps that my office is quiet, especially now with people still WFH. But I have always found that I get more work done while in the office than when I am at home.
Ditto. (Score:2)
I would like to return to work in the office.
Unfortunately, I took a position with a company that is headquartered 1,315 km away from my home. I am WFH indefinitely.
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Not to mention, it helps me (with myself) set BOUNDARIES on work.
I'm a business founder and manager. Honestly, I have crap I COULD BE DOING every waking hour. For my sanity, and for my family (particularly when my kids were younger) I have to do what I can to prevent myself from getting dragged into things that can wait.
I can't just 'turn off'. It's a small business, which means if the alarm goes off, or the server dies, or something...the buck stops with me. Ultimately I am the one who has to deal with
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I love being home and I have all the regimen and scheduling I want.
And for me personally, I *definitely* get more work done from home than in an office.
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The thing about what you're saying is that it is objectively not true. So...
Commuting (Score:2)
No that won't work they said.
Flashback to 2020, please install the office phones in your house to wfh. Worked great, I actually worked harder at home then. Busted ass actually...!
LOL "Black knowledge worker" (Score:4, Insightful)
The same study found that left-handed people were -0.5% less unlikely to not be unhappy with not going back to the office, while Capricorns see that reluctance as a chance to get ahead of others.
Seriously though, the obsession with race is so bizarre... to always see the world through a racial lens *seems* like the very thing that would encourage racism, no? The fact that the author felt it important to call out black people's feelings specifically is either assuming or demanding that one's skin color be relevant to the question. What a way to live.
Not everything is a zero sum game (Score:2)
Many office perks cost less to the company than a pay raise that would help an employee to an equal degree. Free cafes just cut down time wasted at cash register without altering the fact that part of my pay goes towards food either way. Basketball courts and gym classes eliminate commute / organizing overhead that I would need to get exercise elsewhere. True that a some of the benefits are more helpful to young singles who still like to play with toys. But that's a significant part of tech workforce and sa
The perks were fun... (Score:2)
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Bingo.
Same here. Great office, nice people, free food and parties and perks and I'm gonna say no thank you- it's not worth the commute.
Besides, I have a great office at home, and the best part is that it's at home.
Perception of work (Score:2)
I am rabidly against going in to the office for many reasons, all of which are common. Commute probably being the biggest one for me. I'm middle management.
Trying to see things from a senior management perspective, I think one of the problems is that they see "work" as being in meetings all day. Their jobs are less about focusing on tasks and producing output, and more on talking and making decisions. I think a lot of senior managers have forgotten that a lot of the company's business gets done by peopl
Lol, really? (Score:2)
"Putting in long hours at the office is often conflated with a strong work ethic"
Ha ha yeah fuck that shit.
"But among executives and managers, there's still a strong perception that in-person work is the only real work"
Ha ha yeah fuck them too.