“Anti-perks”: what our startup doesn't want in our office
blog.even.com> But as we grow in size, we also plan to grow in the diversity of our perspectives and backgrounds — which is even more reason not to add a bunch of extraneous or overly specific perks. Especially as our team diversifies, we can’t (and shouldn’t) strive to have a one-size-fits-all office or benefits package.
This is a great point about bringing in diverse hires. If you optimize your perks to appeal to you, then you're likely to bring in people with the same interests as you, and there are often strong correlations between interests and demographics. I would certainly rather work somewhere with neutral-seeming perks than a place where everyone was bonding over a bunch of perks I couldn't care less about.
One of my friends is in an office environment where they play Quake III for an hour a day. This perk is actually a mandatory bonding session. I love Quake III, but he doesn't, and he feels like it's both a waste of time and a reinforcement of a specific type of company culture that he doesn't really relate to. He doesn't really mind it, but he has specifically listed it as one of the reasons he is considering finding another job.
Having a more typically "professional" office setting, combined with some more flexible perks (like flex funds for wellness), strikes me as a good way to avoid filtering people out and inadvertently selecting for an overly specific company culture.
In particular, if you're worried that hackers who fall outside of the white/male/straight/cis gendered hacker stereotype are not coming to your company in sufficient numbers, you want to avoid sending implicit signals that your company is only into things that seem to appeal to this stereotype. Perks are one source of those implicit signals.
> One of my friends is in an office environment where they play Quake III for an hour a day. This perk is actually a mandatory bonding session
I've been a gamer for most of my life, but this would horrify me as a perk as it's completely exclusionary (which backs up your point)
Imagine being the employee that doesn't play games, it's like mandatory doing office sports
"Imagine being the employee that doesn't play games..."
Even worse, imagine being the employee who is a veteran with PTSD, or the employee who was a refugee from a war zone like Bosnia who associates the sound of gunfire with their parents being killed.
Yeah, exactly. And gaming in particular definitely has a lot of the same demographic skewing that SV is trying to move past, so things like this don't help with those efforts.
> Having a more typically "professional" office setting, combined with some more flexible perks (like flex funds for wellness), strikes me as a good way to avoid filtering people out and inadvertently selecting for an overly specific company culture.
This is an extraordinarily good insight.
> I love Quake III, but he doesn't, and he feels like it's both a waste of time and a reinforcement of a specific type of company culture that he doesn't really relate to.
Even if I did love Quake III proper (hey I am prone to OpenArena from time to time :)) I could not imagine anything that would force me to hate any given thing more than doing it as part of Mandatory Fun Time.
The one "perk" I think is uncommon but should be standard is nap rooms.
There are just so many people who are happier, healthier, and do better work with a brief nap during the day. Unless you are walking distance from work, splitting your workday like that is infeasible without an office culture that supports it.
And consequently unlike most perks, it can't be offset by a simple salary increase.
The one "perk" I think is uncommon but should be standard is nap rooms.
Or just respect for sleep (and other forms of tuning out), on- or offsite, period.
Including such forms as "I came in at 11 today, because there were no meetings scheduled. And for some reason my body wanted me to stay under until 9 or so this morning, instead of the usual 7-730a, and to chill for a bit and rise gently instead of jumping out of bed. So that's what I did. Being as this is clearly the way our species was designed to operate, if we are to achieve long-term optimal performance."
"But then again, it's not like I have to explain that to you. We're all adults here, so as long as work gets done no one thinks twice about, or even stops to notice really, what time people come in in the morning."
Offices (and at least one person with a hammock in their office) would negate that as a perk.
Offices also diminish the impact of bringing a dog/cat/chinchilla to work and the need for TV rooms (if you don't have everyone looking over your shoulder, watching netflix on during break from your computer isn't an issue)
Though offices also run contrary to "Start up" being some hyper growth focused company, if you plan on doubling the head count every year offices are completely unfeasible.
Don't want dogs or cats in the office. Especially cats with all this stuff coming out about toxoplasmosis.
Toxoplasmosis has been linked to anger Issues with humans- so to keep Sales aggressive- release the tiger.
When they say aggresize sales, last thing they mean is angry dude smashing phone in the middle of discussion with potential client.
Just saying, aggressivity is not same as aggressively.
In the USA at least I think the negative social stigma associated with sleeping anywhere near your place of work has a lot to do with this. Obviously some places do have them; it just seems that it’s been one of the more difficult cultural beliefs to break free from when it comes to widespread adoption.
That can be partially solved by putting them in slightly out of the way locations. The stigma is really against being seen sleeping at work, not necessarily taking naps.
Of course, this is not ideal, but it's a baby step in the right direction.
When I worked briefly in Switzerland during college, I remember being really impressed with how many workers would retreat to a lawn chair outside during lunch and take a nap for an hour or so. It seemed perfectly normal and accepted. And this was at a behemoth of a bank, not a tiny startup. Seems unimaginable in a comparatively sized business in the US.
My WeWork offers plenty of de facto nap spaces (they're labeled as "phone booths"). the key is to have company culture support wandering away from your desk for 30 minutes during the day (a 15 minute nap takes me 30 minutes).
Thank you for not allowing pets. I both dislike and am allergic to dogs, and it annoys me when people think it's no big deal to bring their dog into the office. This is not your home, this is a professional workspace that we all share.
Tangentially unrelated, with all the kids with strong peanut alergies, what's going to happen in 10 years--will offices ban peanuts and peanut based foods?
We informally had a dog policy at our old office, which was an offshoot location. I'd bring my dogs in, until we hired a woman who had grown up in an area of the world where wild dogs were a real problem, and was deathly afraid of them. My co-workers loved having them in the office, but where you work should provide an environment where everyone can do their best, and given dogs weren't germaine to our business, it was best they were left at home from that day forward.
I think that usually, peanut/other allergies are only dangerous if the person is eating peanuts, which that person can avoid (or other food provided for him/her if the office provides food).
If you're talking about a dog though, it is usually impossible for the person to avoid the dog.
> Tangentially unrelated, with all the kids with strong peanut alergies, what's going to happen in 10 years--will offices ban peanuts and peanut based foods?
Offices and other workplaces with sensitive individuals are already doing that.
I'm also very surprised by this "perk" that seems to be so widespread in the US. I sometimes feel like "dog people" can't internalize the fact that just because they like dogs, not everybody does! :)
Our office is "dog friendly", but we have some rooms where dogs are forbidden to make sure allergic employees have a space to go to. Still don't really like this policy.
That doesn't even make much sense, unless the dog-free rooms are on a different floor those with bad allergies will still suffer I imagine.
They're not. And yes, I agree. I don't see how it works TBH. I'm not allergic myself and I don't know who complained about dogs walking around so I can't ask them if they're still suffering.
Especially small yappy dogs.
I'm not sure I've ever had whiplash as extreme as the point of this article where I thought to myself, "Well finally, someone pushing back against the excesses of VC-funded culture" and the line "we will compensate our employees for a dog-sitter (via a flexible health and wellness stipend)."
A flex health and wellness stipend is a fairly regular perk of even large businesses, and it is usually this lax. Mine can be used for an Apple Watch, for instance (due to its heart rate monitor).
Actually, it could address an interesting issue depending on how it is implemented. If you gave team members a 'perks' stipend you could tax it appropriately, and you could have your employee spend it on the things that were important to them. Then create a way to scan your badge to access a perk and voila, custom perks.
No, I don't actually think it is workable, the two arguments that will pop up immediately are :
1) Just give me more money.
2) I don't want you to know which perks I use
I think you already reached the same conclusion, but employee salary already behaves the way you describe: it's taxable, and they spend it as they wish.
The nice thing about perks is that they come out as company expenses--- so they don't get hit by payroll taxes or personal income taxes. Which potentially means that you get to double money spent on perks.
You're right that it would be cool if we could customize it. Give people "perks cards", which come out of company expenses (takes advantage of the above avoiding-income-tax multiplier) and let them spend it on whatever.
There is history here that you may not be aware of, it is a constant battle between the IRS and companies. The IRS insists that companies 'break out' any such company provided services on a per employee basis and include the value of those services in the employee's W2 taxable income field.
Once a company reaches a size where the amount of tax revenue crosses some threshold, the IRS starts bugging you. Apple, Google, SGI, Sun, IBM, and Microsoft are all companies that I know of that have negotiated settlements of one form or another.
Oh huh, I wasn't actually aware of that, but it makes sense! So I guess the loopholes aren't really there to begin with...
I agree that it feels weird, but wouldn't this fund also help pay for a babysitter? It doesn't seem too unreasonable to consider your pet as a member of the family.
Unfortunately, sounds like they fail at the minimum criteria for a sane workweek. In particular: "our team tends to work long days".
Who cares about anti-perks or perks if you're expected to work crazy hours?
Sadly, there's no way around this for a new company. It's how the market works today, and competition is fierce.
I think the idea is to add another opportunity to stretch, go out, socialize, and talk about something other than work, which is probably beneficial when working hard problems.
No way around lost productivity, the possibly catastrophic cost of increased bad decisions and mistakes resulting from fatigue and sleep deprivation, and loss of key employees due to burnout?
There is a war around it — employers can hire enough people to the job and workers can refuse to work long hours.
A consistent more than 40 hour work week is a deal breaker for me. I’ll work 50-60 hours on a project if I know I’m spending 20 hours trying to ramp up on a new technology or I’m trying to do something that’s new to me, but that feels different than management expecting you to get 60+ hours of work done
Most in-office catered lunches are a lot more healthy than a burger or pizza.
I think the point was that just getting up and going somewhere is healthier than sitting in one place all day, regardless of what type of food you're eating.
But undoubtably, regularly walking to lunch and getting some fresh air is a great perk. It's one of my favorite perks of my current job.
Depends on the company I guess. The standard at my office is pizza because it is cheap.
I used to work for a company that would cater dinner for anyone who wanted to stay late (culturally it was encouraged to go home but some people liked starting at 2pm). While the options seemed healthy on paper (e.g. spaghetti, broccoli beef, etc), the food was full of preservatives and extremely low quality. It wasn't much better than going to McDonalds. I think it depends a lot on how much the company is willing to spend on the catered lunches/dinners.
> Our team tends to work long days, and if we don’t walk to lunch, we’ll likely be sitting in a chair for a minimum of eight hours a day.
Nice perk of working 8h+ per day! Love perks like these!
I like a lot of these. I especially connected with "going out for lunch" vs. "catered lunches". I totally get why companies prefer catered lunches, and am surprised more companies don't realize the benefits, but I really enjoy leaving the office for a bit and getting some sun.
That said, one thing I have an issue with is this: "“Mandatory fun” office events".
If we're talking a once-a-week thing, then yes, that's way over the top.
But if we're talking a company day out or something similar every half year or so, I think it's incredibly important. I think the bonding effect is good, but more importantly, if it's not coordinated, then there are people who will miss it. For one thing, for people married with children, going to a random "people in the office decided to go out today" is usually much harder than going to a "scheduled 2 months in advance mandatory event". For another thing, it is easy for this to devolve into some people bonding and everyone else not being part of it. So I think it is beneficial to have a once-in-a-few-months bonding experience.
(I also think lighter forms of this, like an in-office "happy hour" once a week, is a pretty good idea too).
I'm assuming blackout curtains are also an anti-perk? My eyes hurt from looking at the picture, I could never work there.
Aren't perks that are offered to everyone tax deductible and perks for individuals not tax deductible?
and isn't it cheaper for us to provide dog walking services/chef services/kegs etc to everyone, than each person access to their own individual dog walker, paid lunch and paid for bar tab?
Something that stuck out for me:
> "Don’t get me wrong — Even has plenty of perks. Our team is offered paid vacation time (with a minimum number of days off)"
Is paid vacation time really a perk? Is vacation time usually unpaid in the US or something? Or maybe the perk is the minimum number of days off?
In the US the employer is under NO obligation to provide vacation time, period. Paid, or otherwise.
I was under the impression there was a statutory amount, but it was ridiculously low. To have none at all is pretty damn terrifying.
From https://www.employmentlawhandbook.com/leave-laws/vacation-le...
"Federal law does not require employers provide employees with either paid or unpaid vacation leave. Both the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and the Department of Labor have left the matter of vacation leave to the States to develop applicable laws.
Vacation Leave and State Law
There are no States that require employers to provide employees with either paid or unpaid vacation leave. However, states vary considerably on the requirements placed on employers if they choose to provide vacation benefits. Vacation Leave Law Summaries"
It's a major perk in the US. Vacation time is basically reserved for management or C-Suite folks, especially if it's paid.
> is basically reserved for management or C-Suite folks
Oh comon, it's entirely expected in the white-collar world. The difference is it's not federally mandated.
I don't think this is completely correct, but maybe I've experienced life in a bubble.
Many people certainly do not get PTO, in particular retail workers and non salaried employees. I don't believe I have a single friend who is salaried and who does not receive some kind of PTO. For example, public school teachers get paid time off in addition to summer break (where they are generally not paid).
This is categorically false. While there are no federal requirements, and many hourly workers do not get paid time off, most salaried and professional workers do. It is extremely common for us workers to get paid time off.
False.
Heck, I even received a week's paid vacation as a crew chief (not even a manager) at a McDonalds when I was 17.
Wow unbelievable, I never knew that. For someone who works in EU this sounds ridiculous.
For many years, my dad was given 4 days off a year for both sick and vacation time. Any other time was unpaid. He changed jobs last year, and I haven't asked him if his new job is the same or not.
It is absolutely ridiculous.
It’s not true for white collar work. For the most part, salaried and even non salaried full time workers get at least 20 days of paid time off a year.
Nope, average is 10. And this is gross: "A remarkable 23 percent of Americans have no paid vacations and no paid holidays."
https://gusto.com/framework/health-benefits/paid-vacation-ti...
It's pretty much a standard perk for any tech company worth their salt.
The minimum number of days off is pretty much a BS perk too.
> The minimum number of days off is pretty much a BS perk too.
I wouldn't call it a perk, but it's in the interest of the business to help prevent burnout.
8+ hours of working per day pretty much guarantees a burnout for most people
I like the attitude on alcohol.
At least not during work hours, at a minimum.
I wonder if they allow employees to expense lunch on the town, as opposed to paying for catering. I believe Snap Inc. works with local eateries to provide free food for employees, e.g.
Why can't they just pay more? I feel like one of the primary things I want a salary for is meals.
I think this makes a lot of sense - that way people that want to bring their own food don't feel ripped off.
Payroll tax. And cutting perks is easier than cutting salaries.
Perks have the advantage of being pre-tax.
So if you get $10 worth of perk (assuming it's something you'd buy anyway), it only actually costs you somewhere between $5-8 depending on your tax bracket.
Why? That is, is there some specific social good that the authors of the tax code were intending to accomplish by allowing companies to pay for lunch for their employees pre-tax, or is this an unintended consequence ("loophole") of some other coherent goal?
It seems to me like there isn't any reason for a tax code to allow not paying taxes if the company is calling a transfer of money to the employee for the purpose of buying food as a "perk", and yet tax the same money if it's called a "salary".
Nothing that high minded. You are simply taxed on income. Money the company spends isn't personal income.
But that interpretation has ridiculously easy loopholes - why not just reduce my salary by $10K and give me a $10K company-managed Amazon budget for personal expenses? Why not just let the company book my personal vacation travel via payroll deduction? Why not have the company rent my apartment and sublet it to me? etc.
I'm coming at this from the position that the law must say, if you're giving a person access to a cash spending account that lets them buy things for themselves but not giving them the cash directly, that still counts as income. Is that true? If it's not true, why isn't everyone taking advantage of the loophole? If it is, why is lunch a special case?
Only some of the benefits are excluded from income, food and health insurance being the most popular. The rest have their value added to income and taxed accordingly.
So why doesn't every employer give me a food FSA or something? Pretty much everyone spends some of their salary on food....
Plus if they just pay you more, you can bring a packed lunch to work and save the money towards holidays / savings / gifts / financial independence / whatever.
Extremely surprised not to see "open-office" on the list. I guess they consider it a perk!
They say that they have moved away from a pure open office plan (thank goodness!):
> Based on learning that people needed room for more styles of work and levels of collaboration, we added private rooms, shared offices, and flex spaces to our existing open layout.
Yes, sounds more like someone wants save money or something than improving the life's of their employees.
1/10 would not work for.
I think the pet thing is more balanced than a straight up anti-perk, because in situations where everyone is happy with it, it can be very nice to have. But it's certainly not for everyone, and you don't want to make someone feel like they're the "spoiler" if everyone else is ok with it.
As someone with dog allergy issues, I appreciate this sentiment. I don't want to be 'that guy' (the spoiler as you call it) but dog dander is going to seriously hinder my ability to get any work done, with all the sneezing and itchy/watery eyes.
Who wants to be the wet blanket that complains that the dog is a problem for them?
If I were runnning a similar company I would try to find out if a balance could be struck with structured "pet days" and "no pet days" ... I wonder if even that would be too uncomfortable though, for people who really fear/despise pets.
It's not just "fear" or "despise" - if you're allergic to pets, you're mandating that some of your employees work from home on those days.
If you're okay with that, might as well let the pet owners work from home, no?
Just "those days" may well not be good enough. I have fairly bad cat allergies. I can feel it after just a few minutes in a room where a cat _was_.
Fear is a very real concern. I know someone so afraid of dogs that being forced to work near one could easily cause a panic attack.
I find that bringing your pet to work doesn't just impact the other employees but also the pet owner.
I love my dog, but tend not to bring her to the office unless I absolutely need to (maybe we're getting some work done at home or something). The dog loves it but my productivity tends to nosedive since I'm keeping an eye on her to make sure she's not pooping under someones desk or something!
Maybe a "Bring your dog to work" day once a year/quarter, but more frequent I feel just becomes problematic.
It very much depends on the pet for me. I love having pets that have a very relaxing vibe to them. It makes the place as a whole feel more relaxing. Those dogs that run around and have their play time at work are the worst.
It's a good list with a lot of sense. My one minor nit is that they don't stock soda because it's not healthy. Let people be themselves and make their own decisions: you should provide something to drink and it should be what the employees want, not necessarily what you want.
Given how unhealthy soda is for an average human being when consumed regularly, stocking soda is similar to stocking cigarettes. Not stocking this shows a greater level of awareness around wellness, and also doesn't exclude employees who choose to not consume it.
I think it's a great policy to not provide free poison to your employees, let them pay for that themselves.
I'm someone who has mostly worked for startups, but I just came off a stint working for IBM (Canada), and the difference in the "office culture" at IBM from the startups I had worked at kind of blew me away.
IBM's office culture was basically built around two ideas: 1. that everyone working on a team would be spread around the globe (not necessarily at first, but certainly as IBM had to send them around to do sales engineering.) And 2. that workflows should be designed to accommodate people with disabilities.
This led to a number of "features" that I will miss in any future startup:
• The offices have some "open-office"-like areas... but also cubicles, and individual closed offices, and meeting rooms. All of these—except for some of the cubicles—are flex-allocated. You just sit down at an empty one, and clean up after yourself when you go. IBM even has "work centres"—offices just for people (and entire teams) travelling, with no permanent staff other than ops+janitorial. This office design style resembles EC2 (far moreso than your average co-working space): you can "allocate" part of a floor to be a team's office on any given day, and that space will be some other team's office on some other day. This is just as much about the culture (you don't "stake your claim" to the space, any more than you would a library desk) as it is about the amenities.
• Everything is done online, mostly over text. (Yes, yes, Lotus Notes. But also, increasingly, Slack.) You don't have to come to the office; you can work at a coffee shop, or from home, or from any other IBM office/work centre. You just need to sign into the IBM VPN and you're good. Even weekly meetings are electronic (though often over voice- or video-conference rather than text.) You know who this is great for? People in a wheelchair. People with a sprained ankle. People with social anxiety. New parents, past their leave period, who still want to spend most of their time with their kids. People who don't speak English well but can type and read it just fine. A hundred more types of people, who SV never bothers to hire.
• There's a no-pets policy. There's a no-perfume policy. There's a no-music policy. There's probably a bunch more. The spirit of these isn't "no silliness"; it's "make allowances for people with sensory processing disorders, even if you aren't aware that anyone you know here has one, because it's their right not to tell you."
• IBM offices don't offer amenities like food (other than some meh coffee), and they usually aren't close to anything, rather being in an office park that with low land-values. If you're going to the office, you eat breakfast before you go, and you bring a lunch with you. You eat dinner after going home. Which, of course, means that everyone wants to go home at a reasonable hour, so that they'll still have time—and energy—to make and eat dinner. Going to the office is like taking a day-trip. You pack for it.
To sum up, IBM basically assumes that everyone working there is a responsible adult with a private life that is important to them, that is respected as private by others; and that, while at work, they'd like to get some freaking work done so that they can be done with it and go home.
If anyone has heard of a start-up that follows this philosophy, I'd love to work there. (Otherwise, I'm open to starting a chain of co-working spaces that operate like IBM's work-centres, and give all their member-startups a VPN Intranet and a PBX for voice-conferenced meetings.)
I like everything about it except no perfume policy. People during summer smell.
Then they should wash. Perfume + odour is even worse than one alone.
Pet-friendly offices: I’m sure having a pet visit the office once would be a treat, but every day quickly can become a burden on the team.
Disagree, given the observation that pets (provided they're well-behaved, are well-groomed etc) reduce stress and promote empathy. It's just a question of measure - somewhere between "once" and "every day" there are these notions of "once in a while" or "from time to time". Which I suspect would be optimal, for this particular indulgence.
I have been in environments where dogs are not well-disciplined and will pee on the floor and bark annoyingly while we're trying to focus. No thanks.
Hence the "well-behaved, well-groomed" constraint.
If you're in an office where dogs are peeing and barking (and no one knows what to do about it) - then clearly you have a people problem, not a dog problem.
Some people have allergies.
A very legitimate issue, of course. (I'm not saying there aren't solid arguments against pets - just that the original argument wasn't make those arguments).
"I’m sure having a pet visit the office once would be a treat, but every day quickly can become a burden on the team."
Would people who are burdened by an office dog please share your experiences?
We have a dog friendly office and it drives me crazy sometimes. One dog is fine but when you get them in pairs they like to play. And having a dog wrestling 4 feet away from you is distracting.
I like dogs and I will make it a point to befriend the ones in the office but at some point it becomes disruptive.
Yes, that's kind of the key. A single dog at the office is great.
A bunch of dogs turns the office into a dog park.
I love dogs, have two of em, wife is a key member of a dog rescue, and I loved bringing my dogs in the office. But no way do I want a bunch of dogs at the office.
One dog decided that he was in charge of figuring out if people were "allowed" to be in the office and that he should bark if they weren't. I wasn't on the list the first couple days and would literally get barked at if I walked across the office to get water.
I personally just hate/fear dogs after too many bad experiences growing up. Everybody looks at you as the burden or party pooper when you say you would prefer a dog free environment to work at.
Not me personally, but some people are allergic. I'm allergic enough to cats that if my employer forced me to work around them, I would just leave. Some people are that allergic to dogs.
A dog running around the open office can be very distracting.
I've worked at UK army bases where dogs are routinely brought on site. In some places the owners have to fit gates to their office doors to stop them randomly wandering around, and I've not seen dogs in open plan environments. In some places, in principle, the owners have to gain consent from others (those with allergies or nervousness). But I've not seen specific problems.
At least the cavalry types no longer ride their horses to work.
Allergies == burden
I don't like dogs, and don't think that animals belong in the work place. They smell and are distracting.
Are we supposed to know who Even is?
I feel this list greatly depends on the culture and employee composition.
this place sounds like a nightmare to work at. no drinking, anti dog policies, no thanks.
Imagine how normal work places feel like to people who don't drink, are introverts and don't like to be greeted by dogs all the time.
How do you mean normal? Outside of startup land, a pet policy and free booze at work is kind of unusual.
I mean normal as in normal silicon valley startup.
I wouldn't call an office with drinks and dogs normal, not in most parts of the country.
I can't tell if you're trolling / being sarcastic / something. If you're being serious, then I'm suddenly a lot more convinced that having no-drinks-at-the-office policy is a good recruiting technique (in the sense of making sure you recruit the right people).
It would sound pretty good to a recovering alcoholic with pet allergies.