Three-course dinners, access to wellness centres, even free dry-cleaning – for years the goodies that came with a job in the elite tech sector were more than mere accessories – they symbolised your membership of an exclusive club.
Now, as some companies begin what the Wall Street Journal has called the perk-cession, is it time for a conversation about what office workers really want from their jobs in a post-Covid world?
First, the background: amid rising interest rates and recessionary pressures, even towering tech companies are starting to face harsh new realities. “Our management theme for 2023 is the year of efficiency, and we’re focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organisation,” said Mark Zuckerberg, keen to signal to Meta’s investors last month that the party, as it were, was over.
His company’s share price fell by more than 60% last year. In November, Meta announced that 11,000 jobs would go – about 13% of its workforce. Now the boss wanted to be clear. Costs would be cut. Realism was in the air. And Wall Street responded positively, pushing the share price almost a fifth higher when this “year of efficiency” was declared. (Zuckerberg meant what he said: on Tuesday, he announced a further 10,000 jobs would go.)
In truth, the belt-tightening at Meta began a year ago, when some of the famous on-site perks at its Manhattan “campus” were cut. It was goodbye to the free laundry and dry-cleaning. And the gratis evening meal started being served later in the day, more than half an hour after the last free bus ride back into midtown had left. At the headquarters of Salesforce, a customer relationship management company in San Francisco, the speciality coffee baristas have gone. In the same city, regime change at Twitter brought in some notoriously unpleasant (“hardcore”) working practices.
Some managers might object that if people are no longer coming into the office anyway, why should there still be office perks? That is a lot of wasted free food, as the new Twitter owner, Elon Musk, complained. “There are more people preparing breakfast than eating breakfast. They don’t even bother serving dinner, because there is no one in the building,” he claimed on Twitter.
This continuing tussle, about where and when and how we work, is an enduring symptom of the post-Covid economy. There was a thought, when lockdowns came to an end, that free food and other perks might help lure people back in. But any temporary pickup in attendance, and relief at making human contact again, was often quite short-lived. People had got used to the new, work-from-anywhere flexibility, and they liked it. City centres are still quieter, especially on Mondays and Fridays.
Edgar Schein, the great organisational theorist, who died in January at the age of 94, could have told you that the mere visible “artefacts” of office life – furniture, dress code, free croissants – do not necessarily tell you a great deal about the underlying values and assumptions which help to shape the culture of an organisation.
It is better to have employee benefits that are truly valued by employees. Earlier this year, Wired magazine reported a Glassdoor analysis of 70,000 comments posted by tech workers. Between 2019 and 2022, mentions of workplace benefits such as gym membership or free food reduced by half. Effective hybrid working arrangements seem to be more important.
The real challenge here, as usual, is for managers themselves. What sort of work environment are you creating? If you were a twenty- or thirtysomething employee, paying high rent, still dealing with a student loan and having to travel in for an hour or more to reach the sacred office, would you really bother leaving the flat if you could do the job from home? It will take more than a free croissant to get people to show up.
Managing talented people was already a challenge. But in a hybrid world greater skill and sensitivity will be needed to make sure everyone can do their best work. Extrinsic motivators – “carrots” – will not do. The organisational anthropologist John Curran suggests it might be necessary to “wipe the slate clean”, get rid of ultimately meaningless perks and concentrate instead on our working relationships and the workplace culture we build together. Management just got a bit harder.
Perks probably will survive, in some limited form. But we will know we are heading for tougher and meaner times if we start getting pep talks from the boss like the one given by a character called Blake, played by Alec Baldwin, in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross.
“We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest,” he tells his team of real estate salesmen. “As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado … Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”
Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre
