It’s true that it’s not always about the money, but it’s probably never about a ping pong table
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.
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…
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.
Indeed.
It’s telling that “basic dignity” or “managers who aren’t dicks” didn’t make the list.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 implement fuck up.
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.
There is a bit of truth here. Toxic culture and out of touch management will make people walk as well.
Thing is, there might just be a wad of cash big enough to make me put up with that against my health interests.
Fuck ping pong tables though. No one left a company because they didn’t have enough fucking table sports. If you think they are then you are the problem. Exit interview your own fucking arse.
Around 2012 I had a interview with a recruiter, he asked me what kind of company you’re looking for, and I replied, one without a ping pong table, he laughed at me, I am an immigrant, left home when I was 19, so around 2008 went around in my country and EU, and already understood that whenever a company had a ping pong table it had a shitty culture, so by the time of that interview I already seen more than enough shitty companies, but I remember that interview in particular because the guy started making fun of me, laughing at me
11 years after, I wish I could speak with that recruiter to see if he understood that ping pong tables are low efforts solutions adopted by shitty-environment companies and if he would laugh at me again
One of the best bosses I ever had once told me that people will stay for the culture but leave for money. His philosophy was to try and ensure that money was not a factor in people’s decision, then build as good a culture as he could.
And to be clear, by making money not a factor, I mean he paid well.
I had a meeting years ago with my company’s CTO about my salary. He kicked off the meeting by saying “you care a lot more about what you make than I do” which prompted me to ask for 50% more than I had been planning to ask for. He agreed to it without argument. TBF he was a coke addict married to the daughter of the company’s owner and within six months he’d been divorced and fired, but I got to keep my salary.
- Buy arcade room
- Passively aggressively mention whenever someone uses the arcade room
- ???
- Profit.
“Mark, were you playing time crisis 3 in the arcade room again?”
“Ski safari, actually”
“You know that the big presentation is tomorrow right?”
“FUCK OFF DEBRA THIS IS MY PROCESS”
Notice how they’re always empty when they show them to you?
They don’t even give employees time to play them…
“Man, my job pays horribly and the benefits barely cover anything, but they have a ping-pong table so it’s honestly a tough call.”
I struggle to understand how someone could seriously write something like that question without a lack of self-awareness so dire that a walk to the kitchen would come with a near-death experience. It just can’t be real.
This is it right here!
Last time a job tried to hire me from my current position, it was all about the money, my company was willing to compete. I stayed with the company.
This time where I’m throwing applications like campaign pamphlets, I’m willing to take a cut in pay.
It is shocking how a year can have a company go to the shitter.
The flip side is if you can’t be bothered to set aside some money for a ping pong table, as well have the sense to first ask around whether people would rather have foosball, or a proper pizza oven, or whatever the fuck, your company culture probably also sucks. A place for recreation means that you respect recreation and extend enough trust to have employees self-manage their need for it.
…of course, setting up that place only to have it be a hunting ground for micromanagers preying on unsuspecting workers is not what I’m talking about. If noone ever uses those areas, worry.
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.
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
This is brilliant!
Tangentially related, I heard another about enough money:
When you already have enough money, do you really need 2x enough money?
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.
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.
There’s only been two reasons for me to quit a job: shitty pay and shitty people in charge.
Sounds like this company has both.
