NEW YORK (Bloomberg) - To boost its bottom line, Sprint
decided last week to end the era of free office snacks
for its employees. The move represents a tiny fraction of the
struggling telecom's effort to cutUS$2.5 billion from its total
operating expenses.
Axing the free food will shave US$600,000 from the budget. But
at what cost?
"They would never have given the snacks to begin with if they
didn't think it was helping boost productivity somehow,"
said Mr Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at Glassdoor,
the job- review website.
Organisations eager to save money tend to get creative,
and gratis office treats can seem like just the kind of
frivolous expense a company entering a phase of austerity should
reconsider.
To curb expenses, for instance, Kraft earlier this summer yanked
its free cheese sticks and Jell-O cups. But the economic case for
offering free snacks outweighs the relatively puny savings-and once
a workplace gets hooked on snacks, it can't really go
back.
Only 22 per cent of offices provide free snacks and beverages,
according to the Society for Human Resource Management's 2015
Employee Benefits Survey.
(Bloomberg LP is counted among the free-food employers-there's an
ample snack pantry here stocked with everything from fresh fruit
and granola bars to potato chips.)
In the majority of the working world, employees have to fend for
themselves.
From the most cynical point of view, however, this isn't just a
case of corporate largesse.
Snacks keep workers in the office working instead of out foraging
for sustenance during working hours.
A 2011 study by Staples found that half of all workers left
the office to get snacks at least once a day, with some people
making as many as five trips to get their munchie fix.
Snack runs account for 2.4 billion hours in lost productivity in
the US, according to the study.
It should be noted, of course, that Staples and your boss
have a shared interest in keeping more people in the office.
"(If) people had food there, they are likely to stay longer-you
have higher productivity," said Mr Ken Oehler of Aon Hewitt,
an human resources consulting firm that, among other things,
specialises in employee engagement policies.
The cost of shedding free snacks goes beyond lost productivity. An
office that once had snacks puts itself at risk by eliminating the
perk.
"These small perks, they may be small in dollar amount, but they
can be highly symbolic," said Mr Chamberlain. "They have this image
as a gift; pulling it away can have a psychological effect that far
outstrips the dollar amount."
Snacks, like many perks, exist to boost "employee engagement", HR
jargon for an employee's emotional investment in their
job.
Many studies have linked high engagement with bottom-line success,
finding that employees work best when they care about their job and
their employer.
A 2012 Towers Watson study found work environments that
promote the physical, emotional, and social well-being of
employees at the highest level had much higher one-year operating
margins than those without engagement policies of any
kind.
Employees accustomed to the perk can feel burned if it's taken
away.
At one Aon Hewitt client, for example, taking away free lunch
"greatly demotivated the staff", according to Mr Oehler.
At another company, Aon Hewitt found that completely taking away
free food would have caused such a big deterioration in
engagement that the cost savings couldn't be justified.
"Even though it might not be a lot of money," Mr Oehler said, "the
question is, are you getting the ROI (return on investment) on
snacks?"
Cutting something so visible can send a loud, shrill signal to
employees. "There's an old saying where they say the goal is to
pluck the feathers from the bird with the least amount of
squawking," said Mr Chamberlain.
The less visible the cuts, the better-even if it means taking money
out employee pockets.
"Changes to contributions to employee retirement plans," he
suggested as a less disruptive cut than emptying the snack
larder. "These are highly obscure from a worker standpoint."
You know what's not obscure? The daily hunger pangs that remind
snackless employees of what they once had.
ST