Pizza Party phenomena

[imJonWain]

Is rewarding adults/people over the age of xx common elsewhere in the world or is this strictly an American thing?




Also George Bush gave his unpaid SS guards a pizza party which I find really funny.

[BetterOffShred]

I joke about this all the time. It's a real thing.. apparently a strange transformation happens to the brain once middle management is achieved and all forms of recognition for task well done, or exceeded commitment to ones post devolve into trips to Rat Pizza Casino or a 10 minute celebration in the conference room with punch and cake.

Give me money bitches. I don't need the foam slingshot anymore.

[Ugly Nora]

..

[BetterOffShred]

If people need to be told employees want money..

Our company has some weird bullshit pay grade metric with a graphed line and 3 bands of pay per grade for engineers.. and I always ask where I'm at on the graph. And then I ask how I get to a higher band.

I'll get a flatbill hat with dollar signs on it and wear a big gold dollar sign chain in case my message is to cryptic otherwise

I mean I like pizza, but it doesn't pay my student loans or child support

[repoman]

Also George Bush gave his unpaid SS guards a pizza party which I find really funny.

Billionaire gives federal employees that make close to $200k a year+insane benefits/pension (and back pay) three boxes of pizza in propaganda photo about how bad government shutdown is.

US in a nutshell?

[Blackened Soul]

As a hiring manager, one question I always ask during the interview is "what is the best way to motivate you"? People usually say something along the lines of they just want a "thanks, good job" type of recognition. No one ever says they want money.

In summary, if the best way to motivate you is money, then you should tell me that. Stop lying in your interview.

Have you even been dropped on your head?

[Kacey Y]

Right around the time I was seeing these all over the place online, my spouse was outside delivering mail in subzero temperatures and high winds...and her manager bought them all pizza.

[UglyCasanova]

I thought it would be a thread about pizza and now I'm disappointed, so I guess fuck you ungrateful bastard or something.

[DrMabuse]

So much of the modern workforce in corporate America is contractors. The companies often see contractors as roughly equivalent to Morlocks, a subhuman labor force to be exploited until they quit or die. As an employee who manages a bunch of contractors, sometimes I can get food brought in (pizza or Mexican or Indian) when they have to work through dinnertime. I've also chipped in out of pocket to feed the team. It isn't a bonus, just a token thank you. "Sorry you had to work a 14 hour shift, this might be a better option than sitting at your desk eating Jerky because you couldn't go home or go out to grab some dinner."

I remember when bosses would take the team out for happy hour and pick up the tab. Bringing in pizza is the modern socially acceptable version.

[Gone Fission]

Middle-managing in an office where salaries are set by statute far below market for given qualifications and the workers are overeducated, overworked, and living in a damned expensive city, sometimes all that you have in your power is to engineer minor improvements in the working environment. Including buying food for employees out of your own meager pay. So trust me, I get the cynicism of the meme in the OP, but sometimes doing anything else is out of reach.

[D.o.S.]

So much of the modern workforce in corporate America is contractors. The companies often see contractors as roughly equivalent to Morlocks, a subhuman labor force to be exploited until they quit or die. As an employee who manages a bunch of contractors, sometimes I can get food brought in (pizza or Mexican or Indian) when they have to work through dinnertime. I've also chipped in out of pocket to feed the team. It isn't a bonus, just a token thank you. "Sorry you had to work a 14 hour shift, this might be a better option than sitting at your desk eating Jerky because you couldn't go home or go out to grab some dinner."

I remember when bosses would take the team out for happy hour and pick up the tab. Bringing in pizza is the modern socially acceptable version.

Contractors and freelancers are much easier to hire and fire than proper employees, even in the US where the worker protections are pretty non-existent in most sectors. The problem, even with gigs that can be obtained through contracting and freelancing, is that there are other companies that are leveraging people who would do it less (queue jokes about exposure bucks) and AI mechanisms who will do "it" for free with a minimal amount of oversight. It's not just *Call Centres* in *India* or *small children stiching clothes* in *Bangladesh* anymore, now it's programs that pump out novels of dynamically generated content on demand and machines that can provide "better"(read: faster and cheaper) legal advisory decision weighing and things like that.

So in a world that is turning more and more into a service economy in the face of automation, automation is coming to the services sector... just like it did for manufacturing.

[Achtane]

It happened to me today, my dudes.
I'm working 12 hour days at a factory. We just switched over from 8 hour shifts a month ago. It's, of course, excruciatingly repetitive by nature, but the thing I was doing today was straight assembly line style shit. 12 hours of the same 30-second series of motions. My god.

By hour 8 I was losing my grip on sanity. I couldn't keep from doing a thousand-yard-stare. I broke out in a cold sweat and felt like jumping out of my skin. No longer did I have any songs to recite, books or movies to remember. No more thoughts to pass the time with. Only nausea and tendonitis.

Then, on our next break, the shift lead presented us with surprise food. And I felt like a human being again. For like an hour anyway.

...oh man I gotta get out of there.

[BetterOffShred]

There it is. Man I'm sorry that went down for you. I mean like I said above I like pizza, but where you're at it probably doesn't help with the 12 hour shifts.

Is the pizza party actually an apology from management that would be otherwise decent, but we all have our masters.. ?

[JonnyAngle]

I don't think money motivates people. If anything it seems to make them work less hard.

I find that people respond better to politeness, positive encouragement and not talking down to them.

[PeteeBee]

I read a book years ago when I started managing people called Carrots and Sticks Don't Work. The book was pretty good, but everything you need to know is in the title. Punishments and prizes don't build great teams/workforces. You need to foster some sense of pride/community/genuine care.

I never threw any pizza parties simply because we had so many allergies and diets, it seemed like too much work to accomodate everyone