I respectfully would swap "Need: Beer on Fridays" with "Don't Need: Aeron chairs." If my back is killing me because of crappy chairs, no amount of beer is going to stop me from finding a new job.
Agreed. If I want to encourage somebody to sit in a chair for 8-12 hours a day, it's reasonable for me to spend $1k on that chair.
Even if I said the chairs were getting replaced every three years, it'd be a pittance. The comfort would need to get me an average of $1 of additional productivity, per employee, per day, to pay for themselves.
If they save a few people back problems, they're more likely to get me, far, FAR more than that.
agreed. if company provides an office, providing great chairs goes a long way to increasing health and morale, and it's a company asset that can be reused by various employees, etc. beer is relatively cheap, a consumable, not an asset, and adults expect to buy beer on their own dime and time, if at all. chairs are a business tool, beer is not. do you need Aerons at launch? no. but that's a more substantive benefit for your employees that beer.
If I like the people I am working around then most of that stuff is nice but not necessary, except maybe for the back and the chair thing. I would add a quick commute in the first list and a work at home option.
Why do you think that Microsoft products are necessary to sell to large businesses? There might not be any large businesses that don't have any Microsoft products, but I've seen several successful sales to very large business by small companies without Microsoft products.
I thought so, too; I work at a web design / marketing company, where I assumed we could use whatever we wanted as long as the site worked in IE and FF. But our clients send site copy revisions in Word, and screenshots of bugs in Powerpoint, and they want hour estimates in Excel.
I tried using OpenOffice for about a week, but having 99% of MS Office left me 1% short.
One of my old startups in 2003, we made one of music system from spare parts and one guy wrote an web base controlling daemon for it. Then we contributed our collection of CDs. We can use web interface to control the system and up/down or veto the music. And we also have an anthem around 4pm. (The whole Coffin for Head of State by Fela Kuti). It becomes like a ritual.
It creates a bond among people because we know what music that each of us likes. We did not play pop charts or technos, but more like Jazz, Punk, Art Rock and any fun but not mainstream popular songs.
We have almost 128 GBs of mp3 after 3 years. That was one heck of good memory than listening through headphone.
You need a license for workplace music in the UK, also copying a CD for any reason is illegal over here, we don't have a [fair use] backup facility in our legislation.
I work out of a co-working space here in Boston that has Airtunes hooked up. I like it. Sometimes people are on the phone or playing something I don't particularly like so I throw on headphones. Other times it's nice to remove myself from the headphone bubble and interact with the world a bit more. I'm pretty much guaranteed to miss out on any interesting conversations when wearing headphones.
What legal jurisdiction requires phone service for all employees? And which labor laws require that there be a set time of arrival in the morning? (I can understand laws requiring a documented number of hours worked per week, of course.)
Mountain View requires phone systems to pass fire inspection in office buildings. Employees generally need a system by which to contact emergency services.
Labor laws in some jurisdictions cover employee expectations by the employer. If the employer is shown to have arbitrary expectations of their employees (like "soft hours" or flexible work schedules), those expectations need to be somewhere in writing or you can get in big trouble. I've heard of engineering firms being totally screwed (into bankruptcy) by overzealous labor law enforcement when it was discovered that they, for example, had policies like "work whenever and however you want, as long as you get your job done."
i roughly agreed except certain items like the beer and music sound juvenile and clearly are not needed for a startup. i would add something like oh say, call me crazy, but I dunno a business model, and understanding how long your runway is. and while you don't need a formal vacation policy, i'd say that you need some understanding of who contributes what, roughly how much, and when. That's way more important than "sunny offices", windows that open, etc.
