I see this same pattern over and over with talking to people who are leaving a company. There's almost always that "wake up" moment: one singular item which pierces the veil. But it's rarely ever just that one item that causes people to leave, and that one item would probably be tolerated if there weren't other reasons. And the set of those reasons for any two people leaving are not likely to be the same.
So, given that:
* Leaving is actually an accumulation of these items,
* Individuals will have their own distinct list of such items,
* Individuals will have differing tolerance levels for waking up...
Is there actually any actionable information here other than: "Don't make unpopular decisions?" I mean, sure, in hindsight, on this particular and possibly unusual scenario, a bunch of people woke up with a singular item which had minor impact to the bottom line. Easy to look back and say, "Maybe that was a silly decision."
But an employer will always have to make decisions, and some individual will probably find that decision distasteful and add it to their list, and maybe that's finally the item that wakes them up... At what point do you just factor that into cost of making decisions and move on?
> Is there actually any actionable information here other than: "Don't make unpopular decisions?"
Make sure you actually do a cost-benefit analysis, even if it's just quickly in your head. Decisions like this are the result of seeing a metric and thinking about optimizing just that one metric. It's not easy to sum up costs and benefits of connected policies. And it can be very hard to a priori determine what the costs and benefits are. But when people come to you and complain about a new policy you should probably listen.
I just don't get that logic: saving $10,000/yr is important, but docking my benefits isn't a great way to do it.
If I have 1 soda per day, it's less than 1% of my salary, and I don't necessarily miss it for monetary reasons, but why would I see it as anything besides you slashing my salary/benefits package by a fraction of a percent? Any time your plan to save money is to slash my pay/benefits without warning or negotiation, it's a good sign that I should start looking for employment elsewhere.
It's also a fiscally poor choice: the time lost to me debating if I should have a soda (5min; since the choice is non-obvious now that it involves a trip) and going to purchase a drink during the work day (10-15min) costs more than just preemptively buying me a can of soda costs by an order of magnitude.
If half of the devs spend 5 minutes a day thinking about drinks now that they're not provided, at a 50 engineer company that's costing 2 hours of developer time a day. Developer time is between $40-100/hr, so you're talking about ~$100/day in lost work because you're not buying 25-50 sodas. Whatever you're saving in soda costs doesn't offset that. (And if they actually leave the office to go get a drink instead, you're tripling that cost.)
I just find it odd that they're so focused on what a benefit costs, they don't analyze what it's providing to the company in value (by, in this case, alleviating a related cost).
Company I worked at removed all coffee from the break rooms, because it would save them money.
Sure did, except that people now had to go down the cafeteria, if it wasn't closed, or go to the local starbucks down the road (which quadrupled it's daily order volume almost overnight).
Going to Starbucks was a 20 minute walk, plus the 5 minutes standing in line... some of us started bringing insulated containers with coffee to work to save some money, but if the black liquid ran out and it was close to normal quitting time, we now went home instead of grabbing one more cup and finishing the problem we were working on.
Not sure which bean counter decided that was a good idea :P
"The Elves Leave Middle-Earth - Sodas Are No Longer Free"
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...