Considering how expensive staff are, I've never understood the culture surrounding penny pinching the stuff that would keep them happy/improve moral/improve retention.
Forget the moral arguments for a second, even in purely financial terms it would likely pay for itself in recruitment savings alone, let alone brain drain/efficiency, training costs, and so on.
Even a "cheap" employee in a white collar job, is likely costing $60K or more (inc. the employer's share of taxes, benefits, etc). 1% of that is only $600. But people won't pay even that towards bonuses/comfortable chairs/second monitors/"thank you" lunches/staff parties.
At some point it seems a lot less to do with what is rational/logical, and more to do with the power dynamics and people higher up the chain's apathy. Companies are actually hurting themselves for seemingly no good reason. It isn't even fiscally responsible.
What it boils down to is that the penny-pinching stuff is the stuff that's least painful for managers to cut. Firing people sucks, selling big things like buildings is hard and takes a long time. Whereas cutting off the free soda is something the manager can do right now, without having to pick a fight with other managers or launch into a whole gigantic process.
The irony is that cutting the penny-pinching stuff is usually the wrong thing to do, because by the time the managers accept that they're underwater cutting small expenses is no longer enough to right the ship. What they should do is bite the bullet and make one big cut that's big enough to solve the problem; that at least would minimize the effect on morale, since they could tell everyone who's still there that they survived the cut and are now safe.
But again, that requires some courage and willingness to accept some pain, whereas cutting off the sodas is easy and painless. So they do the easy thing, and start down the road of endless little cuts that sap morale and drive people away without actually solving the problem.
This reminded me of when my old company cut the cheese from the salad bar. Mind you, this company was famous for their free lunch perks, but when a salad bar in WI cuts the cheese... well.. it stinks.
This was in 2009/2010. They did a intranet article about how smart they were for cutting the cheese and how it saved $10k a year... in a lunch program that staffed ~100 and fed ~10000.
It was quite clear that it cost MORE to cut the cheese in lost wages from people bickering, complaining, and spinning the decision. however, I'm sure it looked like a quick win for the non-salad-eating manager in charge.
I work in the US and since the Great Recession the swag that we used to get around the office (e.g. t-shirts, ice cream days) have really dried up. Spending on buildings, on the other hand, has increased rapidly.
Last year I went to a meeting in France that was held in a rather old building in Grenoble. It was a day long meeting so they brought in a boxed lunch for everyone. Shocking. There was some sushi, chicken in pasta, hot rolls, chocolate cake, and two small bottles of wine and water. It was fantastic.
I was slow on the uptake, but then it hit me, given a choice between spending money on people or things, they chose to spend it on people. Honestly, a total shock for me.
In one of my European jobs we'd have quarterly "seminars", where we ostensibly studied something. But they were really quite costly parties at exotic locations.
Prioritizing penny-pinching in general over being nice to people in general is an easy temptation for entrepreneurs, and it goes well with generic egoism.
For example, I'm used to more or less annual all-hands dinners at inadequate restaurants, with better wine for the partners (all sitting together, of course) and combined with partners-only yacht weekends and the like.
I'm with you, with all the costs a bonus seems like a pretty arbitrary place to make the call to be cheap.
In the situation I was in there were some penny punchers who felt quite proud of saving a couple hundred bucks here or there and couldn't see the forest through the trees of the misc expenses they were "saving".
It must be hard to quantify the benefits of preventive measures to reduce employee turnover.
It would probably take a company that had all of its shit in order to have a nice report about how HR initiatives over some amount of years was directly correlated to lower employee turnover. If you can't put it in a report to accurately understand the impact of the expenditure it probably becomes hard to justify. I think this must explain all the ineffective half measures and low budgets.
I think often there just truly isn't the money because the company is dying. It can take a long time for a company to die, and people will put up with a lot in the process.
Forget the moral arguments for a second, even in purely financial terms it would likely pay for itself in recruitment savings alone, let alone brain drain/efficiency, training costs, and so on.
Even a "cheap" employee in a white collar job, is likely costing $60K or more (inc. the employer's share of taxes, benefits, etc). 1% of that is only $600. But people won't pay even that towards bonuses/comfortable chairs/second monitors/"thank you" lunches/staff parties.
At some point it seems a lot less to do with what is rational/logical, and more to do with the power dynamics and people higher up the chain's apathy. Companies are actually hurting themselves for seemingly no good reason. It isn't even fiscally responsible.