We had an office virtual get-together and we got prepaid vouchers to everyone on a popular food delivery app. Everyone could order whatever they wished to, from their favorite restaurants. This accounts very easily for varying dietary needs, who else might be physically with them so that they can order more or less. I can't see the simplicity of this being beat easily.
Downside, when the company gives you a voucher for £20 to order food (that ought to be enough for anyone!).
Turns out the delivery app automatically adds £10 in delivery/service fee, and there's hardly any food you can pick for the remaining £10. Had to buy out of my own pocket.
I'll add that when you live outside a city and there are food delivery companies, first or third party, the value of the voucher is meaningless. I got a thank you credit for some delivery app that around $100. There was literally nothing that could be delivered, no matter the price. Sometimes being remote actually means you're remote.
And the alternative of having each person order what they want and expensing it isn't much better. You don't pay anything, but it forces everyone to spend a fair amount of time. Plus accounting for different timezones means everyone isn't eating at the same time.
Yep. Filing expenses can take an unreasonable amount of time especially when some percentage are bounced for some trivial reason.
I get the gesture but just let people grab the food and beverage of their choice like they do with any other friends on Zoom thing--assuming a remote team party is a good idea in the first place.
We have two competing food delivery services here, Foodora and Wolt.
Foodora kept doing these "FREE DELIVERY" promos and blasting me with push notifications. And when I'd open up the app to browse through all of the available places, pick what food I'd like to order, add it to my basket and then go to checkout... My 14€ pizza has turned into a 19€ minimum order pizza + free delivery. Also, the minimum order was separate for each and every restaurant, but I could not find any way to find it other than the checkout page.
When I open up Wolt and select a restaurant, the first two things I see, even before the actual name of the restaurant, are the minimum order sum and the delivery fee.
I only have one of these applications installed on my phone these days. Anyone wanna guess which one?
My company has done this and I hate it because 20+ people all ordering some fast(ish) food for individual delivery through a disintermediary service has so many things wrong with.
I can't reconcile trying to discourage wasteful, race-to-the-bottom, lowest-price-first lifestyles and yet clueless acts like food delivery apps.
I tend to find swag somewhat wasteful even under normal circumstances, but over the past 18 months or so I've gotten a bunch of team and speaker/attendee event swag individually mailed to me and I feel a bit of guilt given that pretty much none of it is anything I remotely need. And, in many cases, will ever use. (Some is nice though so I hesitate to say just get rid of all this sort of thing.)
A friend used this service to try to have a pizza party for a small cohort of graduating Master's students, and said that one pizza came hours early and the rest never arrived.
This seems like the kind of service where if your pizza arrives at all it's by the grace of God, let alone getting there at the right time or being the right order.
I don't consider myself old so not sure if this kind of answer appeals to a particular demographic but it doesn't induce any confidence in their service.
Playful stance is ok as long as it covers fundamental questions but a business should err on the side of caution. Maybe I am old.
The fees are insanely high and the coverage is worldwide, so it means that their smart AI "magic Pizza Bots" ordering is actually probably an underpaid student doing manual work.
That was my first thought. How are they ordering pizzas? I could see a backend portal combined with phone calls working well, but I doubt that a stereotypical tech startup is comfortable using humans to order. And if I ran a Dominos pizza store, I would certainly find an automated order by text-to-speech or email to be fraudulent and ignore it.
Honest question: Do you actually enjoy this (or any similar) kind of remote team event via Zoom? To me at least this seems like a properly dystopian future.
I've been studiously avoiding the local lockdown Friday 4:30pm "drinking together on video" events. Work events are already awkward enough as it is, at least in real life you can have multiple concurrent conversations going on.
Using $Video_call_tech, it's predicated on one person talking at a time.
Want to hear something worse? If you keep scrolling, the page mentions other types of events your team can hire including a “stand up comedian”, which sounds like my personal hell. Social Zoom meetings are already awkward for the reasons you mentioned, then on top imagine having to laugh politely at some C-rate comedian (you know they’re not getting headliners) doing material that needs to be clean enough to be appropriate at a work event. Just an astoundingly bad idea.
I'm totally sure downward dogging over a group video call is not going to be as awkward as hell, and will definitely realign my chakras... ...to point towards other career opportunities.
I wish we could play some kind of video game instead that provides proximity chat to players, like Minecraft or something else with a low barrier to entry. Do away with the video entirely and just let me talk to people and maybe do something fun besides.
That's a great idea. We've been trying to find a better way to socialize as a remote team and playing a casual video game with local chat is brilliant.
I have a weekly meeting with ~10 friends by Zoom. During the lockdown it's impossible to meet IRL, and we are distributed in ~4 countries, so we are even meeting more than before.
Whatever your opinion of restrictions in a given location, I'm pretty sure the right answer isn't to put pressure on people in a job context to ignore restrictions/recommendations/what makes them feel personally comfortable in their own situation to get together with coworkers in person.
Sure, I didn't mean to suggest it's people's duty to capitalism to gather with coworkers if they don't want to.
But in general, if the question is, "how do we accommodate <unsuccessful interdictive intervention whose collateral damage is visited with horrific severity on the most vulnerable in society>", I think that answer is: you don't. You organize and overcome it and speak truth to power.
I always found "Pizza Parties" to be an exemplar of bad management.
Pizza is something that, when done right, is exactly the kind of thing management doesn't understand. It takes time, skill, effort and quality ingredients to assemble.
So remote employees can just order a pizza or whatever substitute they wish, photograph the receipt and then expenses the cost against an event or case.
We have staff in South East Asia, who might not have a pizza shop nearby. They can just order a local takeaway instead.
This reminds me of that Silicon Valley episode about the pizza app, Sliceline. Solving a problem that doesn't need to be solved, and has to do with pizza.
The details say they will send a small pizza to each person.
In my area you can pretty easily find a small-sized pizza for $5 to $8 from an independent pizza place. Similar prices from national chains. Little Caesar's, for instance, offers a $5.55 large cheese pizza.
Let's suppose the delivery fee and tip is another $5.
And let's suppose it takes five minutes per person in time to find a pizza place near them and place the order. At an hourly rate of $60 for the coordinator, that's $5 per person.
So now you're looking at about $5 in profit per person, not even factoring in the $69 administrative fee.
I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't want to do this particular chore in-house, unless your entire team is billing hundreds per hour.
Yes but their big idea is that pizza is a fundamentally underpriced item relative to the value it brings a group of people... sitting in front of laptops...
Leaving aside whether you want a manufactured social event like this.
I have trouble imagining how it works. The food will invariably arrive very asynchronously. I have limited delivery options where I live and actually end up going and picking up a pizza from one or two different places if I want one. (Or make one at home.) I don't have any interest in some app/third party randomly picking a pizza place and delivering to me.
If you must have a remote team social event, just let people deal with their own food and drink.
And if they find one, how confident are they at ordering in Telugu or Urdu?
"We will attempt to place orders in any country and location!" Yeah, right. Never mind team members in South Asia.... I'm in the south-east of England, and neither Deliveroo nor UberEats offers service to my town. Just Eat can find a couple of local restaurants that claim to offer delivery, but pizza isn't among my options.
I think their idea of a "remote team" may be quite limited.
We donate the party funds to a Zero Hunger program, take half a day off to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, and then come back and swap feel good stories.
Nothing would make me more demoralised than being given pizza and being told it's a party.
Pizza parties are for children.[1]
The whole concept of a "pizza party" is some Silicon Valley crap created to justify working devs into the ground then giving them pizza to "build team spirit".
And yes, Amazon's pizza based team sizing is very prominent in my disdain for all pizza based employee engagement.
Edit: for the love of Jesus, the fact that "pizza based employee engagement" is very real in software shows some contempt for us.
* Work unpaid overtime, hey we ordered pizza!
* Come into the office for Corporate Mandated Fun Day, there'll be pizza!
* Do a hackathon and don't sleep for 36 hours so we can borrow your ideas, we even provide free pizza!
* Your team delivered a well engineered and tested product that will bring in an estimated $2.4m in the first year, you bloody bet we ordered some pizza!
And some wedges, with the fancy sauces, you deserve it!
Back in the early 2000s, when Amazon announced the 2-pizza team concept, my team thought "great, we're a 2-pizza team now, let's get some pizza." Then we found out that the pizza is theoretical - you don't get a budget for ordering pizza.
Gosh I think it really depends on your company. Sometimes extra work needs to get done, that’s part of being a salaried employee to me. Providing food is a nice acknowledgment of work that, while it falls within the job description, falls outside of normal work hours.
Whether a job takes undue advantage of salaried employees times is another matter entirely. At my work, 36 hour hackathons would never fly, corporate fun is either paid or optional, and late nights to meet a deadline happen a couple times a year - no problems there. I’m sure that’s not how it is at Amazon but I think the problems there run deeper than the food.
> Sometimes extra work needs to get done, that’s part of being a salaried employee to me. Providing food is a nice acknowledgment of work that, while it falls within the job description, falls outside of normal work hours.
I agree extra work is sometimes required, but I'd like to acknowledged by the monetary compensation, not by pizza.
I'd agree with you entirely if being salaried actually meant anything these days.
As in, you receive a fixed amount, regardless of the hours you worked, could be over the typical 40, could be under.
So, if your company is good at recognising that the "could be under" part is the fair payback for the "could be over" times, then that's awesome, and I can see why you're a fan.
My experience of salaried positions is more one sided.
Eh, after our chip fab burned down, I was part of the recovery team sent into the (not burned down, but technically part of the same building) computer laboratories. Basically our remit was, identify key machines or paperwork that needs to be retrieved, ensure anything that needs to be running is restarted, stay away from the access corridors into presumably unsafe sections leading towards the destroyed fab, and if you see anything that is out of place in a normal office building that just suddenly had its power go out (e.g. smoke damage or actual smoldering debris), retreat and report what you saw to the team surveying the damage who are trained to go somewhere actually dangerous.
Anyway they ordered us pizza and I thought that was nice. It felt like a team activity, and pizza is a team food. Also you're wearing gear, so having pizza brought in saves changing. And the insurers are out the price of a state-of-the-art chip fab, so what do they care about buying us pizza?
But obviously I'm not working unpaid overtime, the job is the job, if I need to put an extra hour in to ship the code today I can do that, if I need some time to wait for a plumber tomorrow I'll just take it, if you've got a two person job you need to hire two people not expect me to do more.
If your workplace has work-life balance problems or you feel under rewarded for your work, that's not because pizza is the problem, that's a whole separate problem and it's exactly as weird to blame pizza for that problem as it would be for management to think pizza can solve it.
In the UK at least I believe the tax rules mean the business can justify the expense of taking everybody out for food and fun (e.g. pizza and bowling, or golf plus cheese and wine if you're determined that pizza is for children although personally I would take pizza and bowling) say once a year so long there is a business purpose to the meeting, so e.g. you spend an hour attending a presentation about the corporate mission and financial projections with little relationship to your actual job, then you spend the rest of the day eating and hanging out.
also the idea of a "virtual" pizza party makes me feel kind of uncomfortable. it's like we bought you pizza so let us gawk at you while you eat it. no thanks.
i don't like looking at myself on a camera, let alone while shoving a pizza into my gob. but im sure more extroverted people would enjoy it.
