The secret to Office Productivity

Nancy Hauge writes at the Kansas City Star on Office Productivity:

The real key to productivity? Free junk food
In an eye-opening survey conducted several months ago by the Boston Consulting Group, a leading business think tank, three out of four top executives from 68 countries said they planned to increase research and development spending this year. Fewer than half of the 940 respondents, however, thought the increases would produce the necessary profit or competitive advantage to justify the expenditures.

Why such a disconnect? Perhaps it's because they're spending too much of their money on the wrong things: technology, rather than Twinkies.

My experience tells me that the rapidity with which an enterprise creates value is directly related to how well it stocks the company kitchen. The lower the nutritional value of the food choices, the greater the intellectual property produced.

I have spent time in a variety of industries: software, hardware, compression technology, storage technology, outsourced manufacturing and digital media. What they all have in common is this: They all run on junk food.

During my career, I have spent hundreds of all-night sessions alongside my entrepreneurial colleagues as we prepared for market launches, product launches, term sheets, due diligence reviews, tape outs, quarterly results, auditors and IPOs. I don't remember ever ordering in anything nutritious when the heat was on.

When engineers, scientists and technologists have to stay up all night, they don't reach for NoDoz -- they reach for Cheetos.

It's always a sign of decline when a company slows down on junk-food purchases. Many CEOs and CFOs deny the value of the kitchen. It is an easy expense to control or cut when money gets tight. It seems like no big deal. People can bring food in or buy their drinks from a vending machine. They will understand that investors don't want the company "wasting" its limited resources buying snacks for the staff.

But the purpose of junk food is not just to give the team a little blood sugar bump at 3 p.m. When you stop supplying fun food, morale and productivity decline.

She supplies an anecdote to back this up:

I once worked for a start-up computing company that grew to $7 billion in annual revenue during my stint. In the early years we brought in doughnuts every morning. As time went on the doughnut bill got to be outrageous. So we cut back to doughnuts only on Wednesday mornings. Funny thing, our product launches began to stretch out. We were not moving as fast as we once had.

When I asked the vice president of engineering what had happened, he said, "You cut back the doughnuts! My guys used to get in here by 8 a.m. every day to get their favorite doughnut before it was gone. Now they come in around 9. I have 600 engineers in this organization, and I lost about 600 man-hours per day because you stopped the doughnuts!"

Very true -- when I had my business, I made sure there were always treats in the kitchen as well as a large well-stocked candy bucket out front for the clients. Good places I have worked for have always done free sodas and frequent catered parties. Microsoft always stocked their kitchens with basic munchies and drinks and managers were encouraged to order pizzas in during death marches. It's the little details like this that make or break a company...