Mandatory Fun
At least one executive grew frustrated with how long it took to get things done at an e-commerce service provider. She complained that top executives wasted a lot of time in endless meetings and the mandatory fun atmosphere grated on her. Employees were told that if they wanted to have a meeting over a game of Ping-Pong, they should, she said. And a "dogs welcome" policy turned the office into a near kennel.
"Some people do long for the days when everyone came to work and wore a suit and tie and sat at their desks without dogs," said Shawna M. Swanson, a senior associate specialising in employment law at law firm Fenwick & West in Palo Alto, Calif.
"Some companies want to give the utmost freedom to their employees," Swanson said.
A lot of people think they can sue to keep dogs out of the workplace or to make people wear shoes in the office, but these are not legal issues, Swanson said.
At Petstore.com, everyone worked in a warehouse. There were not only dogs, but snakes, iguanas, parrots and ferrets wandering around, said Abigail Jacobs, a former employee. When it rained, the roof leaked. But they thought it was fun, she said.
"I was just wowed by the dot-com environment and the stock options," she said.
But the kooky culture wasn't enough to keep the company afloat, and Jacobs left shortly before Petstore was sold to Pets.com. She joined BlueLight.com, an Internet online service and retailer backed by Kmart in San Francis BlueLight is an Internet company with a casual workplace, but with the stability of a traditional company behind it, Jacobs said.
"It's like a start-up environment without the scary feeling," Jacobs said. "The culture is really fun. But we're not throwing lavish parties."
Mandatory fun at technology companies is not something that sprang up with the Internet. In the 1970s, Silicon Valley's Tandem and Apple Computer threw big beer bashes. In the 1980s, Rolm and Borland built Olympic swimming pools. Genetech had weekly hula contests and beer bashes.
Then many of the tech companies grew up and began holding brown-bag substance-abuse lunches and afternoon sexual harassment seminars. As their billion-dollar valuations inflated, so did their liability concerns. They hired corporate attorneys and instituted company policies.
Even the free-spirited Excite@Home banned pets in the workplace because of sanitary reasons and allergies, said Stephanie Rudnick, the company's spokeswoman.
Now the April dot-com devaluation on Wall Street is making everyone take notice of fun in the workplace once again. Outlandish perks are always easier to justify when a stock price is soaring. Investors also begin to worry that the fun work culture can become the point rather than the perk.
