I know it sounds a bit extreme. But, after reading "It doesn't have to be crazy it work," I feel like companies use alcohol to bribe employees to stay at the office after-hours.
A midground would be drinking only with sit-down food. Nobody is doing shots while having dinner. Another idea could be making company social functions a lunch activity, rather than a dinner one.
I personally want to work somewhere who values me as a responsible human being, and expects me to behave like one. The more a workplace feels like they have to micromanage their employees like children, the more I would expect their workplace to be filled with people who act like children. And I personally wouldn’t want to work somewhere like that.
Hire intelligent, respectful, ethical, empathetic, mature adults to do interesting work. Fire the ones who don’t live up to it.
I expect workplace requirements to be spelled out in terms of expected behavior, expected performance, expected results. Define the outputs.
And take responsibility up the chain. IMO the right policy is not to ban alcohol entirely. Rather, if an employee behaves inappropriately the employee is responsible, but if the manager created the environment which lead to the behavior (whether that be approving the purchase of a keg and cheering for a keg stand, or not stopping that engineer from being verbally abusive at the daily stand ups) the manager is also held to account.
This is exactly what I always thought until I ended up working at a place that did not ban anything. I had no idea how far some will take this freedom, until I saw it, and then I thought: Wish this place banned a few things.
Apparently, many of the people Google is hiring are not intelligent, respectful, ethical, empathetic, or mature. The problem is, once you've hired them, firing them requires investigations, proofs, lawsuits, internet drama, and so forth. I'd imagine going after managers would be even more problematic.
I'd just as soon work for a place that bans alcohol, including at the unofficial, optional-mandatory social functions. In fact, that pretty well describes every place I've worked.
It seems almost taboo to say this in 2018 but in my experience alcohol, when used by intelligent, respectful, mature adults facilitates healthy bonds that would not be there otherwise and persist long after the effects of the alcohol have worn off.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2001/01/art1full.pdf (BLS PDF, The employment-at-will doctrine: three major exceptions)
With the possible exception of salespeople entertaining clients, there's no need to drink on duty, and if you do, there is a consequence.
What exactly is the justification for endorsing drinking at work?
a) to want to stay at the company with their friends, less turnover
b) to be happier at work which is good for performance, recruiting, and makes them less likely to feel the need to rush out of the office whenever they can.
c) to efficiently organize themselves and find the right people to get things done if they know each other well
d) to be transparent to each other and reduce friction in communications
You might not ever have some beer or wine when you socialize with people, but for a huge number of people that's viewed as an integral part of socializing.
It's the behavior that is punishable regardless of whether you were drinking or not.
What portion of responsibility will the victims attorney pin on you?
That’s why you’re usually advised to get a liability policy for weddings and large parties.
That said, how many hours' sleep the night before a day's work is acceptable?
Rules don't have to be written around BAC, they can be written around behavior or impairment.
(In fact, while they tend to also have a BAC cutoff for ease of proof, criminal drunk driving laws also are written around impairment, and corporate policy doesn't even have to worry about proof issues in at-will jurisdictions, because there is no proof requirement.)
No, it's still against federal law, which covers California.
The gist of what the parent comment is saying, is that, if you have a policy in place to "compensate" for a certain "negative trait," what you are actually doing is inviting _more_ of that trait, because you are signaling that your company will put effort in to help deal with that, which means that someone who needs help monitoring their alcohol consumption would be _more likely_ to work for you, thus accomplishing essentially the opposite of what you wanted.
Mature adults who do _not_ need someone else to monitor their alcohol consumption are far more likely to inherently present with the responsible, adult behaviors that you desire. But, a mature adult who can already sufficiently moderate their own alcohol consumption is going to be _less likely_ to want to work at a place where said consumption is heavily, outwardly regulated/enforced, because why would they want to be constantly told something that they have already fully incorporated into their mature, adult habits and personality?
My priority is to have swift, clear consequences for harassment. If you are drinking at work and in your buzz behave inappropriately, I want you walked out of the building for the alcohol and spare the victim from the more harm.
You don’t need to infantalize folks. It’s really simple: if you want to go get drinks, there’s a bar down the road.
That doesn't seem to describe Google's employees. (Or anyone under the age of 30, for that matter, says the little tiny cynic who lives on my shoulder.)
Responsible human beings don't drink alcohol in the workplace. If a person is drawing a salary, they should be presenting to work fit & as prepared as possible to do it. There is no good reason for employees to be drinking at or prior to work. Unless, I suppose, there is some well-replicated study showing that alcohol in low doses increases cognitive function despite all my expectations.
Management doesn't have a magic crystal ball to tell truth from falsehood and fact from hearsay - and because of that uncertainty firing people is a far last resort for creating a safe and welcoming workspace. Banning alcohol at work is both prudent and reasonable.
I used to work for a large well respected software company. On Fridays, after work, there was a subsidized bar where we could have a beer or two and discuss work or non-work things in a more relaxed atmosphere. Would you ban that?
If I go to a conference and we have an official conference social meet-up should I be prohibited from consuming alcohol?
I have my own straw man. You say:
> they should be presenting to work fit & as prepared as possible to do it
I propose that we ban coffee in the workplace because we should all be at 100% all the time and coffee obviously shows you aren't turning up ready to work.
On the contrary, I have a very broad view of the workplace. Yes to all your questions. I don't work in tech, and there are no subsidised bars or alcohol at conferences. We got subsidised gym memberships and tea at the conferences I'm used to. If you want to drink, your money, your time, after work. If you want to get tipsy with colleagues in your own time, it is not in any way endorsed by the company.
My personal guess is the tech industry _will_ eventually ban alcohol at all such things as the link between drinking, uninhibited men and sexual harassment is bought up again and again. The bad apples will spoil the whole barrel.
> I propose that we ban coffee in the workplace because we should all be at 100% all the time and coffee obviously shows you aren't turning up ready to work.
Well, I don't agree with you. But if you have evidence, sure. My understanding is coffee is a mild stimulant, so it should be linked to a very mild improvement in work performance - so I doubt you have evidence.
People do turn up to work unprepared. We can't really stop that - maybe they just get a bad nights sleep. But alcohol is going to have a pretty strictly negative effect, so employees shouldn't be drinking it in company hours or before work.
My point about taking a narrow view is that "the workplace" is not only at-your-desk time. Its geographic-but-after-hours, related but off-site social events.
On a related note, a lot of the discussions around software project codes of conduct are based on the fact that software projects fundamentally are human endeavours. It's not just about the code you churn out. If you want to employ humans you have to let them be human. That means some degree of socializing. If you want to employ machines you have to maintain them too.
My coffee counterexample was to illustrate that your approach seems to be binary, zero tolerance. With humans involved, I think it's just not that simple.
> a subsidized bar
And if an employee does something stupid after being in that bar, it requires an absolute contortion of language to say that maybe the presence and cheapness of the grog wasn't a contributing factor. Say in a bad case a male employee sexually harasses some female coworker - the woman involved (and, I suspect, a judge) might well question why the company was enabling this. I personally think that the company should be held responsible as much as the drunk employee.
It is simply too easy to link subsidised alcohol to someone acting inappropriately due to alcohol.
> official conference social meet-up
Ditto. If the meetup is official, there should be no alcohol. Learn to socialise over a lemonade. I've seen a very large number of professionals who, somehow, manage to do just that.
> My coffee counterexample was to illustrate that your approach seems to be binary, zero tolerance. With humans involved, I think it's just not that simple.
If I, in a capacity as an employer, am going to have some responsibility for some employees actions then that employee, whilst I am responsible for them, is not going to be drinking alcohol. There risk far outweighs the hypothetical employee who can only socialise with a glass in hand.
I'm not even making that decision on any specific risk factor - alcohol leads to worse decisions, in a way that coffee does not. We live in an age where companies are often responsible for outcomes in a _very broad_ definition of "workplace". If the company might be responsible, then employees have a responsibility to be making their best decisions.
If you want to drink with your workmates the process should be organise it unofficially, go find a bar and don't wear a hat with a corporate logo on it. It isn't hard to do. If drinking is mandatory to having a career then that is the problem, not my hardline approach to alcohol.
By suggesting that companies ban taking part in that activity, but not preventing them from taking an ever increasing part of our lives through long hours and after work events, you are effectively advocating that we ban the activity in it's entirety
If I leave at 5 PM and go to a bar, how is that meaningfully different from staying in the office and starting to drink at 5?
So I would not want to work where you're in charge where everything I may want to do (or consume) is judged on its productivity basis.
You probably have habits that sacrifice your work performance. There's a good chance, at the very least, you weigh more than you should, work out less than you should, and eat fewer vegetables than you should. You might even have children or plan to have them one day. Yikes!
And all of these cost you much more than the morale boosting beer I get to share with my team as is tradition towards the end of a Friday.
So do many other things. If the only thing that keeps morale acceptable is providing alcohol, then you have a problem either with the people you hire, the work you make them do, or the amount of resources you're willing to expend on morale.
Is that really not a solution here ?
at the end of the day, people should be accountable for their own actions, and i should not be punished if i want to have a beer after working hours with colleagues because a tiny minority of people at my company cant drinking responsibly
Not for the victim.
The punishment should fit the crime, and most situations are warrant only a warning or a minor punishment - and if behavior improves, all is well.
If you have that policy and then start down the road of first-offense warnings, or trying to match the punishment to the crime, you end up in exactly the place where a lot of companies are now. (This isn't a new idea; it's how companies have always operated.) Without a specific set of policies, the company literally cannot do anything right: If you fire someone because his coworkers say they cannot work with him, everyone starts frothing at the mouth. If you pay someone else to leave because he's too important to fire, everyone digs out their pitchforks and torches. If you do nothing, it blows up in your face, spectacularly.
As a ridiculous hyperbole: assume a life in prison minimum sentence is established for speeding, on the first offense, and that it's actually enforced. I guarantee you that very quickly we'd have everyone driving under the posted speed limit at all times.
"If most offenses are first offenses" satisfies the predicate "Unless [% of first offenses] is a really low number"
The consequent "firing after a first offense won't help much" is consistent with "firing after first offense won't reduce the total number of incidents enough."
But quick change is often more desirable than real change.
Not extreme at all. Except for salespeople having business lunches, in the United States, drinking on company time is pretty much verboten outside of the tech bubble.
I don't think this is true, especially for company parties. I have also heard of people in other industries drinking in the office, usually these were smaller companies, or the people doing the drinking were upper management.
When I was at OpenDNS, @davidu used to say something along the lines of, "When you try to host a big company party with over 100 people, you expect to have to fire somebody for their behavior there. Don't be that person." Maybe the costs don't outweigh the benefits of work parties.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/13/wework-m...
What's even more ridiculous is that beef is the costly meat from an environmental perspective, but they've also banned poultry and all other types of meat. I can understand not serving meat, but not allowing employees to expense meals involving meat would make me reconsider working there - especially because of the heavy handed way they did it.
I'm not aware of this, and would be interested in knowing more; as I understand currently, that flow really does apply.
Maybe some companies out there also banned slave ownership across the board. Probably seemed unfair, too. Did they not realize how useful slaves are?
Now, this seems like a silly comparison because we're all so used to eating meat for every meal, but does familiarity trump ethical concerns?
I think you may be overestimating the volume of job applicants that pay attention to such policies, and/or their qualifications.
I am referring only to the prohibition on expensing certain types of meals, not non-meat food/environments in general.
I see this sentiment a lot (especially on HN!) and I share it. I usually skip team dinners when I can. But there's no accounting for taste, and humans in general seem to have a taste for mixing work and "social stuff", so why shouldn't companies encourage it in that capacity?
I don't see why alcohol (excludes non-drinkers) or team-building activities outside of business hours (excludes those with family commitments) couldn't be one of those things.
Here's the box you will be working in. Don't forget to turn off the light when you leave Friday.
It's my meal ticket, not my hobby; it needs to be tolerable.
The "fun at work" meme is, IMO, a way to keep people in the office longer a la the GOOOOG's Gilded Cage.
I am not going to work anywhere that I don't enjoy. I will instead quit and go somewhere else.
You are free to do otherwise. But just be aware that people have fun at work because they like to do so. And many people would quit if they didn't enjoy their work
Or you could list the attributes that you expect people to have during the hiring process and then decline to hire those that don't fit the company's culture.
In my case, that's taking occasional walks to the coffeeshop nearby, despite their lack of inclusiveness of people with mobility problems and those who don't like coffee.
You are free to choose otherwise, but me and many other people have the ability of quiting and working in better work environments.
The other side of that is the question, "How much damage has skipping employer social events done to your career?" You'll probably never know the answer.
I'm sure they didn't have "get drunk and make everyone listen to their inappropriate jokes or worse" on their mind when they left the office.
This change is mostly talking about work social events that take place off site. My team's company holiday party last year was piloting this and gave each person two drink tickets upon entering.
I think banning alcohol completely would reduce the attendance of these social events, so this is a good step where we can keep the social benefits without letting it get out of hand. For instance the holiday party I mentioned was on a Friday night. I really enjoy having a few drinks on a Friday night, and I'm much more likely to attend a Google party with 2 drinks tickets than one with zero. I know that sounds silly and immature, but it's honest.
The "fun places to work" eventually figure out that fun for some is often at the expense of others, and that most things corporate environments have ruled out were ruled out a long time ago because they didn't work well.
In France it is common to have a small party (pot) during work hours when some people would have one drink. Max two.
These also can be at the end of the day but then usually this is by someone who is leaving.
Ummm... no, it's not.
Having had dozens of jobs in five industries over the decades, I've never worked for one where drinking on company time isn't a fireable offense.
The only exceptions were at the company Christmas parties, and overnight DJ's who were tolerated doing lines of coke off of CD cases. But that's another problem altogether.
Our Christmas parties are as boring as a carbide drill bit.
I won't say it's unheard of for myself and my colleagues to have a beer or glass of wine at a work lunch in the tech industry. But it's certainly a rare event though definitely more common when visiting Europe.
Scapegoating alcohol seems like an excuse and really is like babysitting your adult employees.
My view - Drink as much alcohol as you like! And if you imbibe too much, and do stupid things, that shows deficient decision making abilities, and you aren't fit to work here.
That reality, and the reality of addiction, presents a few problems for the hypothetical employee here:
- Attending work events that do have alcohol may cause them to endure a great deal of hardship (talk to a recently-abstinent alcoholic if you doubt this).
- Addiction has no conclusive test or diagnosis--AAD and other indicators are often not present in people who enter rehab, or in people whose substance abuse is identified as a primary motivator for criminal behavior by courts. This means that "getting trashed and acting like an ass", for "real addicts" (whatever that means, which is a troublesome qualifier to add in and of itself) is difficult to prove to be the fault of the company providing alcohol, and for non-addicts is a convenient out (if provided to the former group).
- "Actually required to go to an event" is another troublesome category. Many events aren't "required" . . . unless you want to get promoted/not eventually get fired in favor of someone who attended. I don't propose some legal solution to this (everything I can think of would effectively be thought-policing), but it's an important ambiguity to acknowledge.
- Even if a humane HR/management department exists to whom the hypothetical employee could disclose their condition as a disability, and even if that department lobbied the employee's managers/colleagues to prevent addiction from being a disadvantage to their career, that would still likely result in either a breach of that employee's privacy or eventual prejudice seeping in (e.g. via turnover inside HR) regardless. Not good.
- If those recourses fail, and the employee ends up before the courts pleading wrongful-termination or equivalent based on their addiction, the (at least state) US court system and arbitration organizations are notoriously inconsistent and prejudiced against claims of addiction as any sort of mitigating or complicating circumstance. A company interested in preserving the autonomy, promotability, and dignity of addicted employees would likely view the courts as something the employee in question should be kept away from for their own benefit.
There are many other considerations.
Now, many of those apply to any uncommon disability condition, and it could be argued that below a certain point a very few employees' accommodations should not ruin the fun for everyone else. Even if you buy that argument, the incidence of addiction/substance-abuse related serious lifestyle trouble—principally at work or in romantic relationships—for very large numbers of people in the US is well documented.
Perhaps it would be better to simply forbid the creation of such situations on the company dime.
I tend not to drink around work because of the expectation of professional behavior and I'm just uncomfortable around people I have a professional relationship. However, I've been at companies who have cut alcohol because a few people are sensitive. (I'm not referring to those who are alcoholics that have self-discipline issues) It's annoying.
A couple drinks helps get me out of my own head enough to relax with co-workers. After a couple hours, the two beers have worn off and I usually want another one or two to keep my sociability going.
I'd much prefer a policy where everyone gets to decide in advance how many drink tickets they want and perhaps say "these tickets aren't good until X time." This would help everyone to regulate their own intake, and it treats employees like adults capable of managing their own bodies while still addressing the issue of people over-consuming by accident or in an unaccountable manner.
It drives me nuts when companies let a few bad actors ruin a loose policy rather than addressing the issue with the bad actors, but I know, legally, having a strict, spelled-out policy is safer (easier to defend against lawsuits) legally.
At a small or mid-sized company, ½% of bad actors can be one or two or three.
At a company the size of Google, ½% of bad actors can be hundreds or thousands of human liabilities.
I think it's a question of where to draw the line. I'm sure an argument could be made that they should get rid of the bikes on their campuses because a percentage of people will hurt themselves on them or hurt someone else and be a legal risk.
Then you would get people like me, asking for lots of tickets as you can just discard those when you are done but you would not be able to ask for extra ones. At that point, you could just remove the ticket system as it doesn't work anymore
The goal is to help responsible adults remain responsible adults after a couple drinks when parts of your brain tell you to drink more than you know you should.
The default of two drinks per night is a good starting point; my point is to let responsible adults decide for themselves ahead of time if more than two would be good for them.
we don't need some rube goldberg system of drink metering. we need people to handle their own shit. if they actually behave badly you can always fire them.
If you need alcohol to socialize, then you have a problem and should get help.
That's seriously one of the signs of a problem. Ironically, I'll tell you to "Google it."
Fifteen minutes later, the office manager joins in, interrupting, and starts hitting on me in a pretty blunt way. I enjoy female attention but that was a bit much. I tactfully hint that I'm not interested but she doesn't picks it up so I leave early, a bit salty.
The next morning I arrive to work and see an elevator about to close so I rush to catch it. She was inside! The following three minutes were the most awkward elevator ride in my life. I felt bad for her to be honest, maybe I shouldn't, but it must be so embarrassing when you sober up.
It's much more awkward the next day after drunk sex in a deserted office though.
On the flip side, people have made up stories of me being drunk after having 2 drinks, and my having had any drinks at all makes my side of the story have no credibility. No good. Like when a cop pulls you over and asks if you've had any drinks.
So I'm all for getting booze out of the workplace. I'd had my consumption limited to 2 drinks for my past 4 jobs after being fired for saying obnoxious things while drunk. A company holiday party where the tequila was flowing was the only exception, but I kept the volume down that time. I deserved the firing, no complains there.
It's my personality to say obnoxious things, having been raised on dark and vulgar comedy. My only way to joke around authentically now is without drinking, sadly, because of the nature of accusations against people who've been drinking. Just one example, I'm sure other people have personally entertaining activities that they always do but people think they must be drunk when they do it, no matter how sober. Dancing's another one... the more sober I am, the more people ask "bro, what are you on?"
My twitter is a good example of what I feel free to say while sober. Reading it, you'd think I'm always drunk.
I also am noticing after a year on break from drinking that all drinkers are mentally lazy to some degree, and some tell lies assuming that the other party won't notice and I'm likely guilty of that from my drinking days. It's like their memory isn't good so they assume nobody else's is, yet they claim perfect memory.
A little meandering, I know... but overall I think a no alcohol policy would be great.
This is from Stephanie Hurlburt's Twitter a while back.
Ah, game industry culture and drinking.
I don’t drink. I also feel unsafe being in a mostly-male group when they’re all drinking.
...
The usual "best practice" advice on avoiding harassment is to not pursue romance at work... but how are folks supposed to do that if they don't have time to pursue it anywhere else? Alcohol might only be a minor contributing factor at that point.
I'm joking...well 1/2 joking anyway. (sigh)
I've heard stories about Korean chaebols that are hard to believe, but I'm sure there are intense workplace antipatterns worldwide.
Apparently it was a paternalistic policy that came directly from Watson, who not only banned alcohol during work time including lunch, but also paid the wage on Monday to somehow honder spending it all in alcohol over the weekend.
Lastly, I'm not an alcoholic but I have friends who've struggled with it and my heart really goes out to them. Alcohol is everywhere at work functions and I think it's really insensitive. I could live the rest of my life and never have drinks be part of a professional function and be just fine.
What are the other factors. Are there any higher than 20%.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_harassment#In_the_wor...
"Excessive alcohol: Harassment is never acceptable and alcohol is never an excuse. But one of the most common factors among the harassment complaints made today at Google is that the perpetrator had been drinking (~20% of cases). Our policy is clear: Excessive consumption of alcohol is not permitted when you are at work, performing Google business, or attending a Google-related event, whether onsite or offsite. Going forward, all leaders at the company - Directors, VPs and SVPs - will be expected to create teams, events, offsites and environments in which excessive alcohol consumption is strongly discouraged. For example, many teams have already put two-drink limits in place for events. Others use drink ticket systems. The onus will be on leaders to take appropriate steps to restrict any excessive consumption among their teams, and we will impose more onerous actions if problems persist."
As someone who's been exposed to heavy drinking culture in Silicon Valley, this is a huge step in the right direction. I hope more companies and tech events adopt this.