Celebrating hard work with free pizza is awesome, right? Maybe if I was seven years old and my Little League team finished the season in first place. But free pizza as a token of appreciation at work? Not so much.
It seems the American workforce has come to understand the workplace pizza party as an insult, rather than the exciting morale-builder it once was.
Here’s Five Fast Facts On The Much Maligned “Office Pizza Party:”
- 🍕 I Tried - For a large chunk of American workers, pizza has slowly come to symbolize a lack of effort and the easiest cop-out for bad managers everywhere, and that awareness is becoming more widespread.
- 🔕 Disengaged - Pizza can demonstrate a boss’s lack of engagement with their employees. It shows that bosses legitimately do not know what their team wants. Ask the average worker what they want, and it sure as heck isn’t pizza.
- 💉 Press Down on the Plunger - As one expert says, pizza acts like a single adrenaline shot. It briefly makes people happy, but the rush wears off and the unhappiness returns. Culturally it’s been repeated enough that people have noticed it’s a short-term fix or a distraction. Mia Wallace would agree.
- 🎉 You Win! - Pizza is a terrible reward for an adult in any situation. As one executive points out, employee rewards are a motivator only when they meet an employee’s basic needs. They shouldn’t take the place of an employer’s simplest obligation: realistic and appropriate compensation.
- 👿 Downward Spiral - Pizza can make things worse for everyone. If an out-of-touch boss sees workers’ lack of pizza-induced euphoria (Pizza-Phoria?) as ungrateful, there’s a strong chance that the boss won’t do it again. After all, the workers are clearly “unappreciative.” And then morale continues to tank.
🔥Bottom line: We all want to feel appreciated for the hard work we do, but we’re grownups. The treats-as-rewards model isn’t cutting it. Going forward, a better solution might be for employers to listen to their employees, find out what they really want, and provide that to them, rather than more failure pizza topped with sadness pepperoni.
What do you think about office pizza parties?
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