Response to "Coffee customs"
This is just beautiful. In response to our survey of office coffee customs, my friend who had originally posted the question on Facebook did an Excel spreadsheet of the results:
Categories are defined thus:
Coffee pot - any sort of communal drip pot
Pods - any individual serving system
Fee paid - of any type of coffee, those expected to pay for it
No coffee - nothing provided or organized
Individuals - nothing from the company but varying levels of individual contributions (e.g., own coffee pot in the office, a group "coffee club", taking turns buying/bringing coffee)
Breaking it down further, we find that in communal-pot offices, the policy that coffee-making is a shared task twice is twice as common as having a person assigned to coffee duty (sorry for the fuzzy graphics):
Nice quantifying! I'll add the qualitative part and note that management and employees seem to be at an impasse regarding the purpose of coffee. Many folks pointed out that providing coffee to one's employees is not only good for morale, but cheaper in the long run than having employees go out for coffee. However, others made the equally good point that employees want to go out for coffee, in order to get a break from the office.
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Who is Miss Conduct?
Robin Abrahams writes the weekly "Miss Conduct" column for The Boston Globe Magazine. Robin, who has a PhD in psychology from Boston University, has worked as a theater publicist, organizational-change communications manager, editor, stand-up comedian, and professor of psychology and English. She lives in Cambridge with her husband, Marc Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobel Prizes, which are given annually for achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.
Very cool! I always like an explanation that involves an X and a Y axis!
When I started working at Alcoa in Wellesley many years ago, I was told one of my duties as a secretary was to make the coffee every day. There were secretaries older than I who'd been there longer than I, but since I was the newbie, it was my duty every day. I was also to wash all the cups that the sales people (all men then) just left (when they poured themselves a new cup in a new cup) in the what-would-now-be-called "break room." Okay, I already knew how to do dishes being the eldest female child in my family, but I didn't have the beginning of a clue as to how to make coffee, nor did I even begin drinking it until about 10 years later. Hugely lucky for me, my boss in that office, Gerry Gorham, was a generous, kind and thoughtful man. He taught me how to make the coffee, but he actually did it himself about 75% of the time (maybe, but maybe not, because he got to the office early each day, usually before I arrived on time). Gerry was always like that. He gave more than he expected for himself. For me, moving on in the working world, I had some other good folks as bosses, but mostly just selfish people only out for themselves. What has this world come to?
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