Well this would be an interesting business case.

As the effects go both ways, you have to ask yourself many questions. If there are other ways you can increase the amount of hours an employee works for you, would this not be one of the more expensive alternatives? Am I not compromising work-life-balance by such a concept, even if this means a short term profit?

But… you could approach the topic from another angle. You could say, that if my employees do feel the need to stay longer at work, I will at least provide them with a free dinner, to acknowledge their sacrifice.

How’s about better long term retention, and a happier, healthier workforce if they go home once in a while?

9,000 employees * 251 days * 1 hour * $50 = $113M

If it does cost $75M (again, we’ll use the worst case number, even if it’s more likely 70% of that), we’re talking about a 50% return on investment. Since we’re using worst case numbers, the direct returns are probably much higher.

And that’s before calculating any second order benefits (better retention, increased loyalty/productivity, increased morale/quality of life, increased reputation/easier hiring and recruiting – and of course free write ups. By almost every set of these important (but harder to quantify) metrics, they is a non-trivial qualitative improvement. Even if it were a complete wash, any knowledge company that could would be (and are IMO) stupid for not following suit.

Do people realize how disruptive and hard it is to replace (recruit/hire/train/etc) a high performing engineer (especially w/ the huge ramp up w/ the custom systems and processes at a cutting edge tech firm)? Does anyone realize how non-linearly time scales and what it means in terms of development productivity (Talking to lots of people, and certainly for myself, I find it takes me a couple hours for me to ramp up into a flow state, after which I get more productive (until a certain point – but again, depending on blood sugar!)). Anyway, I’ll stop railing against stupidity. I’m sure Google has run the numbers themselves. They do love doing that, so I hear.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171960

It seems to me that the cafeterias at Google are just an extension of their ruling ethos — generous and ruthless at the same time.