Business English: Do I cut subsidised food or gym?

A male manager (45) wrote: I'm in the unenviable position of trying to make budget cuts to our organisation. I have been looking at the remaining benefits that haven't already been axed, in particular the subsidies to the staff canteen ...

... where staff can have hot meals and coffees for less than it costs at Pret A Manger, and the reduced-rate gym membership. The first is enjoyed by more members of staff and has been in place longer. The second is an important plank of our wellness policy, and is extremely popular. Which would you cut?

Read what Lucy Kellaway, "agony-aunt" of the Financial Times (London), answered:

This is one of the easiest problems I have ever come across. You should go on subsidising the canteen. This is partly for the obvious reason that axing a benefit enjoyed by many causes more uproar than one enjoyed by few.

Lucy Kellaway

But there is a more powerful reason that goes deeper than protest - or money. If you still have a canteen that members of staff actually use, you have something rare and precious that glues your staff together.

In most companies, the office canteen has been starved to death as people have increasingly chosen to eat chorizo and rocket artisan baguettes from Pret A Manger instead.

In the past: Canteen as heart of office life

A decade ago the canteen was the heart of office life, a place where gossip was exchanged and friendships forged over a shepherd's pie and spotted dick. Now it has become a functional meeting room, a place to take visitors for a bad latte and a Kit Kat.

This is a great shame from every point of view - apart from that of the sandwich shops. At lunchtime, office workers scurry out for a hasty meal which they eat on their own at their desks. It's more expensive, less healthy and less convivial.

In marked contrast to subsidising a canteen, which has real social and cultural value, subsidising a gym has almost none, irrespective of whatever "wellness" programmes you think it serves.

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Only a few - and they will not leave

If your company is typical, there will be a small, hard core of employees who go there every day, but I can't see that the marginal extra firmness to their abs gained from all that iron pumping helps your company at all. If you take the subsidy away, these few people will be cross, and they may well knock on your door to complain, but with unemployment as it is, they aren't going to walk (let alone sprint).

As for all the other gym members, the silent majority who pay their subsidised membership but hardly ever can be bothered to pay the place a visit, axing the benefit will be a great relief, as it will save both money and face.

I used to belong to a subsidised gym and it took me about three years of never going before I cancelled my membership, as I didn't want to make such a public admission of defeat. If my employers had removed the subsidy, I would have felt they had done me a favour.

Aus: The Financial Times, London. www.ft.com