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My company is publicly traded, so I know they are profitable, and they don't mind burning cash. Here are a few examples of how they freely spend money:
1) My company has a few offices around the country, and my boss was telling me how there are actually some employees who don't live near any of the offices. So the company actually pays them to fly to the California office every Monday and then fly home every Friday.
2) One guy apparently travels a fair amount, so somehow he managed to have the company pay for him to LIVE in hotels EVERY single night, even on weekends. (This is great deal for him, as he doesn't live in his house anymore, he rents it out.)
3) My company thought it would be a good idea to try out open workspaces for employees, so they rented out new office spaces and paid to tear them down so they could build the open areas. Now I heard from my boss that they have received feedback from people who don't like working in these open areas, so they are actually thinking about spending even more money to re-build individual offices in these office spaces.
Since the company seems to have no problem spending money, I wonder why they don't spend a little more on employee salaries. I actually heard one of our VPs say that the company's salaries are a little bit on the low side. Seems weird that they are willing to burn money in various ways except on salaries.
If a company was going to pay me to live in hotels so that I could rent out my house, I probably wouldn't mind a salary that's a little lower than average.
Tell your company to use its money to hire college grads. Specifically ones named ggumbo.
1) Those employees must be worth it. If they had turned down the job offer saying they didn't want to move and your company came up with this solution, they must be damn good at their jobs.
2) It might actually be cheaper for this person to stay in hotels instead of flying them home for the weekend just to fly them back to the same place the next Monday if his travel work keeps him in one place longer than a weekend. Again, he probably negotiated this deal. If he travels SO much that he would only need his home on weekends, that's paying a mortgage for 8 days a month. I would tell my company to come up with a plan otherwise I'd quit traveling so much. Again, this employee must be worth it.
3) So it didn't work out. You never know until you try. It's not like they can't sell them later as offices ready to go and make money back.
Bottom line: yea I think some of these things are outrageous, but your company doesn't. They ARE spending money on employees, just not directly. If people still work there, the salary can't be too bad. If everyone up and quit citing the low salary then maybe they'd reconsider. Why pay you 100k/yr if you'll work for 80k? Basically they've figured out how to pay you enough to keep you working there but not so much that they can't use the money other places they deem necessary. Life isn't fair.
I seem to pick companies willing to burn money on new sales reps for a year than get rid of them. So I picked up a nice paycheck and benefits for a year, only to land on the street after 12 months. It's happened to me twice in the past 5 years and both were either Forbes 500 and/or Fortune 500 companies. Both had similarities, sold mature products and were hoping with more feet in the street they could sell even more. After a year of flooding the country with new sales reps and no increase in sales they moved to a new plan of the month that did not include me and many of my co-workers.
At my last position they spent $200k on a state of the art piece of analytical equipment (UPLC) used it for one year then transfered the project it to another group across the country with a different instrument (LC/MS) and that instrument sat there unused the final year I was there (they still payed a great deal for the service contract on it).
This is the same place that were loathed to offer benefits to their workers and used temp agencies to rip everyone off. I guess some companies are so screwed up their size and momentum is the only reason they don't fail.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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It's cheaper for them to fly someone around and pay for hotels than to hire additional people and rent space in other locations so that's easy to understand.
When it comes to the work space changes, someone gets a bright idea that they think will improve productivity and they try it. That's a one-time cost unless it fails and they have to change it back, but increasing salaries is an ongoing cost. Depending on the number of employees, over many years the pay increases will cost them hundreds of times more than some construction.
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