The text is unreadable anyway. From what I gathered I think it's missing the point, which is that pizza parties are for social bonding. You don't get that by handing out $20 to the employees.
I think it's also missing something pretty critical here - giving each employee $20 could be seen as kind of insulting, whereas combining each employee's $20 into a pizza party at least looks like a grander gesture
> From what I gathered I think it's missing the point, which is that pizza parties are for social bonding.
I think you missed the whole point.
The point of pizza parties as exemplified in the article was to commemorate purely monetary milestones. Your boss rakes in a few millions, and all you get is a pizza that you need to share with coworkers? That's bullshit.
But hey, some people like the bones that their boss throws at them.
To quote Don Draper: that’s what the money is for! You already get a pre-negotiated salary and maybe a bonus plan, why is there an expectation of more money that nobody agreed upon?
> why is there an expectation of more money that nobody agreed upon?
Sorry, that's a bullshit excuse to avoid having to pay employees.
The very blog post from this discussion explicitly touches the issue of perceived value. Everyone seeks to maximize the value that they generate from their work. That's why salary is the single most important factor in deciding whether a job is worth it's and that is why yearly bonus and salary reviews are the single most important factor in retaining employees.
Why is anyone trying to fabricate this idea that getting paid is not the single most important reason why most of us work?
What? Nobody is arguing that companies should avoid paying employees. How are you reading that?
For the overwhelming majority of jobs, you get paid only what's in your contract. If that number is not enough, fine, renegotiate it if you are able. But employers cannot be expected to pay you more than you're entitled to.
> What? Nobody is arguing that companies should avoid paying employees. How are you reading that?
What? You're making those claims. You're coming with bullshit excuses like "expectation of more money that nobody agreed upon". This blend of bullshit talk doesn't pop up when some unexpected event hits and everyone is suddenly expected to "be a team player", and crunch time hits and the boss expects everyone to "go above and beyond". You better believe this investment road goes both ways. Being a team player means getting a share of all team wins, and a cold slice of pizza ain't it.
> For the overwhelming majority of jobs, you get paid only what's in your contract.
You're talking like yearly bonuses or performance reviews don't happen, and no one receives paid bonuses ever. Why are you pretending that employees don't get compensated by the value they create?
GP's point likely is that, by taking a salaried job, you're agreeing to take a low-risk, steady income. You do that, because you don't want your take-home pay to suddenly drop or disappear because the company had a worse month or quarter, or because you had a worse week. But this cuts both ways - you trade away the risk, you trade away the reward, so if the company has an excellent financial quarter, you're not entitled to any extra money because of it.
What? No, it does not. If I create value for my employer, I better be compensated accordingly. If I don't then my employer is very quick in firing me. I can even be a top performer and get the axe, as the recent firing wave hitting FANGs demonstrates.
You keep your cold slice of pizza. I need to get compensated by the value I created and being forced to join bullshit HR events is not a compensation.
You signed the contract that said “you get paid X amount for Y work or better.” If you do Y+1, then obviously you get paid X. There was no clause on the contract you signed that you got paid proportional to your work, only that you got paid for doing a bare minimum of work or better.
If you believe you should be paid proportional to your work, then do freelancing or have your own company. Just don’t cry over a contract you willingly signed and didn’t read.
You get a salary everywhere you work. Do you do volunteer work for a living?
If I explicitly and directly work on something that makes my boss richer, you're damn sure I want to be rewarded by the value I brought to the company. The salary is what I charge to be in the building, but if I get my employer to actually hit a compensation milestone you're damn sure I want a cut of it, and a warm feeling inside that my boss is richer along with a slice of pizza mandated by HR is absolutely not it.
> From what I gathered I think it's missing the point, which is that pizza parties are for social bonding. You don't get that by handing out $20 to the employees.
If your company passes a major financial milestone, yes, it's time to celebrate - but it should also be a time to hand out a bonus to those who made it possible in the first place.
At every place I've worked that had bonuses, the rules and structures for them where very precis and documented and decided on at the top level. Didn't matter how well our department or division did, the bonus structure couldn't be altered. If/when my boss wanted to reward us specifically for a job well done, his only tool was to buy us food and take us places.
If you're buying me pizza, just let me eat in my own little corner... I could care less for "elevator talk" schmoozing, because you're probably buying the pizza only because I saved your ass from getting fired.
A manager can almost always directly pay for pizza from the petty cash account with no problems.
Getting salary improvements involves HR and all dots go budgeting and such.
Now what might be moderately interesting is giving managers the permission to raise salaries by pizza amounts. Eve $5 a week maximum is only $260 a year but I wouldn’t complain.
A manager can generally just decide to take his team out for dinner and spend $100 pr. person without issue. They most likely cannot hand out a $100 cash bonus to their team because they feel like it.
Part of that is the IRS can crawl very far up your company if there is unreported wages; but nobody really bothers about bonus meals even though technically there may be tax implications.
Indeed. Paying my $100 restaurant bill costs the company ~$100. Making sure an extra $100 shows up in my bank account costs a lot more than $100 due to taxes.
>Cash is generally intended as a wage, and usually provides no administrative burden to account for. Cash therefore cannot be a de minimis fringe benefit. An exception is provided for occasional meal or transportation money to enable an employee to work overtime. The benefit must be provided so that employee can work an unusual, extended schedule. The benefit is not excludable for any regular scheduled hours, even if they include overtime. The employee must actually work the overtime.
> Meal money calculated on the basis of number of hours worked is not de minimis and is taxable wages.
(this stuff is why some managers will just buy pizza for everyone from their personal money, and never bother expensing it, paperwork is not worth it)
To me, the key phrase in this article was "most organisations still subtly force people to show up under the garb of networking and engagement and even fun."
There's the issue to me. Have all the pizza parties you want, but I hate the undertones that you're not a team player if you don't show up to a voluntary function after work hours.
I love networking events on company time - feels like great two way value. But put it into the evening and all of a sudden you are bumping up against my time with my family (and my hobbies). If the value is there for me, and it isn't too regular, then I'll certainly go to something out of hours, but if it is purely a social then the pay off becomes harder for me.
When I was younger though (and child free), I'd jump at these sort of events, and loved them. A company I used to work for wrapped up about 6pm, except Friday when you were still expected to be around until 6, but there were beers and soft drinks plus snacks from 5pm. Most people would still end up talking work, and plenty of us would still be there talking work (in various guises) until 7pm or later, and would carry on to the pub to do the same if we fancied it. But I loved the fact it started in 'working hours' and that the snr staff would all get involved. Was a great icebreaker and helped move silos between teams and departments.
Now I'm older, if it is outside of working hours, I have to see the benefit in it for me.
> When I was younger though (and child free), I'd jump at these sort of events, and loved them.
I think this is the key point. After hours parties only focus on one demographic (young and/or without children). Some non-zero percentage of the workforce will not fall into this category. People organizing such parties should not be surprised that such people don't show up.
The after work hours must be a culture thing. There's no way you get anyone to show up at a pizza party at work, on a Friday evening, unless you invite peoples families and give two months advanced notice. Kids need to be picked up no later than 16:30 (maybe 16:00), partner get of work at 17:30. You could be ready to go at around 19:00, but that's bedtime for the kids, so now you need a nanny... That seems like a lot of work for a free pizza.
Same here. In my experience, pizza parties mean a break from work accompanied by free food. I guess this just goes to show that some people will complain about anything -- even if you don't like pizza, what's wrong with getting an extra break from work with management approval?
Now, some companies do have after-hours holiday parties, but those generally feature a higher level of food than pizza -- also booze.
Those aren't nearly as common as they were years ago, though (too much liability from the booze factor, I reckon).
I still don't know why HR loves having pizza parties, it seems like it's management who loves it. The article could use a bit of editing, it's rather difficult to read.
> Amit Sharma, currently an HR leader in a multinational IT consulting firm, who has dealt with employee rewards for more than five years, said there is a golden rule for any benefit. If it doesn’t fall under the three categories listed below, always pay cash.
> If the “perceived value of the benefit is greater” than what the company pays it should be a benefit. For instance, health insurance is usually expensive, so, if a company offers it, employees value it more.
If a company wants to “give a message” using a benefit like a concierge service (travel bookings and tours) it sends out a message: Just focus on work. We’ll take care of the rest.
Wellness-related benefits showcase a firm's desire to promote healthy habits.
> “So, if a Pizza party is for engagement with no clear objectives, it is a waste of money. Just pay the cash. But if it serves a purpose then they should consider it,” Sharma said.
English is not my first language, but this seems harder than average to understand. I'm curious if native speakers have the same difficulty, or it's just me.
It is very strangely structured, but it isn't nonsense.
> said there is a golden rule for any benefit. If it doesn’t fall under the three categories listed below, always pay cash.
When looking to give something to employees that is not a raise of their salary, you should meet one of the following three criteria and if you can't then default to giving them a cash bonus.
> If the “perceived value of the benefit is greater” than what the company pays it should be a benefit. For instance, health insurance is usually expensive, so, if a company offers it, employees value it more. If a company wants to “give a message” using a benefit like a concierge service (travel bookings and tours) it sends out a message: Just focus on work. We’ll take care of the rest. Wellness-related benefits showcase a firm's desire to promote healthy habits.
Money can buy things but not all the things -- convenience, the ability to buy as a group, leveraging connections that an organization has are all things that are more valuable to an employee than cash, and they will realize this.
> “So, if a Pizza party is for engagement with no clear objectives, it is a waste of money. Just pay the cash. But if it serves a purpose then they should consider it,” Sharma said.
If you want the employees to hang out with each other and use pizza to pretend it is a benefit and not a forced engagement, then you are going to be disappointed because employees are not stupid (even though you were in charge of hiring them a bunch of smart ones slipped through), so just give them cash and they will appreciate that and not feel like you are treating them like suckers.
Well, it simply doesn't answer the question of why employees hate pizza parties.
We get some anecdata about one person who didn't want a pizza party and would have preferred cash or coupons.
The rest of it is just some waffle about what some HR people think, and some wild speculation that it's because senior people get an ego boost from it.
You're failing to reject the thesis, and somehow are presuming employees like this sort of HR-mandated afterwork get-together.
I repeat: what leads you to presume this is something employees enjoy? I mean, is it conceivable to you that any random person prefers to be forced by HR to attend an event on their own personal time instead of spending it with their loved ones, or even doing something they love?
If you can convince everyone else at your shop that nobody perceives pizza parties as valuable they’ll stop offering them.
Until then, these sorts of low cost rewards deliver value. Only you can fix this. Only you can ruin pizza parties for everyone.
The reality is that they’d offer nothing given the choice between something real and something like a pizza party.
No number of pizza parties equals an annual bonus that matters. So enjoy the small things. It’s what's available. The rest is between you and whomever authorizes your promotion/bonus budget.
Which employees hate pizza parties? You get to knock off work for an hour and eat a bunch of pizza. I mean, good work should be incentivized and rewarded with money, and if it's not, that's a separate beef. Don't take that out on the pizza. The pizza did nothing wrong. Give me the pizza!
There are many ways to ruin this, like using a very cheap and bad pizza place. Garbage food might not matter to a 25-yo, but it would matter to me. People with severe allergies to any pizza ingredient are also pretty much excluded, you usually can't rule out contamination. Some companies do this after work, unpaid, and pressure people into staying late. One company I was at used to make important decisions over a pizza dinner in the evening and if you didn't stay, too bad, decision already taken, you just won a new project.
Nobody invited me to one of those pizza parties. The employees+bosses parties I attended were all at regular restaurants and we split the bill. Pizza/pastries is always on premises as an apology for unexpected overtime or a farewell to some employee leaving.
Edit: oh and I forgot those quarterly parties that I and three more buddies that were working in a customer's offices used as a way to launder the unused food tickets.
At a place I used to work we had optional "pizza parties" as a reward for employees during work hours. Then many people started grabbing pizza and going back to their desks to work, or to head out for a break, etc.
Management got upset that people weren't staying in one place to eat and talk, so they made it mandatory to stay in the room for anyone that was eating.
It was pretty clear then that the pizza wasn't a reward for employees, and was something intended to achieve some other purpose (e.g. teambuilding, work discussions, etc.).
I'm fine with pizza. Just don't make it into "reward" for completing anything and it is fine. I sure would rather talk with colleagues and eat something for last hour or two of work rather than work.
People are different. Extroverts love social activities at work and introverts hate them.
Extroverts are estimated to be anywhere from 50% to 74% of the population. That coupled with the fact that employees are less likely to quit a company that they have social engagement with in the office means pizza parties aren't likely to go away anytime soon.
When I was working at this place https://www.karnovgroup.dk/ which used to be owned by Thomson Reuters (so I was there for transition), HR decided to do some outreach to accountants - one of the groups that those companies provide services for of course - after which the HR representative came and shared the anecdote that one accountant stood up during the party and announced "We didn't become accountants because we like people!"
So maybe the people in these pizza parties just don't like people.
Pizza-parties during work hours are fine. What I have a big issue with is the after-work team-building parties you're peer-pressured into where you have to spend your free time with people you barely know (because you work with 10 people and there's 100 or 1000 people in your company) and pretend to have fun doing random stuff with them.
It's only a thing because managers are rarely introverts.
I worked for a medium-sized local company that had ice cream parties. Everyone loved them. They'd hired a local vendor and we'd all go down and get free ice cream and chat. Everyone was happy.
Later on in my career, I worked at JPMorgan at a tech center and they brought in a local ice cream food truck. I was like great, it's hot out and ice cream would really hit the spot. So I stood in line with hundreds of other people for about 30 minutes or so (which was honestly was just too long, but sunk cost fallacy, etc...) and I got up to about 3rd in line. Then I heard someone say, "It's not free ice cream, you have to pay for it." I was like, no way, that's crazy. Why would they advertise an ice cream party where everyone has to buy their own ice cream? So I stayed in line and sure enough, it was like $6 or so for some ice cream. I didn't buy any, I just walked away.
Imagine one of the world's most wealthy corporations being so cheap that they set up an ice cream party but have the employees pay for it themselves.
The bigger question is: Why are there 17 "everything" pizzas, two sausage and pepperoni pizzas and one only cheese pizza for 100 people? And the first 15 people eat the three simple pizzas.
I know! It’s so annoying. Why are we catering so much to the couple of weirdos that can’t just enjoy a normal pizza like everyone else?
Get a bunch of pepperoni, some cheese, and a couple of weirdo ones. I hate showing up to these things a few minutes late and all that’s left is some “white pie” trash or a pizza with so many toppings that it’s incoherent and soggy.
I mean fine maybe get some kind of vegan gluten free thing but honestly if you’ve made those choices you sort of sacrificed pizza. Don’t make everyone else suffer. Or give them a salad.
I already said to include cheese pizzas. Adding some with a variety of vegetables introduces unnecessary scope creep. Now it becomes which vegetables, etc. Vegetarians can have cheese pizzas.
You need to keep it simple otherwise you’re back where we started. Most people like pepperoni pizza. Most everyone else is covered with cheese. Vegans can eat a salad.
The way this kind of thing is distributed is a power law. There’s a thin tail of weirdos but most everyone fits into the pepperoni/cheese dichotomy. We over optimize for the thin tail of weirdos and this is why we have 30 variations of pizza most people don’t want and only a few good ones that get hoarded immediately.
Why must we all suffer because a couple people decided to be difficult?
What? I love pizza parties. I love events serving pizza.
Problem is, where I live the industry got infected with a bullshit fitness/healthy eating virus, and all the events I used to like now serve fruits and salads.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadI think you missed the whole point.
The point of pizza parties as exemplified in the article was to commemorate purely monetary milestones. Your boss rakes in a few millions, and all you get is a pizza that you need to share with coworkers? That's bullshit.
But hey, some people like the bones that their boss throws at them.
Sorry, that's a bullshit excuse to avoid having to pay employees.
The very blog post from this discussion explicitly touches the issue of perceived value. Everyone seeks to maximize the value that they generate from their work. That's why salary is the single most important factor in deciding whether a job is worth it's and that is why yearly bonus and salary reviews are the single most important factor in retaining employees.
Why is anyone trying to fabricate this idea that getting paid is not the single most important reason why most of us work?
For the overwhelming majority of jobs, you get paid only what's in your contract. If that number is not enough, fine, renegotiate it if you are able. But employers cannot be expected to pay you more than you're entitled to.
https://salesandmarketing.com/psychology-behind-unexpected-r...
What? You're making those claims. You're coming with bullshit excuses like "expectation of more money that nobody agreed upon". This blend of bullshit talk doesn't pop up when some unexpected event hits and everyone is suddenly expected to "be a team player", and crunch time hits and the boss expects everyone to "go above and beyond". You better believe this investment road goes both ways. Being a team player means getting a share of all team wins, and a cold slice of pizza ain't it.
> For the overwhelming majority of jobs, you get paid only what's in your contract.
You're talking like yearly bonuses or performance reviews don't happen, and no one receives paid bonuses ever. Why are you pretending that employees don't get compensated by the value they create?
What? No, it does not. If I create value for my employer, I better be compensated accordingly. If I don't then my employer is very quick in firing me. I can even be a top performer and get the axe, as the recent firing wave hitting FANGs demonstrates.
You keep your cold slice of pizza. I need to get compensated by the value I created and being forced to join bullshit HR events is not a compensation.
If you believe you should be paid proportional to your work, then do freelancing or have your own company. Just don’t cry over a contract you willingly signed and didn’t read.
If 95% of my income is salary, don’t expect the same motivation out of me as the CEO.
And the salary I receive every month...
You get a salary everywhere you work. Do you do volunteer work for a living?
If I explicitly and directly work on something that makes my boss richer, you're damn sure I want to be rewarded by the value I brought to the company. The salary is what I charge to be in the building, but if I get my employer to actually hit a compensation milestone you're damn sure I want a cut of it, and a warm feeling inside that my boss is richer along with a slice of pizza mandated by HR is absolutely not it.
That is the definition of having a job. Why do you think you are asked to do things at your job?
If your company passes a major financial milestone, yes, it's time to celebrate - but it should also be a time to hand out a bonus to those who made it possible in the first place.
I always just pretended to like those only for the sake of keeping my employment.
Getting salary improvements involves HR and all dots go budgeting and such.
Now what might be moderately interesting is giving managers the permission to raise salaries by pizza amounts. Eve $5 a week maximum is only $260 a year but I wouldn’t complain.
is the IRS going to actually care? probably not, unless it was systematic and notable, but see: https://www.irs.gov/government-entities/federal-state-local-...
>Cash Benefits
>Cash is generally intended as a wage, and usually provides no administrative burden to account for. Cash therefore cannot be a de minimis fringe benefit. An exception is provided for occasional meal or transportation money to enable an employee to work overtime. The benefit must be provided so that employee can work an unusual, extended schedule. The benefit is not excludable for any regular scheduled hours, even if they include overtime. The employee must actually work the overtime.
> Meal money calculated on the basis of number of hours worked is not de minimis and is taxable wages.
(this stuff is why some managers will just buy pizza for everyone from their personal money, and never bother expensing it, paperwork is not worth it)
There's the issue to me. Have all the pizza parties you want, but I hate the undertones that you're not a team player if you don't show up to a voluntary function after work hours.
What kind of party is it if you aren't paying me to be there?
When I was younger though (and child free), I'd jump at these sort of events, and loved them. A company I used to work for wrapped up about 6pm, except Friday when you were still expected to be around until 6, but there were beers and soft drinks plus snacks from 5pm. Most people would still end up talking work, and plenty of us would still be there talking work (in various guises) until 7pm or later, and would carry on to the pub to do the same if we fancied it. But I loved the fact it started in 'working hours' and that the snr staff would all get involved. Was a great icebreaker and helped move silos between teams and departments.
Now I'm older, if it is outside of working hours, I have to see the benefit in it for me.
I think this is the key point. After hours parties only focus on one demographic (young and/or without children). Some non-zero percentage of the workforce will not fall into this category. People organizing such parties should not be surprised that such people don't show up.
Now, some companies do have after-hours holiday parties, but those generally feature a higher level of food than pizza -- also booze.
Those aren't nearly as common as they were years ago, though (too much liability from the booze factor, I reckon).
> Amit Sharma, currently an HR leader in a multinational IT consulting firm, who has dealt with employee rewards for more than five years, said there is a golden rule for any benefit. If it doesn’t fall under the three categories listed below, always pay cash.
> If the “perceived value of the benefit is greater” than what the company pays it should be a benefit. For instance, health insurance is usually expensive, so, if a company offers it, employees value it more. If a company wants to “give a message” using a benefit like a concierge service (travel bookings and tours) it sends out a message: Just focus on work. We’ll take care of the rest. Wellness-related benefits showcase a firm's desire to promote healthy habits.
> “So, if a Pizza party is for engagement with no clear objectives, it is a waste of money. Just pay the cash. But if it serves a purpose then they should consider it,” Sharma said.
English is not my first language, but this seems harder than average to understand. I'm curious if native speakers have the same difficulty, or it's just me.
> said there is a golden rule for any benefit. If it doesn’t fall under the three categories listed below, always pay cash.
When looking to give something to employees that is not a raise of their salary, you should meet one of the following three criteria and if you can't then default to giving them a cash bonus.
> If the “perceived value of the benefit is greater” than what the company pays it should be a benefit. For instance, health insurance is usually expensive, so, if a company offers it, employees value it more. If a company wants to “give a message” using a benefit like a concierge service (travel bookings and tours) it sends out a message: Just focus on work. We’ll take care of the rest. Wellness-related benefits showcase a firm's desire to promote healthy habits.
Money can buy things but not all the things -- convenience, the ability to buy as a group, leveraging connections that an organization has are all things that are more valuable to an employee than cash, and they will realize this.
> “So, if a Pizza party is for engagement with no clear objectives, it is a waste of money. Just pay the cash. But if it serves a purpose then they should consider it,” Sharma said.
If you want the employees to hang out with each other and use pizza to pretend it is a benefit and not a forced engagement, then you are going to be disappointed because employees are not stupid (even though you were in charge of hiring them a bunch of smart ones slipped through), so just give them cash and they will appreciate that and not feel like you are treating them like suckers.
We get some anecdata about one person who didn't want a pizza party and would have preferred cash or coupons.
The rest of it is just some waffle about what some HR people think, and some wild speculation that it's because senior people get an ego boost from it.
Not worth your time.
Why do you presume employees like pizza parties?
What leads you to believe that HR-imposed mandatory, non-paid gatherings after hours are something enjoyed by employees?
Those who already want to gather after hours to socialize are already doing it, without needing HR to be involved.
I repeat: what leads you to presume this is something employees enjoy? I mean, is it conceivable to you that any random person prefers to be forced by HR to attend an event on their own personal time instead of spending it with their loved ones, or even doing something they love?
Just pointing out that for those people who are passionate about pizza parties and whether employees like them or not, the article is not helpful.
Until then, these sorts of low cost rewards deliver value. Only you can fix this. Only you can ruin pizza parties for everyone.
The reality is that they’d offer nothing given the choice between something real and something like a pizza party.
No number of pizza parties equals an annual bonus that matters. So enjoy the small things. It’s what's available. The rest is between you and whomever authorizes your promotion/bonus budget.
Or just switch jobs. Tends to be easier for everyone involved.
The only value these events generate is the Potemkin stuff: providing a dedicated crowd to a higher-up, and marketing material for HR.
Edit: oh and I forgot those quarterly parties that I and three more buddies that were working in a customer's offices used as a way to launder the unused food tickets.
Management got upset that people weren't staying in one place to eat and talk, so they made it mandatory to stay in the room for anyone that was eating.
It was pretty clear then that the pizza wasn't a reward for employees, and was something intended to achieve some other purpose (e.g. teambuilding, work discussions, etc.).
Extroverts are estimated to be anywhere from 50% to 74% of the population. That coupled with the fact that employees are less likely to quit a company that they have social engagement with in the office means pizza parties aren't likely to go away anytime soon.
So maybe the people in these pizza parties just don't like people.
It's only a thing because managers are rarely introverts.
Please just stop.
Later on in my career, I worked at JPMorgan at a tech center and they brought in a local ice cream food truck. I was like great, it's hot out and ice cream would really hit the spot. So I stood in line with hundreds of other people for about 30 minutes or so (which was honestly was just too long, but sunk cost fallacy, etc...) and I got up to about 3rd in line. Then I heard someone say, "It's not free ice cream, you have to pay for it." I was like, no way, that's crazy. Why would they advertise an ice cream party where everyone has to buy their own ice cream? So I stayed in line and sure enough, it was like $6 or so for some ice cream. I didn't buy any, I just walked away.
Imagine one of the world's most wealthy corporations being so cheap that they set up an ice cream party but have the employees pay for it themselves.
Get a bunch of pepperoni, some cheese, and a couple of weirdo ones. I hate showing up to these things a few minutes late and all that’s left is some “white pie” trash or a pizza with so many toppings that it’s incoherent and soggy.
I mean fine maybe get some kind of vegan gluten free thing but honestly if you’ve made those choices you sort of sacrificed pizza. Don’t make everyone else suffer. Or give them a salad.
You need to keep it simple otherwise you’re back where we started. Most people like pepperoni pizza. Most everyone else is covered with cheese. Vegans can eat a salad.
The way this kind of thing is distributed is a power law. There’s a thin tail of weirdos but most everyone fits into the pepperoni/cheese dichotomy. We over optimize for the thin tail of weirdos and this is why we have 30 variations of pizza most people don’t want and only a few good ones that get hoarded immediately.
Why must we all suffer because a couple people decided to be difficult?
The profits are obviously very many times the cost of the pizzas, for one thing, let alone the unpaid overtime of attending.
They should at least be thrown during working hours, and preferably accompanied by a meaningful financial bonus.
Problem is, where I live the industry got infected with a bullshit fitness/healthy eating virus, and all the events I used to like now serve fruits and salads.