What’s the most important dev tool you can buy? A Foosball table.
At Compare The Market we use a range of great high-quality dev tools. I feel completely spoiled by the set of tools placed at my fingertips. Even still, one of these tools towers above the rest.
It’s the tool that leads to the greatest returns on productivity, better than my top of the line MacBook pro; better than my heavily customised editor; better even than my badassified shell
And here it is:
That’s it, I’ve not uploaded the wrong photo. The best dev tool that I can recommend is a foosball table.
Before you write me off as mad hear me out. Below are three reasons why a Foosball table really is the best dev tool that money can buy
1. Foosball builds teams
We’ve all been on those cringy team building days, companies literally spend thousands trying to get their employees to gel.
If you want to know why they do it you just have to think about your own working relationships. Think about a time you’ve worked with someone you just click with. Now think about a time you’ve had serious friction with another college. If you’ve experienced both, then you know exactly why creating teams that work well together is so important.
We’ve all heard the phrase “those who play together, stay together”. It works for teams too, Teams who play together work well together. What better way to play together than to play than Foosball on your office Foosball table.
2. The key to productivity is to take a break.
It might feel like when you are under pressure from a high workload that a break is the last thing you could want — that couldn’t be further from the truth. Studies have shown that even short breaks can drastically improve focus over a long period like an 8-hour workday.
This is an important point because often the lazy assumption is that employees taking time to do ‘fun’ things like Foosball or a PlayStation are ‘slacking off’ or being unproductive. The truth is that these employees are often more productive as a result of their break.
The ‘Social’ element of Foosball is key as well. Employees will encourage others to come and play with them. This means that everyone is taking appropriate breaks.
3. Foosball makes people happy.
Great news you have some fantastic developers working for your organisation. Once you’ve hired them, the difficult task begins: keeping them.
It’s a task that no business should ignore. It costs over £30,000 to replace an employee. High turnover rates in organisations can also be disruptive to core tasks and projects. Knowledge and context can be lost as key employees leave the company.
now I’m not suggesting that one table can fix all your companies staffing problems, but even a 1% improvement in employee happiness can make the difference between an employee staying or leaving.
In conclusion
What this post has been trying to get at is this: the way we work is a key part in a company producing high quality code. A tool that improves our way of working is therefore just as, if not more important than a tool that helps us write code. A foosball table does this in three ways:
- It builds teams
- It improves productivity
- It improves employee engagement
