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Comment by creepydata | Hacker News Reader

10 hours a week on teambuilding seems extremely excessive.

The thing is, many people don't want personal relationships with their co-workers, they want business relationships with their co-workers. Forcing employees to socialize with each other means you are excluding those people who don't want to socialize with their co-workers and those who don't have much in common with their co-workers, or even those who don't like their co-workers on a personal level. This seems pretty obvious, but only in retrospect.

I also don't understand what "understanding motivations" means.

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I would love to be in agreement with you but my experience has taught me differently. Social relationships are business relationships. There isn't a way to separate the two. If you don't like someone you work with directly eventually one of you will leave if you both are working two closely together. The tension could also cause other business problems in some form or another over time. 9 to 5 doesn't work for everyone.

For some people working different schedules is what works for them. What about that type of inclusion? Inclusion of those who don't want to do the standard 9 to 5 and those who do want to socialize with each other.

I think there is a tendency for individuals to do 180 on business-related processes every time a new article comes out about some business is doing X and it appears to be successful for now.

When times are rough having a social relationship will help keep the business part of the relationship in tact. Things will not always be easy and there will be rough patches and stressful situations. It's also helpful to meet and get to know people in other departments before you need them for something.

If you work in any kind of large organization with lots of departments and moving parts you will need to know now to navigate the organization. Social situations allow you a chance to build relationships with people working on other parts of the business that you may or may not need help with later on down the line. People have to socialize with each other to get work done. It's not an option to not have at least a somewhat social relationship with someone you work with closely. It's not realistic.

Yes, I think it's helpful to understand someone else's point of view(and/or motivations) and where it comes from. Knowing these things can stop you from being offended by something that may be said or done that wouldn't otherwise be considered offensive. Many times you will already know how someone will react to certain situations and decisions as well as figure out ways to effectively navigate that.

Its easier to get a co-worker to care about and help you with your problem if you have some common ground with a co-worker or some social capital. A "business only non-social" environment means you have a whole bunch of people working who ultimately undermine each other.

You wind up with duplication of effort etc... I've had people tell me flat out tell me they don't want me to tell them the solution to the problem they were having that was already solved because they wanted to figure it out by themselves. This type of "business-only" competitive attitude is wasteful of the businesses time and money. This happened at one company I worked at who was steadily laying folks off while this sort of wasteful behavior was happening.

All in all trying to take the people out of the people in my almost 10 years of experience doesn't actually work out well and can actually be wasteful and hurt the business.

Complete and utter nonsense.

Business and personal relationships can most certainly be separated, it just takes the right mindset and the willingness to set personal boundaries. However, if you are telling your employees "come in in shorts, drink beer, don't leave the office, we are all just friends here" you're intentionally putting up barriers to forming that mindset.... You don't have the same sort of relationship with your dad as you so with your spouse as you do with your best friend as you do with your good friends as you do with an acquaintance as you do with a stranger. This is normal.

Learning to work well with people who you don't particularly like is a skill. One that is learnable. Children have problems with it but adults should know better and if they don't know better they should be fired and replaced with people who can act like adults. "Working well with others" is something one is taught in kindergarten, it is mandatory for the workplace.

There's plenty of people I don't particularly like that I work with, that I know I wouldn't get along with on a personal level but I don't have issues working with them. People who I hold very, very different core values from me and people who have fringe political beliefs. But I don't have issues with them at work. I wouldn't want to socialize with them though.

Avoiding offending someone is easy, it's called avoiding saying offensive things or things "considered offensive," otherwise known as "being nice to others." Once again, we learned this in kindergarten.

If nobody is helping you with business problems unless you are friends or have "common ground" you have a very, very dysfunctional organization and it needs serious help. Even worse if everyone underminds each other. Not being friends with a coworker is not an excuseable reason for undermining them and at that point you are dealing with an office full of psychopaths and children. Forcing them to socialize with each other isn't going to fix the larger core issue.

What about customers? Do you need to 'get to know' your customers personally before you can work with them too? I'd imagine that would be a huge barrier to new customer acquisition. "Sorry, we can't give you a quote until we 'know your motivations(?)' and get to know your pets names. Meet at the pub at 5?"

The toxic workplaces you have described have nothing to do with a lack of coworker socialization.

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