Patience for after-hours work socializing is wearing thin
wsj.com
wsj.com
Work is a job. If you want to make it a social life, go for it. But let it be your decision.
I've had work situations in the past where many of us were friends and still in contact years later. But, don't let it become your life.
> This summer Goldman sent an invite to 100 colleagues for casual after-work drinks at some picnic tables just outside the office as a goodbye party. She was taking a new job with the federal government. Fewer than 10 showed up.
Maybe don't have an event where people have to BYOB at work?? If I'm doing a going away thing I'm going to a pub.
Additionally, weed doesn't cause hangovers or its not a validated side effect, a little brain fog for some.
There is very little “I used to be an alcoholic” or “I’m pregnant”. No excuses necessary and most people don't need one. It’s normal enough not to matter.
People are content avoiding it as a carcinogen as it is for basically every organ in the digestive tract. On the carcinogen front and weed consumption, many people aren’t smoking their weed (or not primarily or not often), they use edibles or drinks too.
So there’s a burgeoning shift in patterns, but its common enough for it not to just be recovering people that garner the imagine of being sloppy at one point. Very well adjusted people are just not interested.
But its not just weed as a competitor. I run into completely sober people too, they just never started anything and aren't interested. No religious thing, no belief system. People from multiple different circles. I go out with an in shape woman and there’s a non-negligible chance there’s no vice.
My patterns going out haven't changed much, but I’ve stopped buying six packs. Its made a surprising difference, I appreciate it.
Drinking culture has largely changed for the better and I think workplaces are safer than they used to be. But I also think you'd have to be an idiot (or risk-blind) to get loose at company events like a lot of people used to do.
People getting loose at parties used to mean harassment and it was deemed ok because "men are being men" but it was never ok. Just treat people as they deserve whether you're drinking or not and there's no issue to be had.
I don't think I regret anything I ever did or said while drunk (unless you mean 'taking that last drink that will kill me tomorrow' and in this case, I regret an Irish coffee I knew was too much).
The vast majority of the people at a drink up could handle it, but occasionally there would be the one troublemaker (and it was always the same person, although not always everytime) that simply couldn’t read the room, or couldn’t control themselves.
At official or unofficial drink ups, I’ve seen:
Someone have to have their keys taken away.
Someone have their keys taken away, and then bite — literally, angrily bite — the coworker that took them before running off into the night.
The worst event, I didn’t see happen, but saw the aftermath of. Someone got in a car (hopefully theirs), and proceed to jump the curb of the traffic circle in the office park and ram — and destroy — a nondescript abstract sculpture that was owned by whoever owned the office park.
I believe the last person was fired. Hopefully, that person got help, because that could not have been the first time for a trick like that.
Interestingly enough, all these events happened at the same employer. And yet, I still think fondly of those drink ups (though, not those instances).
We live in a surveillance culture today. And those photos and videos will haunt you wherever and whenever you are in the future.
Yeah we get it. People like to treat work as "work", and not deal with overwork, socialization, RTO, micro-managing, etc.
you're not speaking for those people who need reminding about it, depending on their circumstances.
There is no "we" when making a single post.
But there's so much negativity in these comments. Does everyone here despise casual time with their coworkers or what?
Despise? No. But, the decision isn't spend time with coworkers or don't spend time with coworkers. It's spend time with coworkers, or spend time with family/friends. I pick the second option. I'm already spending 40 hours a week with my co-workers. Let me spend the few remaining non-busy, non-tired hours I have with my friends.
But, what do I know. I never go out of my way to spend time with people I don't have a shared interest with anyway. So maybe I'm an exception.
1. After work activities are voluntary 99% of the time (even “required events” I’ve personally skipped many times)
2. I prioritize my family over everything (leaving jobs over work-life balance), but that doesn’t mean having time out of work with co-workers is necessarily bad
3. I tend to value my coworkers as friends and have even invited some to weddings, etc. I don’t think it’s all that odd to have fun outside of work
All that being said, I also hate cutting into family time. But not everyone has a family or solid friend group, so activities through work are probably a good thing
And they never will, if they stick around at work after work.
After I got married, I understood what everyone was too nice to tell me. Hey, you're cool and fine, but... no, thanks. After my daughter was born? I'm spending all my time with her, except for the times my wife is happy that I go play basketball or tennis so that I don't fall unhealthily out of shape. It is crazy how quickly my switch flipped after marriage, and then flipped even more extreme after having a kid.
If the socialisation time is always outside work hours, then yeah, people with young kids will basically never come.
Why is that the only way?
> Does everyone here despise casual time with their coworkers or what?
What’s with the trend to hypernormalize human agency and preferences?
Why are alternative approaches to life forbidden? There seems to be a religious like statefulness in people where we see a typical human and assume “they must be like me, and they’re being negative if that’s not true.”
Well, you don't want to ask people to donate time. You don't want to disrupt work too much either and it shouldn't be mandated. A loud mixer mid day for people who really can't spare the time can be distracting.
I think you’re just going to annoy people who would rather go home and people who would rather use that hour to work.
But.. if socializing is important why not do it during office hours?
This feels like the end ya'll; another scary nail being driven in. I'm in a top 10 city in the US. At least half the establishments used to be open till midnight every night, and now the city is going to sleep at 10:00. The meetup scene has collapsed; the industry has literally no social functions left for people who do want to opt in to hanging out & shooting the shit & swapping tales. The city center is dead as shit; no chance to swap stories & mingle there. My work division used to do trivia and board games and happy hours and all sorts of other things, but we've lost headcount and lost critical mass & lost the social drivers; now it's so hard to get people to do stuff. Tonight was a pretty nice all company happy hour and almost no one from my division was interested. It was a great night.
I've been at places where a lot of people had to really plan & make sure it was ok for them to do social activities; home or other commitments kept them busy. But every place I've been, folks have been eager to hang out, even if just for a bit. Sometimes there've been slowdowns but the resistance now feels new & difficult, unprecedented to me. I know I'm over-projecting my current experience, but I can totally see & immediately grasp where we are a as a crisis point, where common bonds & worthy good cameraderie - not corporate run, top down edict, but genuine bottom up socialization - happens. I don't know what the world looks like if we lose these cohesion points, if we stop having exchanges.
There's a lot of good reasons for negativity & skepticism. There were real costs. But fundamentally I think that view is twisted, that it is wretched & sad to not acknowledge & embrace the opportunity & to recognize the upside. The world has, in my view, become far more quiet & isolated, & not all workplaces are great, but I hope many people have had good workplaces & good colleagues & can recognize some merit to having better than formal at-will as-necessary purely-industrial relationships. I don't want work me to just be a robot.
In my opinion it wasn't worth it, but this seems like a minority opinion . It's so important for innovation and career growth to have these opportunities.
At-will employment cuts both ways.
- Nah, I’m not into hybrid class warfare
Company occasionally runs an optional dinner/entertainment night with food and drinks paid for. And I'm happy to participate.
Who is saying that? I don't despise my job or coworkers, but I'd rather spend time with my family after work. I don't really have that much free time so I prioritize.
And… if they truly want to see me ? Select a work day, do it during the work day. Current job host a seminar during the work hour, with a one night out on a hostel on Thursday. Not a week end.
But if the company is planning something after work hours? I consider that to be a "team-building" activity, a part of my 8 hour work day.
You are replaceable at work, but not replaceable at home.
The tradeoff to being always available to work is there's no "after work" time anymore; jobs have already claimed all the waking hours.
It's a matter of setting boundaries. If you do work whilst not getting paid, the beneficiary is not going to correct your error. The only way you get them to pay for 24 hour availability is by not working 24 hours each day for free.
If you're actually valuable and it's actually required they will work out a deal with you to compensate you for it.
They'll usually just deal without it, maybe with some abusive passive aggressive grumbling.
If they're unreasonable, they will do you a favor and end the business relationship.
If you constantly refuse to set boundaries with your employer because "if I do they'll fire me", you will reduce your effective hourly rate immensely. Don't do that. It makes them respect and value you way less, too, because you aren't valuing your own time - why should they if you don't?
Its structure is hierarchical, but the world has become a hyperconnected network. Underlings might have much more interesting networks than their bosses. In theory this should be putting lot pressure on what "orders" can flow top down. Its like pushing circus animals, trained to perform ever diverging niche tricks the whole day, into a common space and hoping connection happens. Its not going to happen. The circus is an abnormal space for connection.
It does not take any extra time and people end up get a longer lunch than usual.
Office culture, like the rest of culture, is cyclical. People are reactive, and tend to move in herds. Given an intense external stimulus like the pandemic, we should expect to see waves of behaviors propagating out through time for at least the next few years.
During the pandemic, nobody was in the office, so right after the pandemic, there was a boom in office socialization (in some quarters). Now, apparently according to WSJ, the pendulum is swinging back. This isn't indicative of very much, except that there was a big shock to the office-work social system and it's still not stabilized.
In particular, it's not especially suggestive of what the steady state will be, once these perturbations diminish.
I think we probably have several more back-and-forth cycles around everyone-works-from-home! vs. 40-hours-in-office-or-bust!, before the market works out what the relative value is (to the employer and the employee) of having people in the office and paying for a physical office for them, vs. the flexibility of working from home and of having a potentially international hiring pool. There are benefits and hazards for both parties in either arrangement.
My personal feeling, just based on how the job market has tended to stratify in the past, is that we'll see multiple approaches within each industry/sector, based on how fundamentally creative the work is.
The organizations in a particular sector who are really pushing the boundaries of that industry, who are actually advancing the state of the art, will likely be in-office cultures, because nobody has yet found a substitute for in-person communication particularly as it applies to creative problem solving. But those will represent a small tip of the workplace iceberg, sitting atop (and demanding higher rates than) a larger volume of companies whose work simply isn't that fundamentally creative or challenging, and have to compensate by offering flexible / WFH arrangements, and actively court the employees who are more interested in work-life balance than in working in their industry's version of the Manhattan Project.
Past boss was like that, big parties and then stabbing you in the back. "but we are a team, right? we drink together". Nah.