I know that we have posters from all over the world here so I thought it would be really interesting to see what you guys think of this and how this workplace culture differs from your own.
I'm in the UK. There's an increasing thing happening over here - particularly among companies that like to think of themselves as 'trendy' and following in the footsteps of companies like facebook, apple and innocent and focus on building an internal culture among their employees. On the one hand this is great! Theoretically employers are finally starting to treat their worker-bees like people and working to build a sense of community within their corporations - to try and make everyone who works there feel like part of a big happy family.
Realistically this basically equates to quasi-compulsory 'social time' - aka lets all hang out together after work and get drunk. There is a dark side to this however, which is that anyone who doesn't want to take part in this after-work 'fun' is looked on as someone who is not a team-player.
I have personally experienced this, and it's the side I'm curious to hear your views on. I worked at this company who was in the Times top 25 companies to work for 2015/2016. The CEO saw himself as a social visionary. We were lauded for being innovative, with lots of incentives to keep employees motivated. Things like cycle schemes to help you buy a bike, free massages during working hours (once a month), friday socials and hackathons, and huge summer parties that were more like festivals. It all sounds amazing on paper, doesn't it? They had a small office in London which is where I worked, and a huge office in another city in the UK. It were a very young company, so most employees were between 18 and 30. The company was like a little bubble - it was their world - their social sphere: people met their other halves there, they all worked together, ate lunch together, hung out together after work, even lived together in flatshares.
You could view this culture in one of two ways:
1) Woooow this is AMAZING!!! these people are so cool!!! I'd love to be part of a family like this
2) holy sh** what is this, a cult?!
If you're anything like me, work is work and you have a life outside work. No matter how great my colleagues were I personally didn't want to spend my entire life with people I work with. I have my own friends and family that I want to hang with after work, or just have some alone-time to do chores and relax. However this wasn't a good enough excuse. The only way you weren't guilted into going to the pub was if you had small children to get home to. I don't drink because I'm allergic to alcohol, so going to a pub after a long day at work to watch people I don't really care about get increasingly drunk and trying to convince me to essentially drink poison is not my idea of fun. They always went out for drinks on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and I went to a dance class on Tuesday and Thursday evenings with my friends; so to me it was a no-brainer. I see these people every day, obviously I'm going to choose to see my friends twice a week.
The company had an AGM in the big office which was 3 hours away. Attendance was optional because it started at 4pm. It meant 6 hours of travelling in a day to sit in an auditorium for 5 hours being told about what we did that year, and not getting home until midnight. My colleague and I had a ton of work we had to do. He wanted to go home after work to support his wife who had just had their first child. My mother was having some health problems and I wanted to get home and call her and see how she was. We both basically had our bosses tell us that we were going whether we wanted to or not. I also didn't go to the summer party because a relative was having a heart bypass, and to me family is more important than a job.
My 'resistance' to going to company socials was seen as a huge issue and was actually brought up in my half-yearly review. Apparently by not attending socials and after work drinks I was giving off the message to my colleagues that I wasn't invested in the company, or the team, that I didn't like them as people and didn't want to socialise with them. I already worked at least 2 hours overtime every night that I wasn't getting paid for, and on top of that I was being forced to go to a pub? I'm sorry, but since when did having to be besties with colleagues become part of a job description? You are there to do a job - it doesn't matter what you think of your colleagues as long as you are pleasant to everyone and get your job done on time and done well - when the clock strikes 6pm your life is yours. But I was actually told that I had to be more social outside work!?!? What the actual F?!?
I am not the only person who has experienced this culture of 'compulsory socialisation' at work and thinks it is messed up. I'm hearing about it more and more from friends who are exhausted all the time because of the pressure put on them by workmates to go out drinking every night after work. My boyfriend recently turned down a job for £10k more money, because he got the very strong impression that that place was a similar thing, and didn't want to be sucked into this cult-like way of working. You should hang out with people because you want to not because you are made to feel that you have to.
Is this something that is limited to London? or is this a culture that is happening in other places? Do you think it's ok? or do you think it's unhealthy?