Office happy hours, client dinners and other after-hours work gatherings lose their luster as more people feel the pull of home
Patience for after-hours work socializing is wearing thin.
After an initial burst of postpandemic happy hours, rubber chicken dinners and mandatory office merriment, many employees are adopting a stricter 5:01-and-I’m-done attitude to their work schedules. More U.S. workers say they’re trying to draw thicker lines between work and the rest of life, and that often means clocking out and eschewing invites to socialize with co-workers. Corporate event planners say they’re already facing pushback for fall activities and any work-related functions that take place on weekends.
On one hand, I’m a bit bummed out that my generally positive workplace culture has all but completely evaporated in the wake of the pandemic and nobody wants to even come in to the office anymore, let alone mingle or hang out after work. I genuinely enjoyed the company of a few of my co-workers and even though I was definitely a 5:01-and-done kind of guy, I would still make an effort to be friends with the ones that I liked outside of a professional setting.
On the other hand, I absolutely cannot blame anybody for not wanting to put in the social effort. For a long time I was a “fuck it, it’s quittin’ time, I’m out of here!” person and I would blow out of the office after flatly rejecting my co-workers requests to hang after work because I just didn’t like to socialize that much back then, and I would resent people who were pushy about going out for drinks or staying out really late at night. Despite the fact that I do enjoy doing those things now that I’m older, I don’t want to be “that guy” to anyone else, and I refrain from judging anybody for declining to socialize after work. Maybe they are introverted and shy? Maybe they don’t want to catch COVID? Maybe they have a kid to go home to? Maybe they just don’t like my company and they want to go home and read a book or something? Whatever it is, it’s none of my business, so more power to those people.
I kind of have similar vibes. I joined a company months after acquisition with a long 2 year migration to joining the mothership standards. During that time beers were opened at 4pm on Thursdays for team knowledge share sessions that carried over into happy hours that had a company tab for the first round. In this environment ive made lifelong friends, served as groomsmen and pallbearers for colleagues that I befriended, but also accelerated my career by making professional relationships with folks beyond the sphere of my immediate work duty relationships.I do think there was a “terroir” of conditions that made it work. I don’t think it can easily be replicated. But it kind of bums me out that the current work culture described in the post basically blocks this from ever happening again. I don’t think I’ll be able to informally provide the mentorship and guidance that I so greatly benefited from when I was young and new to the now new generation, or cultivate friendships like I used to.
My company is similar (although there’s still people trying to organise things) but while things changed over the pandemic, they were already planning on full hot desking and reduced floor space (lucky for them they’d just implemented the infrastructure for large scale WFH as the lockdown began). The sense of a “Team” has completely gone, the majority of people I work with are based in other parts of the country or even overseas, going to a social event at my local office would just be mingling with people I don’t know, don’t work with, and only have the name at the top of our paychecks in common. So I don’t bother, and they wonder why.