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.
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.