Forced "fun" in the workplace

Worked in a business with a sports day. Didn't go to the first one and there were lots of questions asked. The next year their insurer told them to stop, thank feck, or else I'd have never lasted the seven years I did there.

Hopefully he sends the managers a bottle of cheap wine and a thank you card 🥳

I remember working for a company in the UK and they were insisting I get up on stage and sing and dance and tell jokes. Threatened to fire me if I didn’t. I went straight up to my boss and said “What the fúck? Do you think this place is Butlins???”

Unfortunately, it actually was.

Leaving aside the case described in the OP, I think the "need" to attend work fun events is often partly a perception - people are insecure and want to impress so when the boss says "the Christmas party is good craic, you should attend", they interpret that as an instruction. To make matters worse, the employee's malleability and openness to suggestion may result in them being marked out as weak, facilitating subsequent bullying.

I've seen this in workplaces with new staff who felt pressured into going to a Christmas party (which was paid for by the employee) and later admitted that they felt like an idiot for doing so.

This sort of stuff doesn't work on me - one advantage of being bullied and an unsociable weirdo in school is growing a pair of balls and becoming relatively immune to peer pressure at a young age.

Wouldnt mind escaping up her tunnel...

Get out.

That Secret Santa bollocks, pizza parties, sports Jersey day. The previous place I worked in used to do all that kind of crap.

Had forgotten the Secret Santa bollox. Had that in a job I was in about ten years ago. Very female orientated office- bitchiest place i ever worked. There were ones that I thought were bff’s…- 6 months later they were stabbing eachother on the back.

Thankfully that was my one and only Christmas there. The Xmas party was also an almost “compulsory” night away thing in athlone.

we have "spirit weeks" complete b*****x we have a people director also a waste of space. also hr and talent management. again no idea what they do. we get free t shirts with company slogans again a waste of money . we have a client centricity program instead of well actually looking after clients. just waiting for the house of cards to collapse really.

Good night out surely involves a shag

To be fair, it always improves a night. But I don’t see the point in sleeping with an office randomer just because of the festive season.

I was once in a job where we had a meeting on Monday to discuss goals and a meeting on Friday to discuss how the goals went for the week.

The problem was you had to pick two work goals and two personal goals. Work goals - grand, no issue. Personal goals ended up being "I will try to eat healthier" , "I will try to go for a walk at least twice this week", "Im going to get a haircut" - it was pathetic. All irrelevant bullshit and in the name of team building/bonding or whatever. It didn't last long for me anyway

Personally I have zero tolerance for any of that cr^p and always just say NO to all those extra curricular activities. Fortunately I'm really good at my job and valuable to the company, so they leave me alone and never create any drama about my non participation in such events.

I've never heard such bullshyt in all my life.

And I've heard some bullshyt....

Whoever unquestionably imported American office culture, unquestionably, into this Country, wants bloody shooting.

The workplace competitive drinking sessions are starting to grate. This year I've started excusing myself from them. I'd rather drink with people I choose to drink with and at my own pace.

I worked for an Irish company for about 6 years, which was then taken over by a British multinational crowd at the beginning of 2020. Horrible altogether. They had this in-house system that would, at the start of each month, e-mail you a list of 6 employees from anywhere in the world. You were obliged to contact these staff and then rate them based on your experience. At the next month’s company meeting, the employees who got the best ratings were revealed, as well as naming and shaming those who didn’t do it. I remember on one occasion that I got the company CEO in the UK. He never even bothered to get back to me, but he wasn’t called out of course!

I lasted about 8 or 9 months before jumping ship, It was a busy enough job without wasting my time on social crap.

😂 That was hilarious but would they invite Brian on these kind of bonding sessions?

I see you added me to your enemy list again, Brian. You’re not supposed to use the office intranet for stuff like this.

Ah lads, you would hate my job! First, most of us work remotely - that's an important point.

We have morning stand ups for a half an hour four times a week. We spend the first 15 minutes talking socially, partially in a our office's second language, which we are all either proficient in, or are studying, and then we move onto work topics for the second half. Our work is fairly dynamic, and our team is small enough, so we could have new projects landing or updates to projects that concern us on a daily basis.

We have a social 30 minute morning call with our partner on the day that we don't have a stand up, and then we have a team lunch that day for an hour.

We have two other social calls with other teams once a week. One of them is from 5.30pm to 6.30pm, so it does eat into our free time a bit, but also into our working time. We chat and play games remotely on this one. I usually go to this, and we have a bit of craic. The other one I actually don't join because it's mostly made up of people from a different location, and they end up chatting about stuff going on in their office. I just stopped going to those after sitting silently and working in the background while trying to look semi-interested on screen.

Then we have buddies. We all have a randomly assigned buddy, who we chat with at least a week.

The we have the walking and talking call once a week, where we all go out for a walk, go grocery shopping, whatever, for an hour, while chatting. That's across about seven different teams and we get split into groups of four or five. I'd join this one maybe half of the time.

The Christmas party is something that we're very much encouraged to attend. Very few people don't go, unless we have a valid reason. We also have a Christmas team dinner, and we are travelling to, and staying at, our office location for two nights for these. We tell clients that we cannot travel to them on those days, because being on office site is the priority.

We have an annual two days away during summer (Thursday, Friday), where the days are split between presentations and activities. I missed last year's for a valid reason, but it was very valid. Nothing frivolous like cousin Susan coming to visit would be an accepted reason to miss this.

In my last job, we had weekends away twice a year where you really were expected to attend. Skiing in the winter, and bbq beside a lake in the summer. All paid for, and that's great, but I wasn't into a weekend away sharing a room with one of my colleagues.

But, for my current company, most of this stuff is built in purely because we are all working remotely, and I have to say that I see the benefit. The remote working was put into place because of Covid and many of us weren't around in this company pre-Covid when people actually worked in the office and would get to know each other with casual chats during the day or over lunch.

I was talking with one of the guys from another team recently who doesn't have the morning calls, or lunches, and he felt very isolated from his team. There are other ways around this, but I would miss our calls now if we didn't have them. Sure, I don't want to be best friends with all of my colleagues, but it's nice to have a relationship with them, and we all genuinely like each other on my team. We have a very fair working environment, if we have personal appointments, etc., there's no problem with taking them during the day, as we are all adults and we know what work needs to be done and are trusted to do it. If we had to miss a call because of work, that's absolutely fine. If, occasionally, we were working late and wanted to skip the morning call for a sleep instead, that's fine - we'd get caught up on anything important work-wise afterwards. We're strongly encouraged to take lunch and breaks, as the hazard of getting glued to your work when working remotely is widely acknowledged. I'd much prefer this to a clinical environment where we're expected to sit at our desks 9-1 and 2-6, and have no communication outside of work only.

Actually, edit to add, we try not to do overhours, unless really necessary, and where we do we get either x1.5 in money or in time in lieu. x2 if it’s after 10pm, or on weekends or public holidays. Travel time is included in this. We can’t sell our holidays either (as we could in previous jobs), so you really do take them. It’s not the worst place I suppose!

this video is fitting here I think.