Today I’ve decided to tackle a subject that’s obviously proving divisive, given the discussions I’ve had recently on the subject: that of socialization at work.
Sociability: proof of engagement, a prerequisite for collaboration and a remedy for loneliness
It’s often said that the workplace is a place for socializing, or at least it should be.
What could be more normal than not to socialize at work? It’s a mark of politeness, a sign of interest in others, even the only way to make the office a livable place, or even to survive in it.
Socializing is a prerequisite for collaboration, for “working together”. But are we sure? I’ve long wondered whether collaboration requires, if not emotion, at least the existence of interpersonal bonds, and an empirical assessment of my experience has led me to revise my initial prejudice on this point (Is good collaboration technical or emotional?)
“those who show the most openness towards others are not the ones who collaborate the best and those who seem the coldest, the most distant, can excel in collective work and the mastery of behaviors, routines, techniques and postures that it involves.”
Socializing is also a mark of engagement, perhaps the most visible without being the most relevant (Employee Engagement: Illusion of Performance or Real Impact?) if we look on the bright side, a means of making employees dependent for some (What the loneliness of some remote workers really tells us) or even isolating them from the outside world in an almost sectarian way for others (After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again) if we want to look at the dark side.
Bright side? The dark side. Every business has its own practices, and it has to be said that, depending on its culture and its managers, it can tip over to one side or the other.
What seems to be changing is that employees are taking note of the situation and protecting themselves by saying “it’s just a job, I’m here to do it well and I have my social life outside the business”.
A natural need to lower one’s mental load
“This final movement marks the start of a working day as pleasant as a splinter under a fingernail, with each day off slightly easing the pain. Barely seated in your ergonomic chair, back bent in the direction of a screen, Marc comes to call you because you must immediately join this budget meeting: i.e. cramming several people behind a single MacBook to talk via Zoom to the only two people who are at a distance because they have a dentist in the early afternoon. No one can hear each other, and everyone ends up exhausted. With only one thing to look forward to: the lunch break.
I’m a fervent practitioner of lunch sitting at my desk, alone. In 2024, it’s the only quiet time in the office when no one is going to come up to you and say “Is this a bad time?
The lunch break is the last bastion available at work for a moment’s mental pause and respite, before ending up in the toilet. The last inviolable sanctuary. But I believe it should be kept as a last resort.”
(“Let me have lunch by myself at my desk!”)
Here we have the case of a person for whom eating alone is the only way to lower his mental load in the middle of a nervously exhausting day, to recharge his batteries.
Almost a form of professional and mental hygiene ?
Is he antisocial? Disengaged? After all, we’re talking about an executive.
No, he’s looking for the optimal balance to be both nervously and intellectually available, and can you blame him?
What would we say if he ended the day exhausted, unable to concentrate or make a decision, or even in a bad mood?
We all have our physical and nervous limits , and you can’t blame an employee for knowing his or her own and reacting to a well-known plague (Digital Infobesity: When Collaboration Tools Degrade Productivity, QWL and Amplify Mental Workload).
After all, the question is nothing new. “In 2010, Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google, shared a concern with the world: “Every two days, we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003. I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening soon.”“.
But also :
“Having the discipline to step back from the noise of the world is essential to staying focused. This is even more important in a highly politicized society that constantly incites our emotions, causing the cognitive effects of distractions to linger. ” (In a Distracted World, Solitude Is a Competitive Advantage).
A protective reflex
For others, the challenge is to protect themselves from a corporate culture and focus on their own performance :
(Tribune: “I’m no fun at work and I assume it”)
“I’ve always worked in investment banking. Jeans, sneakers and sweatshirts were outlawed except on Fridays, when we went out to relax. The truth is, we weren’t cool. I didn’t mind, though, because I’ve never really been cool at work. Since graduating, I’ve split my personality in two: at home, with my friends or family, I’m the first to party, to make lame jokes, and I’m known as the person you can call at any hour to do a favor. At work, it’s just the opposite. Why is that? Because I quickly realized that the people I met in this context were always interested in something.
It started in high school, when my mates systematically copied my answers to maths tests, and continued when they asked me to proofread and correct their dissertations when we were in business school. They’re my friends, I chose them for the right reasons and I was happy to help them. What I didn’t accept was that this logic was then transposed into the world of work with people I hadn’t chosen. Very quickly, I saw that my bosses and colleagues were appropriating my ideas and my successes”.
Where I work today, the logic is quite different. Everyone is constantly extolling the virtues of the business that wants to improve employees’ working conditions and transform relationships between colleagues into genuine friendships.
It’s nice, it humanizes relations between colleagues and it’s easy to be seduced by this kind of atmosphere. But don’t be fooled: while there’s a friendly atmosphere on every floor, hierarchy is still just as important even in this kind of organization. Horizontality is nothing but a decoy: employees are led to believe that they can take part in the business’s major decisions, and yet, with little or no explanation, one international market is closed to open another, budgets are cut and a job opening is abandoned because it has been deprioritized . Moreover, information is no less top-down… “.
A legitimate (?) withdrawal movement that has virtually turned into a vaccine, as the author admits:
“ And what if I’d rather change? I don’t yet know if I’m capable of being the toddler on duty or ready to take yoga classes with my colleagues during my lunch break, but maybe I just need to put a little water in my wine to fit in a bit more and see if I reap the rewards.”
Again it’s not so much a natural trait of the person or maybe a minor train but a reaction exacerbated by a business context and in the end a behavior that takes root.
I won’t even mention the many people with whom I’ve discussed the subject and who’ve told me “I’m an introvert, I love my job, I’m super invested, but too many unnecessary interactions make me uncomfortable and I’m fed up with people pointing the finger at us”. An indirect way of evoking the elephant in the room: social pressure and its weight as a lever of proof of engagement.
In fact, at a time when we’re talking so much about inclusion and acceptance of difference in the workplace (because that’s what it’s all about), there are employees who suffer from mild autistic disorders, who we don’t even see, some of whom never even talk about and may not even be aware of, but for whom spending time with people is a real suffering, even if hidden. 1% of people maybe, but 1% nonetheless.
We’re talking about perfectly normal, high-performing employees, who are only criticized for not showing what is a sign of engagement, because that’s what we’re talking about.
In fact, although there are no real figures on the subject, but observations, impressions and discussions confirm it, there clearly seems to be a movement, perhaps slight but real, towards less socialization in the business, coming from the employees themselves, whether on site or remotely, and perhaps even worsened by the forced return to the office according to my theory of suffered versus chosen moments, which means that you can appreciate spending time with someone, or even desire it, but hate having it imposed on you all day long. But this doesn’t seem to go hand in hand with disengagement (which has already been high for a long time anyway), simply a desire to reduce the intensity and/or quantity of social relations in the workplace.
In any case, the simple fact that more and more employees are daring to talk about it, to speak out, to write about it and to demand it, makes it imperative that we take an interest in the subject.
Why do we want to reduce social ties in business?
Where does this come from? A number of factors can be put forward.
Firstly, there’s a shift in personal priorities: many workers are seeking to make a clearer distinction between their professional and personal lives, preferring to limit social interaction at work to preserve their time and energy for outside activities necessary to their balance (After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again).
Then there’s teleworking, which is often blamed for the risk of isolation , even though I tend to think it reveals more than it causes (What the loneliness of some remote workers really tells us). The rise of remote work, accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has reduced opportunities for informal interaction between colleagues, leading some to become accustomed to a more isolated work environment (Work from anywhere: what impact on social relations at work?) or to seize the opportunity to develop healthier, longer-lasting ties outside the professional sphere.
Finally, there are misalignments with corporate culture. Divergences between employees’ personal values and the business culture can lead to social disengagement. It is worth noting, however, that in France an employee dismissed for “cultural misalignment” after refusing to take part in business events deemed inappropriate won his case in court (Can a senior employee be dismissed for “cultural misalignment”?). A harmful misalignment, perhaps, but in no way reprehensible.
The issue is not to blame or promote this or that behavior, to favor those who are comfortable with the historical doxa to the detriment of others, but to allow everyone to flourish.
But between the cultural and managerial shortcomings of businesses and the need to take into account each individual’s way of operating (unless we accept the stigmatization of certain personalities and profiles as an official management and HR practice), it’s very difficult to blame employees.
In fact, a recent study shows that loneliness at work is no more attributable to employees than to remote work, but is quite simply due to organizational factors of which employees are the victims (We’re Still Lonely at Work).
What may appear to be disengagement is in fact more often than not no more than a healthy reflex of self-protection, and the consequence of organizational dynamics.
Bottom line
What if the answer to all this wasn’t to take differences into account, to better integrate people according to who they are, and also to correct what’s not working in business culture and management?
When it comes to socialization in the workplace, there’s no such thing as “one size fits all” – everyone has their own point of balance – but rather the difficult task of taking everyone’s needs and personalities into account. That’s what a more inclusive workplace is all about.
Image: workplace socialization by GaudiLab via Shutterstock.
