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.
Honestly I never did this in the past 20 years of work. Maybe a few office parties outside of work hours. But the whole “Have your boss or subordinate over for dinner” BS was never my thing.
TBH I truly think it was a boomer invention that died in the 80s, because nobody I know ever did anything like this willingly.
This is about happy hours and networking events. Lots of people did that.
Ah that’s fair.
Yeah had a few of those. They were always carefully written as “optional” but it was definitely a Convo piece of you didn’t show up.
I typically showed face for an hour or two, had one beer, sucked up and left. Which is what I’m assuming everyone else did too
I fought my boss over one of those voluntary gatherings. I had shit to do. He said it’s optional but if I want to get ahead I should go.
I did not get ahead.
That was for a different time and era when company loyalty was a thing. When you intended to work for a company for decades, forming relationships with your boss actually meant something.
Nowadays employees are just disposable assets, so why bother forming deep bonds with your coworkers?
And back when your boss might actually also be the owner of the company - especially through the 50s and 60s, the person you worked for in the factory very likely could OWN that factory, and so having a decent relationship with them made it easier to approach them with modifications that might make a worker’s day easier, without the hostility of a strike.
Now, since every company is basically owned by some conglomerate, looking to sell to some conglomerate, or is about to get swallowed by some conglomerate, things like “labor relations” are dead. You can’t talk directly to your boss about maybe making sure the factory line has proper guards in place, because the guy who he has to talk to in order to make that decision is having brunch in Paris or meeting with some world leader today. Even if they could, the company bean counters already ran a cost-benefit analysis that showed that the loss of limbs and the payouts and fines they’d deal with for having no guards in place would only be 34% of the profit they’d make from increased production capability or whatever.
The day I was hired at my current job, my boss’s boss “made” me promise I’d work there for a decade lol
Not every job sees you as disposable. Leave those jobs until you find one that appreciates you. I’ve found 2 (out of my last 4) in a decade, but they’re out there.