I WFH, every year one of the goals that the rest of the team decides is that it’s “so great” to see each other in person. The past few years haven’t worked out but one did. I spent hours in a couple of airports, the huge expense for the company, I spent days away from my family, and for what? So you could look me in my same face you would see if we turned cameras on every once in a while? My husband says I’m being weird, but I legitimately want to know, what is the benefit? I hate being there and have to play nice so you can…look me even closer in the face?
Its nice to meet the team, start nornal conversations not necessarily bound by work.
Getting to know the people in a way video calls rarely can fscilitate.
BUT how often depends on the team, the distances, the company, and most importantly how often this happens.I really like my WFH, but its not a full WFH job, so we meet for important events like sprint planning every few weeks.
But thats only 1-2 hours away and most of the commute is long distance train, so i can work that time and still get paid.
Its nice seeing the team and other people in the company i would have never seen, it could be a bit less for me, maybe once a month would be better…I also think many people only have their work colleagues as contact and little real friends to meet with outside of work… after all one is paid and theother time you have to maintain your life constantly.
Some people really like in-person socialization. There’s something lost in the webcam only meeting. I’m glad you adapted well to the circumstances of the pandemic, but not everyone faired so well. I can tell ya I went a lil bonkers not being able to see people in person.
Fared
We’re social animals, socialization benefits us. WFH is better overall, but meeting up now and again has clear benefits.
Just commented here, and the anti-social folks seem to disagree, even though I’m mainly agreeing with them. Go figure.
How you felt, going bonkers, is roughly how many introverts feel being around people. So, the three years that introverts felt good in the history of… forever, many of us would like to keep that. I just ask that extroverts respect how shitty the workforce is especially for introverts and maybe try to get their social needs met in their personal life and not demand that work time also fit only their needs. At the expense of others.
As an introvert, as much as I feel weird aroind people, I feel even weirder video chatting with people I’ve never met in person. In that situation, I have no idea how to read people and the expectations are way harder to try to meet. This makes meetings even worse until I meet them.
While I agree that forced in person work daily is insane, the OP is complaining about meeting people in person once after many years, which feels equally as ridiculous. IMO even for widely dispersed teams, meeting a few times a year seems ideal.
Some people do not care about reading people or meeting expectations of people at work. They just want to do whatever is strictly necessary to get some money to live, and then get away from the whole thing.
They may not care, but reading people and meeting expectations of your colleagues is pretty much a bare minimum level of functioning for most professional positions.
I’m a massive introvert and would love to not have to rely on those social aspects of work, but they undeniably make me more effective at my job and make life easier in the long run. It’s no different than physical exercise or any of the million other things in life that might be a bit unpleasant but are ultimately good for you.
Well… no
As long as you don’t get fired, there’s no need to do any of these things, if you literally don’t care what happens at your job, then there’s no need to be effective or anything like that. You don’t need to be liked, you don’t need to care what your coworkers think, you just need to do enough work that it’s useful to employ you.
Some people need to be around others, some people hate it, some people are indifferent. Everyone is different.
I find social interactions very draining. While others find being isolated draining.
I think we are likely in the minority but that doesn’t make us weird. No one is normal.
Social interactions are totally draining for me, but I cannot understand a person until I had a face to face communication with them.
Same here. I am introverted and I hate social interactions. It drains me. BUT for me, after talking and meeting a person face-to-face a few times, all the rest of the online communication becomes a lot more smooth-sailing.
Thanks for posting that. I find social interactions pretty draining as well, and default to email or chat whenever possible, but your post made it click in my head that even a quick video call with a new (or old!) colleague makes later communications feel so much easier.
I’m in the same boat as you. It’s a waste of time for me, but others seem to need it.
It’s worth noting I have autism though. So social interactions don’t do much for me.
I realized in fairly early adulthood that I have traits that would have gotten me an Asperger’s diagnosis pre DSM changes so I relate.
Spent years making quarterly trips from outside Indy to upstate NY - somehow the boss thought it was good for morale or something.
What it was good for was reminding me how much I disliked that individual as a human being in general, and why I needed to GTFO there.
I share the same opinion as you. My job is mostly remote, but I am required to come to the office (2 hour drive away) once every month or two (which has mostly come down to company meetings once every 2 months).
On the bright side, they book me a hotel room and compensate me for gas and wear-and-tear on my car, but pretty much when I get there, it’s a normal day with a scrum meeting almost first thing, which we do virtually almost always anyways, and then the same work I’d be doing at home, just at a cubicle. We sometimes go out for a group lunch, but most of the time we’re on our own (I don’t really eat lunch so I just grab a coffee), and then we have the company meeting which could 100% just be done virtually. My only real interaction with anyone in the office is greetings when people walk in and that’s pretty much it.
I’m with you, I really don’t see the benefit, and I know I can’t complain much because it’s not very frequent, but it’s still 4 hours of driving (which btw, I think I’m expected to not count as “work time”) and it doesn’t benefit me or anyone else I see anyways.
I think everyone just pretends to be honest. They’re a few fucking weirdos who enjoy waiting 5 extra hours for their delayed flight and having to rent a car to drive to some conference that could have been conducted virtually and all that other bullshit, but I’m fairly confident that most people would prefer NOT to do that and to simply wfh. Webcams are fine with me. I have friends. I have a wife. I have a family. I don’t need to see work people in real life. It literally adds zero benefit to my life. Also a lot of people suffer from chronic pain like back problems. Commutting and flying and sitting 8 hours a day in some piece of shit ergo chair from 1988 is literally torture for them. Work culture has no sympathy for disabled people. They can go get fucked. Work from home for life all you motherfuckers.
I’m the same way. I’m not anti-social, just picky with how I spend my time and with whom. I guess it’s more of a reflection on my job, but work people ain’t it – meaning I wouldn’t be friends with most of them outside of work. As I get older, I find that I increasingly put myself first and have less tolerance for bullshit lol.
Yea. Exactly. There have only been a handful of work colleagues who i actually wanted to be friends with. I’ve disliked or been indifferent talking to 95% of the people I’ve worked with.
It depends a lot on the group of people, but sometimes introverts can prefer in person interactions. With online meetings, there’s usually one person in focus and that makes it harder to pop in and speak. With in person sessions, you can speak one on one.
It depends person to person, dynamics of the team, and the costs of meeting in person.
For example, this could be more true for younger team members who may not have a strong social network / a family at home
Yeah, I’ve met many people who literally have never spoken up in a meeting unless called upon… And then you meet them in person and they talk all the time.
Online dynamics are entirely different and it doesn’t work at all for some people.
But for most people it’s functional but much less so than in person. Humans were wired for in person interactions. Not just cropped compressed video of a persons face.
We do this sometimes but just people who live near the city lol! I can’t imagine doing a meet up where you had to fly somewhere and my company sure as hell would never pay for it!
Seeing everyone in person can be kind of fun because we can have a real conversation that’s not being monitored… We mostly talk shit the whole time lol
It helps with team building exercises that make you feel like a toddler.
We like it
It’s hard to trust someone I’ve never met. I don’t want to travel either but I want to understand the people I work with in a way that’s only possible when we share space.
It’s work. It’s not always fun but that’s too be expected.
Agree. non-verbal comunication and body language, sincerity, humour, reactions and building trust are all things that are much easier in person.
If you can have that with the people you work with then it can makes work easier in all sorts of ways.
Because I can’t seem to act the same remotely as I do in person. I have trouble reading the room and responding as expected.
Yep. In my review with my last boss, while transitioning to a new team, he noted that someone had said I should act more professionally. No idea what he meant! Never had such a thing said to me in decades of in-person work.
In person, we get a better feel for the emotions present. No getting around the fact that we evolved to be social animals. When the internet first became a thing, it was conventional wisdom that we were missing out on a lot of social cues by only communicating via text.
My company seems to have nailed it, so far. Mostly leaning on hiring local employees, but no mandate to come in. They can meet up, and that’s nice for many reasons. I’m starting to feel left out a bit, wanting to fly up there again, just hang out for a day or two, build relationships, learn about what people outside my team or working on or struggling with. Generally shoot the bullshit and make friends. Guess that’s passe now.
You sound like a Solarian
In The Naked Sun Isaac Asimov portrays a world focused on avoiding physical contact with other people. The Solarians interact with each other largely through technology. They live far from each other, spread out across a sparsely populated planet. People are taught from birth to avoid physical contact, and live on huge estates, either alone or with their spouse only. Face-to-face interaction (referred to in the book as “seeing”) is seen as a repugnant chore. Communication takes place through technology unknown of off their world: holography, 3-D television. Communicating with each other in this fashion is referred to as “viewing”, in contrast to “seeing”, which is face-to-face. Communication is frequent, but it is “viewing” of a transmitted image. 1
Go back to your caves of steel
I find it difficult to put my penis in people of I don’t see them in person and I want to put my penis in people.
The benefit is that there’s no practical benefit but they get mad when you point out that they’re just making you come in to sate either your busy body co-workers being terminally extraverted to the point where even just going to the bar after work doesn’t stroke them off hard enough, or to sate the middle manager’s wanting to squeeze you for in office metrics so the higher-ups stop asking what in the fuck the middle managers even contribute when the best the workers do is the time when it’s impossible for said middle managers to be metric squeezing them the entire day.
If I only ever have to see my team once a year, I take it as a win, fake it til I make it, pretend it’s amazing for flatter my boss and team.
Everyone would think I’m an asshole if I wasn’t positive and polite about the one whole day we are forced to eat fucking bagels together.
