Confession: I’m a huge dork
It’s hard not to feel like an enormous fraud writing this blog, when in my last two performance reviews at work, I’ve been dinged pretty hard for lack of social skills.
I just know that next time I’m out in public I’m going to make some ghastly gaffe, and someone’s going to tease me about it because I’ve set myself up as some sort of etiquette guru. Hell no. I’m a huge dork. It’s just that I’ve been a huge dork for so long that I’m starting to clue in to what I’ve been doing wrong.
So, to pre-empt anyone ragging on me for being less than perfect in my own etiquette, I thought it might be interesting to talk about those two performance reviews, and my own etiquette failings as communicated to me by The Powers That Be at my current place of employment.
The first time round, the big issue was over my communications with the Big Boss. See, from time to time the Big Boss would ask me for something, and I’d phone him for clarification or to tell him it was done or whatever. I cut straight to the chase, used as little technical detail as I possibly could in deference to his non-geek sensibilities, and tried not to waste any of his valuable time.
Seems I was going about it all wrong, and it had bugged him enough that he’d talked to my supervisor about it. See, the Big Boss was from a very different culture, both ethnically and in business terms. He’s from an Indian background, and I’m not sure how much bearing that has on the situation, but I’m guessing “some.” As for business culture, he’s the sort of guy who networks and socialises with other important business people and makes deals. Whatever part of his background it was (and I’m guessing both), it meant that he wanted to start out a phonecall with a few minutes’ social chitchat about the weather, the traffic, or what we’d done on the weekend. And here I was cutting straight to the chase because I thought he’d have no time to waste.
Apparently for business people, the ones who wear suits and shake hands and make deals, socialising isn’t a waste of time. Of course, this should have been more obvious to me if I’d stopped and thought about it for more than three seconds. And once it was pointed out in my performance review, I got the clue and started chatting to the Big Boss more.
I think it worked. At least, things seemed much smoother with him after that, and by the time performance reviews came round the next year, they found something else to ding me on.
This time it was that I didn’t socialise enough with my co-workers outside of the work environment. They raised three particular issues: that I hid in my cubicle in a back corner of the office away from most traffic, that I seldom went out for social lunches or drinks after work with co-workers even when visiting the other office, and that I hadn’t attended the company Christmas party.
Each of those things is defensible in its own right, and in fact I can get quite heated on the subject if you give me half a chance (I’m resisting womanfully right now, I promise you) but instead I’m going to at least try to step back and look at the big picture here.
Obviously there is some degree of extra-curricular social activity that is expected in the workplace. It’s not simply enough to do your job and nothing but your job. At minimum, you should be polite and friendly to people in your office, greeting them in the morning, swapping a little chitchat by the water cooler, or whatever else is appropriate to your situation. Any less is likely to cause offence.
Now, as for lunches, dinners, drinks after work, and company-organised social events outside of office hours, what’s the rule? Well, it varies by workplace and also by your position in the workplace. One of my supervisor’s criticisms of my behaviour was that more was expected of me because I was in a management position. To put it simply, socialising outside of work hours was an expectation for this particular job at this particular company, albeit one that wasn’t mentioned on my job description.
That sucks. It sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks. I have no words for how much it sucks. And it makes me mad. It’s stupid, and unreasonable, and who the hell do they think they are to tell me how I should spend my time when they aren’t even paying me? What am I, a slave to the company? If attendance at the company Christmas party was compulsory and subject to performance review, they shouldn’t have acted as if it were optional! If drinking after work with the guys was required as part of my job, then the bar is an extension of the workplace and I shouldn’t have to put up with sexist, offensive remarks. And the fact that, like some large proportion of all the geeks in the world, I have an attention deficit the size of Canada1, should have made it entirely unremarkable that I should choose a work environment where I can actually get work done instead of being distracted by every person who walks past.
Now I’ve stamped my little foot and had my temper tantrum, I’m still left wondering what the right answer is here. Obviously I wasn’t being sociable enough to keep my bosses happy. Obviously high tech companies expect more than just nine-to-five attendance from their staff. Obviously socialising with co-workers builds trust and understanding and smooths the way for workplace interactions.
And yet… there’s something out of line here. I’m concerned by the underlying idea that one should treat work, and the company, as the most important part of one’s life. That one’s co-workers should automatically be one’s friends. That one should subsume one’s own preferences and interests to the overriding company culture. That having other social priorities or pre-existing engagements or a family life or hobbies or health problems that detract from one’s ability to go out with workmates — or to work regular overtime, for that matter — is unacceptable.
To top it all off, I’m not at all sure that I would have been as strongly criticised for the same behaviour if I had been male. Because, let’s face it, nobody has very high expectations for social behaviour when it comes to guys at tech companies, but women are meant to just automatically do this stuff.
So I’m not sure I can pull a Miss Manners here. On the one hand, we should all exhibit basic standards of social behaviour towards our co-workers. On the other hand, our bosses shouldn’t be expecting us to give up whatever lives we may have.
What do you think?
Note 1: i.e. Really big (as long as we keep Quebec).
21 Comments so far
Leave a reply
At one company I worked for, the managers once decided to organize a ski
week-end, with ski teachers with diplomas in “team-building” and other
bullshit. This annoyed me quite a lot, since I just do hate snow, ski and
mountains. Moreover I had wife and kids and I wasn’t happy envisioning to leave
them a whole week-end, not getting enough time to see them during the week.
So I began to ask stupid questions like “am I going to have two days off
to compensate this ski week-end”. Of course not, replied the managers, because
this is not work, this is socializing with the team. And this week-end is
of course optional (requiring the employees’ presence would have been illegal)
but… it’s not going to be well perceived by the Company if you don’t show
up there and smile and be happy.
I figured out quite fast that this wasn’t a place for me to work in, so I
declined the team-building week-end and left the company. It collapsed a dozen
months later.
First, I just want to say… I’ve really been enjoying your blog, especially since it’s written by a fellow female geek. :)
I don’t think there’s any easy answer to your question. At my company, we’re fairly small, about 40 people in the office. There are quite a few people I wouldn’t voluntarily spend time with outside of work even if they paid me to. On the other hand, there are quite a few people that I do spend time with outside of work. In fact, I got one of my best friends a job here, and another person who works here has become a very close friend outside of work. There’s others in our little “clique” of about 8 that I’ve had over to my house for parties and such.
We go out to lunch every day and have pretty much told the office that it’s an open invitation for anyone who wants to come, and occasionally someone outside the clique will join in. Every once in awhile, like when someone is leaving the company, I’ll send out an e-mail to the company saying “We’re going to ____ for lunch today to celebrate ____. Anyone who wants to come, let me know in the next hour so I can make reservations.” Even the VP’s and CEO have joined us for lunch on some of these days (and it’s a great excuse for having a long lunch! :) ) This way, I’m being social, but at the same time it’s still pretty much during work.
Our company also sometimes closes the doors for a day and we go out together, like we once went to Dave and Busters, ate, drank and played video games all afternoon. I made sure to spend a little time with everyone there that day, but mostly hung out around the people I feel most comfortable with.
When I walk around the office, I always try to have a smile on my face and say “Hey!” to people as I pass down the hall, and also try to get to know a little something about most of my co-workers so when talking to people face to face I can say “So, Lee, won any bike races lately?” or ask the soccer mom about her kids, or whatever. I guess I’m in a good position to do this, since I do all of the “technical training” for every employee on their first day (here’s how to work your e-mail, here’s how to use the phone software, here’s your login and password, here’s how to check your e-mail from home). So, I try to make people feel welcome on their first day and that the IT department is their friend (unless they’re an annoying jerk… ;) )
At the same time, outside of the Christmas party, I don’t particularly care to do anything outside of my normal working hours, especially since right now I’m working about 60 hours a week. I try to have a good excuse ahead of time if, say, we’re all invited out for happy hour or something. If I do go, I put in some face time and then go to do what I want to. It’s a little harder when you’re single, because people will think “What could she possibly have to do that’s more important than this?” Well, honestly, if I want to go home and play City of Heroes all night, then that’s my business. Like I said, there’s a few people here I wouldn’t want to see for one minute longer than I’m required to (these are always the people that will corner you to ask why their home PC is broken or why you haven’t gotten around to fixing their very minor issue at work that day when you had a server outage or something else crazy. :p)
But there’s a political game you HAVE to play at work, sadly, even if your office is refreshingly free of office politics. My office is off as far in a corner as it can get, but I tried to make it a welcoming environment for when I do have visitors. A smile and a “Hey, I’m really busy right now, but we’ll talk later, okay?” or asking someone to e-mail you if they want to discuss it further can go a long way, I’ve found. Put up an appearance of friendliness while still maintaining your boundries. Put in an appearance at an event without allowing it to take up your whole night. Have a good excuse on hand and let people know beforehand for when you can’t be at things. And, every once in awhile, suck it up and just go, pretend to have a good time even if you don’t, but don’t let work rule your whole life. If that’s not enough for your boss, then I think the problem is on his end more than yours.
Hmm… maybe I need a geek ettiquite blog from you about having the habit of talking too much. :p
1. I absolutely loathe enforced extra-workhours socializing, and I really don’t care if I ever see my co-workers outside the office. My friends are my friends and my work is my work, but that doesn’t seem to be the general mindset in the officing world. It might have something to do with the fact that I have a fairly large group of friends who are completely seperate from work, and that not everybody has that luxury (frequent movers, new job, other shake-up of one’s social life). The biggest problem for me is that I *can’t* go out for a drink after work. I’ve got to drive thirty miles to get home, so the drinky-drinky is not a spectacular idea. Company lunch on company time and company dime, though? BRING IT!
2. It seems that every time there’s an office event for the evening, it happens on a Wednesday. I have a standing engagement with my non-work friends on Wednesday. So, my excuse is always, “I have a prior engagement. You guys have a great time.” And if pressed, “Wednesday gathering. It’s a tradition.” I don’t have to tell them that we all get together, have dinner&beer and watch LOST. Just that I’m busy. And it IS a tradition, dammit! It was weekly Buffy/Angel before they got cancelled!
3. The main thing with out-of-office-enforced-socializing is to be nice. Don’t talk about work except to congratulate, don’t talk about sports unless you can talk about a team no one really cares about, don’t talk about POLITICS for the LOVE of GOD. Safe topics include: TV (even if your colleague unironically LOVES Wife Swap), music (”I went to the XXX concert last weekend.” Leads to musical taste discussions and rarely to fistfights), things about the City You Live In (restaurants, festivals, tourist stuff), and I find Stuff I Heard On NPR to be a great icebreaker. But that just might be me.
4. I hear your mountains are very pointy, but the prairies are not.
Annakie - if logorrhoea is an etiquette sin, I am so doomed. Even when I was a toddler, my grandfather told everyone I’d been inoculated with a gramophone needle. But as to your other comments, that’s all very sane. You do need to balance it.
insidian - you know, somehow I managed *not* to have that song on the brain until you said that. Could be worse, I guess… could be “trees and rocks”.
Come to Britain! We hate this crap and don’t do it!
Reading this blog makes me realise the huge benifits of being self-employed and working from home, dispite the drawbacks.
About what the company can expect / demand of you: the question you have to ask is, “what are they paying you to do?” Write code, yes, but also, because you are in management, to be a Leader Of Men^WPeople. Which to me seems means that you can’t just hang up your tools at 17h00 and go home. I know that I, owner of my computer, rarely get to “leave” the office.
But on the other hand, I whole heartedly think that the USian view that the company is allowed to demand off-hours work is fucked.
If the out-of-work socializing is in an annoying venue (e.g. too loud to have a decent conversation or too full of boors to enjoy yourself), find some confederates at work and find an alternative venue and make sure that the people reviewing your work are on the To: list when you invite everyone out for tea, or snacks at someplace civilized, or a trip to the local video arcade, or a walk in the local park so people can get exercise and fresh air. If you have at least a few people involved from the start, you’ll be perceived to be socializing, and you might be surprised by the number of people that want to show up to an alternative.
And I don’t know how things are in Canada, but in the United States, if you say that a negative performance review for failing to attend gatherings in a bar full of obnoxious sexists qualifies as sexual harrassment, your manager should quickly turn a few interesting colors and strike it from your review.
Leolo - I started working from home myself recently. I’ve never looked back. For me the major benefit is not having to try and ignore my sleeping habits - I’m sick and tired of being cussed out for arriving at work at 10am or later - sorry, but I just don’t do mornings. Never have, never will. I get my best hacking done late at night.
A related issue - I don’t like it when someone says “you should be in the office by 9:30″ but actually mean it as “you should really be in the office at 9:00″. (As someone replying to the “fuck you” letter Skud linked to in her post about resignation letters wrote: “the gall to leave at my scheduled quitting time. Imagine, he tells me I work till 6:00 and I leave at 6:00.”) If there’s a social/work culture expectation here, spit it out. It doesn’t help me having to guess what you mean.
Back on the topic of out-of-work socializing, though, the situation here in the UK is pretty fucked too because of the expectation that people are willing to go to the pub and drink. Well, I used to go to pubs, but I’ve pretty much given up because they bore the shit out of me. And they smell bad: you come back stinking of a thousand cigarettes. Oh, and they’re full of drunk people. This is enjoyment? Well, maybe for some people. But the way that people here seem to take it for granted that you’d want to do that after work amazes me. I’ve just spent 9 hours in the office, it’s the end of the week and I’m tired, and you give me a funny look when I say “no, I don’t feel like a pint, thanks”? Get real.
I know that there are a few A Manager’s Guide to Geek Employee efforts already out there, but it sounds like you have some material for a few Management/Geek Etiquette posts, perhaps for geeks who’ve become managers? What’s the etiquette for asking an employee to work late? How do you reward them for working late? What’s the etiquette for running interference between your team and your own boss? What’s the etiquette for suggesting to someone that their performance is not up to scratch? (Conversely, how do geeks respond to this stuff? How do you say “I’ve worked 60 hour weeks for a month when my collegues are working 40, lay off already?”)
I’m in academia and collegiality is a big part of what that world expects, though socializing with students isn’t quite required. One of the adjuncts got a tenure track job in a small city about 40 miles away. They want her to move and become part of the community. She loves being on tenure track, but that suggestion isn’t making her happy.
I think the expectation that people socialize with coworkers is a very American thing, and sounds like at least some Canadians also think this. It does mean that your job is your life and that anyone who has a greater interest in family will be at a disadvantage (generally, but not always, women).
I hope there are some other cultures that don’t expect this.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t a gender issue. I’ve been banged on the same sorts of things, and mostly for the same reasons (I don’t want to interrupt people or take up their time unnecessarily). I’ve also gotten that treatment because I just don’t want to talk to people when I’ve been working 16 hour days.
At places where I have been the boss, though, I have held extra-work activities, but it always included family and spouses so that the family could meet the people they may hear about in stories. I didn’t do it to build teams or any other such nonsense. If you can’t build teams by spending every work day together, then you have a problem.
In general, I mostly categorise those poisonous environments as populated by people with boring lives who lack perspective on what really matters in life. Those bosses don’t have anything to do on the weekends or nights, so they pull everyone into their sphere so they don’t have to be alone. Furthermore, they use the threat of “not being a team player” to bend people to their will and assuage their feelings of inferiority by acting like a “Boss”.
Ian Howlett is sadly wrong: we do pull nonsense like this in the UK. I used to work for a magazine publisher who would fly the entire company to the south of France for a long weekend — which sounds pretty reasonable until you hear about the dormitory accommodation in a small market-town in the middle of nowhere, the timetabled activities and the (almost) mandatory drunkenness throughout. I suspect most people were getting and staying drunk to blot out the ghastliness of the whole experience, but I was teetotal at the time, along with several others, and it was genuinely horrible. I blew my chances of promotion by objecting to the whole travesty, left shortly afterwards, and have not regretted it for a second.
This is absolutely a symptom of a poisoned work environment. Humanely managed companies respect and do not try to colonize their workers’ privacy and home lives. I’m glad you left.
Your reviewiers were idiots. Don’t sweat it. You’ll have better reviewers along your career.
It’s certainly not just the US/Canada. It’s the same in the UK, NZ and Oz… (of course, you’d know about the latter).
And it’s not just a gender thing either, as others have said.
My big rules about dealing with all this stuff? Get thee to the Xmas party, no matter what. Leave after the food has been served (you’re expecting an international call from your mum - whatever). And one “social event” - even if it’s only with the 2 people you can bear to have a drink/lunch with for an hour - every 3-4 months (depending on your work environment).
I hate to say it, but your manager sort of had the right idea, but didn’t manage to express it properly to you. They don’t want rumptions in the ranks. If you don’t turn up to any social stuff at all, co-workers can develop an attitude: “So she thinks she’s better than us…” And for a manager, dealing with an employee that everyone else thinks is a snot is something they’d rather avoid. As well as the fact that most managers get freaked by a lack of conformity in any respect (but we all know that).
If you turn up to the occasional thing, it sends out the signal that yes, you want to get on with these people. Even if everyone else goes out on a weekly basis (which seems to be the default in London), you can miss 90% of these events and still be deemed to be “ok” by the unwashed masses.
But yes, again as others have said, it’s the unwritten rules that bite us on the bum…
In these times when loyalty to the company isn’t good enough to keep your job, when lay-offs are prevalent, job changes are frequent, the expectation of employers of you to include them as part of your extended family is no longer acceptable. Employees who’ve been with the company for many years may be expected to show up to more events, since social ties have been established over a long period. Otherwise, don’t expect me to extend my private time to the employer. Conversely, there are times when showing face for the minimal amount of time will reap the maximum amount of benefit, and the Christmas party is one of those times. It’s perfectly acceptable to decline if you have another engagement with family, etc., but you won’t get as much face time value at the other events. (varies with employer)
This sort of ties in with a good article I read about career management, and I’m paraphrasing: Your family won’t lay you off for personality differences, fiscal issues, or shareholder obligations, so treating your employer or expecting a familial relationship with the employer is unrealistic, especially for the employer to expect that sort of loyalty from you. Instead, treat yourself as a business that has contracted out skills for pay, to get a more realistic picture of your employment relationship.
Hey Skud,
this blog is great! a timely topic, with good anthropological generalizations. You might want to consider publishing it for $$$ instead of losing your copyright on the internet.
On socializing at the office: I agree it can be a chore. But it’s relatively painless in the civil service (both Canadian federal and Ontario). Group lunches are frequent but usually tolerable. There is no Christmas party to which you must bring exactly 1 date of the opposite sex and same class status. Golf tournaments are entirely optional (I’ve never been or even felt obliged). Beer after work is infrequent, optional, and short; work/life balance is respected. Why are social obligations so reasonable in the civil service? Because employees have to pay for social events themselves! Thank goodness our tax dollars are not wasted on ski weekends.
Good luck back in Australia, I hope things work out better for you.
Alana
I agreed with your post (and your irritation) about required workplace-related socialization, right up to the point that you revealed you were in a management position. Geek or non-geek, management positions require people skills and carry expectations for such things as extracurricular social activities. Being angry with the company because this is the expectation for management types is unreasonable; being angry because no one gave you the “you’re a new manager, here are the expectations” briefing is entirely reasonable. As far as complaining about expectations above and beyonf the 40 hour work week, I have to say that most companies do expect managers to put in the extra time without additional compensation. I think that the frontline managers at my $ORKPLACE are expected to work a 40-hour week on productive stuff and also put in the management papaerwork and people stuff on top of that. Unfair? Perhaps. I think you’d be very well advised to look for a job in the “tall pointy hat” department, whether at your current employer or some other. From your post, it seems to me that you are as disinterested in people work as I am.
Great blog - and I completely agree! why do companies think they can tell you how you shuld spend your presonal time? I too have been criticized in performance reviews for my non-socializing style (and I was not even in a technical position at these companies). The president came to me on more thatn one occassion telling em that I needed to be more like the marketing manager (blech!) and schooze the clients - more chit chat. Hey can’t I just be polite, do my work, and eat my lunch in peace??? I know that drove my co-workers crazy, but the last thing I want to do after spending my day with a bunch of yahoos is to have to talk to them for an hour over my unpaid lunch. On the flip side, I find myself constantly coaching my engineer/six sigma husband on how he can improve on these same socializing skills without being a kiss ass. Sigh!
If anything, this kind of thing is less common in the geek world, and more common in traditional business. Someone I know who’s an HR executive once didn’t get a promotion, and was explicitly told it was because that when he’d bought a house, they it wasn’t in the subdivision that all the other executives lived in. That was at a manufacturing company. The presumption that the company is all seems to get greater, the more senior in the company you are.
[...] though. I used to work in a job where I didn’t like going to all the company social events. Got me in trouble, in fact. So it’s a bit of a pet subject for me: when do you have to go to a company social [...]