if I work in the office, everyone just wants to socialize

A reader writes:

My team is fully remote but welcome to come in whenever we please. People will come in for any number of reasons, such as if they have plans in the area later, need a bigger monitor to finish a project, or just want to change their scenery for a bit (almost always my reason). We have a Teams chat and when we work from home, we chat almost all day long. When we are in the office, we chat a lot, go to lunch together, and usually have a good time.

However, we still have a weekly hour-long video call on the calendar. This is supposed to be “optional” because it’s “just to chat” but everyone always attends. During these, there are always so many very long, very awkward lulls in conversation where everyone is clearly uncomfortable but no one will say anything about it or leave. The calls aren’t the worst thing in life, but they are irritating enough that I don’t want to attend them. Or at the very least, I’d like to have them moved to every other week. I asked around and none of the other teams operate this way; their meetings are bi-weekly for 25-30 minutes tops.

Also, when we are in the office, instead of going to lunch together some of the time, it is EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. The vibe is very much, “If you came to the office today, you must want to lunch with us. Why else are you here?” and then passive-aggressive comments if you decline and have nothing else to do.

It used to be that you’d be able to tell when someone wanted to hang out in the office for social contact because they would send a blast telling everyone what day they would be there and you could steer clear if you weren’t up for it. But they don’t do that anymore and now if I end up in the office on the same day as others, I’m expected to hang out with them even if I have nothing else to do, but still really don’t want to. Occasionally wouldn’t be a problem, but this is happening more and more. I’m planning on solving the issue by just working elsewhere when I want to get out of the house, even though my office is awesome with free snacks and little cozy nooks. (Which you can’t hide in anymore because team members will look on our scheduling sheet and see who else is in that day and go hunting around for you!)

How do I manage this? I’m friendly and personable and chat as much as I can take (and in most cases more than I can take) and I understand the need to have some team interaction, I really do, but I can’t go on like this. I’ve talked to the team lead but he is the worst offender (when I had another meeting starting, he actually contacted the person leading that meeting to tell them I’ll be late) Any advice on what to do here? Any chance I can get away with just skipping every other meeting?

Interestingly, when I joined this team, I asked questions about the work-from-home policy and they informed me they all stay home, they keep work and home life separate, they don’t hang out after work, and they don’t share their personal phone numbers. Someone even said, “So we aren’t going to be outside-of-work friends, ya know.” I assumed that meant I was joining a very mellow, low-contact team, which is what I was looking for after coming from a place that needed to spend every single working minute together. This team is unfortunately starting to feel really similar.

Yeah, it sounds like the culture on your team has changed a bit since you started. I’m curious about why! Did someone more social join the team and change the vibe? Did people start to feel more isolated at home over time and so began ramping up the socialization at work? It’s not really the point of your letter, but it’s an interesting evolution.

You’re right that the easiest way to solve the problem of being hunted down to socialize in the office is to stop going in as much, since that’s an option available to you. But there are downsides to that: you might lose out on conversations and visibility that would benefit you to have, and you might sometimes have work that’s easier to do from there. So it’ll also help to work on getting more comfortable speaking up and setting the boundaries you want to have, whether that’s “I’m going to stay here for lunch today” (and deciding to just be okay with it people are disappointed by that) or “sorry, can’t talk today — I’ve got to focus on finishing X while I’m here.”

As for the weekly hour-long video calls: they’re supposed to be optional, so try treating them as optional! Attend every second one, or every third one. If people comment on it, say, “I had something I needed to finish up today” or “Oh, I think they’re optional so I used the time for something I had to get done.”

But also, since you said it seems like most people are uncomfortable with the calls, why not ask around and see if you can gin up support for shortening them or holding them less frequently? In some teams, you could raise it on the call itself: “what do you all think about moving these to every other week or making them shorter? I know they’re optional but personally I end up feeling like I should attend because others are, and if other people feel that way too, every other week might be a more manageable frequency.”

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