Longing for a career at a one company it seems like a concept from the 80s-90s or movies, where you start as a janitor and finish as a director.
However, this indeed can impact your day to day life at a company, as managers will develop biases towards people who they socialise with. That's why I think any kind of socials are a bad idea as they may be potentially discarding people who are bad are socialising but are great workers otherwise and that comes as a negative to a whole organisation.
A career at one company might span 5 years rather than a lifetime, and that's plenty of time to be affected.
One form of interaction benefits one type of employee. A second form of interaction benefits a second type of employee. Both benefit the company. Which form is best?
It's not just about socializing or climbing the ladder - you need to communicate with other people to get stuff done. Even if you only care about technical contribution and getting work done, if you aren't in the office and everyone else is, you'll have a difficult time.
If half the team is in office and half is remote on Slack, then the communication throughout (both useful and pointless) is much higher among the in person. Some simple examples:
1) quick clarification for a technical question - easier to turn back and ask your colleague
2) design minutiae which you remember after a 30/60min meeting is over - very easy to grab your coworkers in hallways or by watercooler and nail down
3) coming across interesting conversations among your colleagues by just being in proximity - not possible when you have to schedule a 30min chat for that
4) reading body language to know whether your colleague is stressed or relaxed or happy or sad - helps tailor your response which improves the communication
I haven't even delved into the timezone issue yet, which matters a lot even between colleagues on East vs West coast (let alone Europe or Asia). Meetings before 8:30am PT? PT people would still be waking up or dropping kids to school. 9-10am PT? Time for people in ET to have their lunch. 12-1pm PT? Lunch time for PT people. After 2:30pm PT? ET guys are already out for the day.
Whiteboards were a huge part of my daily work prior to COVID and the lack of whiteboards had a negative impact on my team. Touchscreens have not really been the same for us, it is too much overhead when all you wanted was to quickly work out an idea with someone else.
We dropped whiteboards in favour of collaborative editing of documents. People write their ideas and then comment in realtime. It took some time to get used to, but not many people miss it. Some people got reMarkable if they want to draw something and share - this is a brilliant tool, but unfortunately it doesn't support encryption, so the use is a bit limited, but to draw some flows etc is great.
I completely understand this. I think best through conversation with others involving drawing on paper or whiteboards. Without being able to do this, I can really struggle to focus ideas and plans. Online just does not work as well for this, not for me anyway.
The reverse is true as well. A company with no focus on social interaction drives away people that enjoy socializing with their work mates. For them it makes the office seem like a cold and uninviting place and they’re more likely to take that job offer from a friend. I agree that everyone needs friends outside of work and that you shouldn’t be really close friends with people at work since it can lead to complications but there are benefits to being able to chat with the people at work about non-work related things and to let your hair down a little.
