As an NT, could you help me understand your feelings towards this event? I would really enjoy learning more about my coworkers and what is meaningful to them. It sounds like it would reinforce team bonds and help me understand my coworkers beyond their just their superficial work layer. I’m sure they have fun interests and experiences to share which we might even have in common and nerd out about, or grow into a new interest for me that could enrich my life.
Look; we struggle a lot as we basically do on the fly translation when communicating with non NT since the two worlds are so different and every word might carry a different meaning than intended.
Now put that into a forced (worse: group) situation, it’s clear that it is pure stress.
“just be yourself” is only accepted for NT. I’ve had lots of situations where I was left puzzled and looked down on due to being myself.
It’s a different type of social dance we have to do that is not part of my normal daily script and that I am not prepared for and now have to agonize over, I don’t know anything about myself, a fun fact is never a single sentence how dare you???
This only works with the same select few people who speak up or share things in every call. They’re typically very outspoken, willing to go to after work, work related gatherings and such. That’s fine.
No thank you. I value work life balance very much and this violates it. I keep my personal life separate, unless I want to share. I’m very good at what I do and value my ability to do so. The people I need to get along with, I already do. These kind of details get shared organically and should not be forced.
I also do not come from a healthy family background to put it softly. When these positive sounding ideas to share come up, I come up blank, because I do not have them to share.
So go on and talk about your happy vacation to Disneyworld for the nth time, or your trip to Istanbul, or your huge extended family and their third grandchild. Talk about your hobbies and your farm animals. Don’t force me to enroll into playing games over Teams meetings. It’s fine for you to share or participate as long as you want to. I’m happy for you. Just don’t make me have to make shit up on the spot. I’m not creative that way.
If you want to know more about me, then show me that you are a good worker that I’ll get along with. Become someone I might speak positively about. Then I may offer a part of me that’s outside work. These forced team building techniques don’t work. They never have other than build resentment.
This makes me sound quite bitter but I’m just a chill guy that values privacy.
autistic person here! if I want to socialize, I will do so on my own terms. forced socialization does not make me bond, it makes me stressed, especially when I have work that needs doing
With rare exception, team bonds at big companies are superficial and these forced social situations aren’t going to produce deep bonds.
More to the point, I have work I actually want to do, and shit like this isn’t going to get it done any faster. Nothing you learn about my dog, kids, the weather, etc is going to make work faster, on the contrary the absolute best case is that we’ll spend more time catching up about non-work shit.
If management has time to think this stuff is a good idea, they aren’t good managers, especially if they manage anyone that has no interest in these things.
With rare exception, team bonds at big companies are superficial and these forced social situations aren’t going to produce deep bonds.
This is the main problem, imo. Nobody there is actually paying attention, most will just mention the most immediate thing that comes to mind to get it over quickly.
If you’re going to spend 33% of your life around a group of people, it seems like the most rational choice would be to choose a group of people you know something about, understand and enjoy, right? Getting lots of work done in isolation in a cold, hostile environment surrounded by strangers seems to me like a worse choice than getting less work done with fun people you enjoy, with the feeling like you’re all in it together and can rely on each other to handle challenges bigger than any single person as a team. Life’s not just about getting the most work done possible before you die, right?
Counterpoint: I’m already expected to spend a third of my life working with these people.
I’m not an ogre and I definitely don’t live like I need to get the most work possible done before I die. I just take an extreme approach to work/life balance: work stays at work, private life stays at home as much as possible. For one thing, I’ve overshared with bosses and had things used against me in department meetings or reviews. For another thing, how much do people really want to know about my daughter or my crazy z80 assembly project? Because I’ll bet it’s way less than I’d want to share.
To that end, what’s the most important thing for me to know? Connor is “crazy into craft beers” and took his whole family to Sandals last July, or Connor goes to pieces when there’s a SEV and hides his mistakes until they become problems? One of these things can be learned from corporate icebreaking exercises. The other comes from the 33% of my life I already spend with him.
I have work friends, and try to be as friendly as the circuits allow with everyone. I’ve worked with a few of these friends across multiple companies. I’ve road tripped to festivals with a couple of them. I try to keep things cordial with the ones I don’t hang out with after hours because work’s already hard enough without me being an asshole. And I know one fun fact about everyone on my team (likes to run, D&D / cosplay guy, also likes to BBQ); I learned exactly zero of these things through corporate exercises.
Besides, everyone’s just nodding their heads waiting for their turn to talk.
I think this comment is a really good illustration of what it looks like when a NT person doesn’t understand the challenges faced by ND people. I don’t mean this as an atrack. I’m going to speak in absolutes because I’m lazy af, but when I say ND please read it as “some ND people”. It’s a spectrum, after all.
If you’re going to spend 33% of your life around a group of people, it seems like the most rational choice would be to choose a group of people you know something about, understand and enjoy, right?
There are a lot of challenges ND people face in the work place. The idea of choosing where you work can feel like a strange concept because we need to figure out where we can fit in with minimal harm done to ourselves. If we get lucky and find that, we’re not going to change it because we don’t “vibe” with the people. We’re probably not going to vibe with the people anywhere??? We need to be able to change ourselves and our behavior, learning all the unspoken rules about an individual workplace and hope we “pass” enough to stay employed while not running ourselves into the ground while doing it.
While I like and appreciate most of my co-workers, I’ll never really be able to say I understand them. Sometimes I think I do, and then BAM something happens and I’m totally lost again. Either I’ve broken some unspoken rule or they have broken what I thought was an unspoken rule or something like that.
Getting lots of work done in isolation in a cold, hostile environment surrounded by strangers seems to me like a worse choice than getting less work done with fun people you enjoy, with the feeling like you’re all in it together and can rely on each other to handle challenges bigger than any single person as a team.
Working in isolation can help with issues with executive function and processing delays. I’m “successful” and highly regarded in my field but if you say numbers at me my brain shuts down and I panic. I’m an engineer!!! When I’ve worked in an open concept office I would have to stay and do another “shift” after everyone went home. No, headphones aren’t enough. Any distracting, someone doing a small talk as they pass your desk, people seeing you and deciding to message you - all these things took me off task and took me 20+ mins to remember WTF I was doing and get back to it.
Life’s not just about getting the most work done possible before you die, right?
There are a few things going on here:
From the outside, I can look like someone who values work above other things in life. I don’t. I like solving puzzles. When I’m into a puzzle god help you if you interrupt me.
The “rule” about work is that you go there and do work right? Slacking is frowned upon unless it’s this narrow band of socializing? There are too many rules about what the appropriate amount of work to do is, it’s exhausting. Pair that with all the sensory nightmares that come from working in the vicinity of other people and it’s much easier to think of work as a set of tasks that need to be done and then you can go.Thinking of work as tasks that need to get done and doing them is a pretty common ND approach, tbh.
I 100% hide behind my expertise and ability to get shit done to protect me from unemployment for being “weird” and not fitting in. You bet your ass I’m going to make myself indispensable by working a lot.
As much as a ND might want to get along with their coworkers, sometimes they just can’t. Sometimes we can’t understand each other. There are also a whole new weird set of rules about work friendships that are different from non work friendships and that’s a whole minefield to navigate.
I’m not saying you’re wrong for wanting that. In a perfect world we’d all be doing things we love surrounded by people we love. I’m saying this sort of shit isn’t going to turn coworkers into friends. If I think we’ll get along, I’m going to have a sense of that through natural means. We’re probably not going to get along anyway. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586171/full
Let’s call it being shy (that’s not what it is.) We generally don’t like to share personal things unless we trust you. So doing this in front of a group of people almost feels like stage fright but worse. Think of being in front of a group of people that despite rationally knowing they are not hostile to you, the little squirrel in the back of your brain is convinced they are.
This can stem from several things such as generalized anxiety, to being judged previously for our interest. Many of us have interests that are out of the main stream, may be a niche interest specializing in a specific thing, or something that others consider childish.
I enjoy the work and I like doing and talking about work. I already enjoy the people i work with on a casual level and dont desire taking that any further.
Plus with how corporate is I dont want to put myself at any risk by expressing more than a bland shell of a man. Better to blend in that stand out.
Also NT but an introvert: I don’t want my co-workers to understand more than the superficial layer I project. It’s fucking exhausting to exist socially all the time but hiding behind a facade helps.
If I want to share with you, I will. Usually this will happen naturally if we’ve worked together for a while and I like you. I’ll start mentioning some of my interests, and depending on how you respond I’ll mention other interests or experiences.
I have been invited to events like this before, and I have managed to avoid them through rescheduling calls with vendors so I have an excuse not to attend, coming up with critical things that could not wait so I’d be able to skip, and by just flat-out taking a sick day. I do not want to be forced to share my personal life with my coworkers.
If you make me share in front of a group, I will spend the entire allotted time talking about something incredibly trivial that applies to everyone.
For an example of how this works when I can’t avoid it, my manager recently started asking how we’re all feeling on a scale of 1-10 during some team meetings. If you give a low response, he’ll start quizzing you in front of the entire team as to why you’re not feeling better. If you answer too high, he’ll ask about why you’re feeling so happy. My response in all of the meetings has been 8, no matter how I’m feeling, because that’s average and there’s no follow up. It’s none of his business how I’m feeling; if I want to share with him and the others, I will choose to do that on my own and not in a group situation.
I am friendly with my coworkers, but I am not friends with them (with a couple exceptions for people I’ve been working with for almost a decade, and even then they’re not in my inner circle).
What does he do with that information? Is it just idle chit chat that has no effect on the team, or does he try to improve/resolve work situations that come up in discussion when you’re feeling low and help celebrate successes and reinforce positive patterns when you’re feeling high?
I have no idea what he’s doing with it. He’s certainly not improving or resolving work situations with it. We suspect he’s trying to build a paper trail so he can punish people who don’t agree with him.
Whatever his intention, it’s resulted in most of the team quietly agreeing to bypass him in favor of going to his boss if there are urgent or important concerns that arise.
Picking the wrong picture.
Going in to too much detail about the picture.
Going in to too little detail about the picture.
Going in to the wrong kind of detail about the picture.
Not showing the right amount of interest in other people’s pictures.
Being asked a question about my picture that I’m not prepared for and saying something “weird”.
The amount of stress even thinking about this meeting has caused me is nuts. The amount of masking I’d have to employ to get though this meeting would leave me exhausted for days. I know it’s not rational, but it’s how our brains work. Luckily my supervisor is awesome and agreed to give me cover for skipping it.
It isn’t clear what the social expectations and if we get it wrong we get rejected. (Neurotypicals have their subconscious to tell them what to do. That same subconscious will decide friend vs foe)
As an NT, could you help me understand your feelings towards this event? I would really enjoy learning more about my coworkers and what is meaningful to them. It sounds like it would reinforce team bonds and help me understand my coworkers beyond their just their superficial work layer. I’m sure they have fun interests and experiences to share which we might even have in common and nerd out about, or grow into a new interest for me that could enrich my life.
Look; we struggle a lot as we basically do on the fly translation when communicating with non NT since the two worlds are so different and every word might carry a different meaning than intended.
Now put that into a forced (worse: group) situation, it’s clear that it is pure stress.
“just be yourself” is only accepted for NT. I’ve had lots of situations where I was left puzzled and looked down on due to being myself.
My lived experience in three memes:
It’s a different type of social dance we have to do that is not part of my normal daily script and that I am not prepared for and now have to agonize over, I don’t know anything about myself, a fun fact is never a single sentence how dare you???
This only works with the same select few people who speak up or share things in every call. They’re typically very outspoken, willing to go to after work, work related gatherings and such. That’s fine.
No thank you. I value work life balance very much and this violates it. I keep my personal life separate, unless I want to share. I’m very good at what I do and value my ability to do so. The people I need to get along with, I already do. These kind of details get shared organically and should not be forced.
I also do not come from a healthy family background to put it softly. When these positive sounding ideas to share come up, I come up blank, because I do not have them to share.
So go on and talk about your happy vacation to Disneyworld for the nth time, or your trip to Istanbul, or your huge extended family and their third grandchild. Talk about your hobbies and your farm animals. Don’t force me to enroll into playing games over Teams meetings. It’s fine for you to share or participate as long as you want to. I’m happy for you. Just don’t make me have to make shit up on the spot. I’m not creative that way.
If you want to know more about me, then show me that you are a good worker that I’ll get along with. Become someone I might speak positively about. Then I may offer a part of me that’s outside work. These forced team building techniques don’t work. They never have other than build resentment.
This makes me sound quite bitter but I’m just a chill guy that values privacy.
autistic person here! if I want to socialize, I will do so on my own terms. forced socialization does not make me bond, it makes me stressed, especially when I have work that needs doing
With rare exception, team bonds at big companies are superficial and these forced social situations aren’t going to produce deep bonds.
More to the point, I have work I actually want to do, and shit like this isn’t going to get it done any faster. Nothing you learn about my dog, kids, the weather, etc is going to make work faster, on the contrary the absolute best case is that we’ll spend more time catching up about non-work shit.
If management has time to think this stuff is a good idea, they aren’t good managers, especially if they manage anyone that has no interest in these things.
Feels relevant somehow, consider listening to act one of https://www.thisamericanlife.org/796/what-lies-beneath
This is the main problem, imo. Nobody there is actually paying attention, most will just mention the most immediate thing that comes to mind to get it over quickly.
If you’re going to spend 33% of your life around a group of people, it seems like the most rational choice would be to choose a group of people you know something about, understand and enjoy, right? Getting lots of work done in isolation in a cold, hostile environment surrounded by strangers seems to me like a worse choice than getting less work done with fun people you enjoy, with the feeling like you’re all in it together and can rely on each other to handle challenges bigger than any single person as a team. Life’s not just about getting the most work done possible before you die, right?
Counterpoint: I’m already expected to spend a third of my life working with these people.
I’m not an ogre and I definitely don’t live like I need to get the most work possible done before I die. I just take an extreme approach to work/life balance: work stays at work, private life stays at home as much as possible. For one thing, I’ve overshared with bosses and had things used against me in department meetings or reviews. For another thing, how much do people really want to know about my daughter or my crazy z80 assembly project? Because I’ll bet it’s way less than I’d want to share.
To that end, what’s the most important thing for me to know? Connor is “crazy into craft beers” and took his whole family to Sandals last July, or Connor goes to pieces when there’s a SEV and hides his mistakes until they become problems? One of these things can be learned from corporate icebreaking exercises. The other comes from the 33% of my life I already spend with him.
I have work friends, and try to be as friendly as the circuits allow with everyone. I’ve worked with a few of these friends across multiple companies. I’ve road tripped to festivals with a couple of them. I try to keep things cordial with the ones I don’t hang out with after hours because work’s already hard enough without me being an asshole. And I know one fun fact about everyone on my team (likes to run, D&D / cosplay guy, also likes to BBQ); I learned exactly zero of these things through corporate exercises.
Besides, everyone’s just nodding their heads waiting for their turn to talk.
I think this comment is a really good illustration of what it looks like when a NT person doesn’t understand the challenges faced by ND people. I don’t mean this as an atrack. I’m going to speak in absolutes because I’m lazy af, but when I say ND please read it as “some ND people”. It’s a spectrum, after all.
There are a lot of challenges ND people face in the work place. The idea of choosing where you work can feel like a strange concept because we need to figure out where we can fit in with minimal harm done to ourselves. If we get lucky and find that, we’re not going to change it because we don’t “vibe” with the people. We’re probably not going to vibe with the people anywhere??? We need to be able to change ourselves and our behavior, learning all the unspoken rules about an individual workplace and hope we “pass” enough to stay employed while not running ourselves into the ground while doing it.
While I like and appreciate most of my co-workers, I’ll never really be able to say I understand them. Sometimes I think I do, and then BAM something happens and I’m totally lost again. Either I’ve broken some unspoken rule or they have broken what I thought was an unspoken rule or something like that.
Working in isolation can help with issues with executive function and processing delays. I’m “successful” and highly regarded in my field but if you say numbers at me my brain shuts down and I panic. I’m an engineer!!! When I’ve worked in an open concept office I would have to stay and do another “shift” after everyone went home. No, headphones aren’t enough. Any distracting, someone doing a small talk as they pass your desk, people seeing you and deciding to message you - all these things took me off task and took me 20+ mins to remember WTF I was doing and get back to it.
There are a few things going on here:
From the outside, I can look like someone who values work above other things in life. I don’t. I like solving puzzles. When I’m into a puzzle god help you if you interrupt me.
The “rule” about work is that you go there and do work right? Slacking is frowned upon unless it’s this narrow band of socializing? There are too many rules about what the appropriate amount of work to do is, it’s exhausting. Pair that with all the sensory nightmares that come from working in the vicinity of other people and it’s much easier to think of work as a set of tasks that need to be done and then you can go.Thinking of work as tasks that need to get done and doing them is a pretty common ND approach, tbh.
I 100% hide behind my expertise and ability to get shit done to protect me from unemployment for being “weird” and not fitting in. You bet your ass I’m going to make myself indispensable by working a lot.
As much as a ND might want to get along with their coworkers, sometimes they just can’t. Sometimes we can’t understand each other. There are also a whole new weird set of rules about work friendships that are different from non work friendships and that’s a whole minefield to navigate.
I’m not saying you’re wrong for wanting that. In a perfect world we’d all be doing things we love surrounded by people we love. I’m saying this sort of shit isn’t going to turn coworkers into friends. If I think we’ll get along, I’m going to have a sense of that through natural means. We’re probably not going to get along anyway. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586171/full
Let’s call it being shy (that’s not what it is.) We generally don’t like to share personal things unless we trust you. So doing this in front of a group of people almost feels like stage fright but worse. Think of being in front of a group of people that despite rationally knowing they are not hostile to you, the little squirrel in the back of your brain is convinced they are.
This can stem from several things such as generalized anxiety, to being judged previously for our interest. Many of us have interests that are out of the main stream, may be a niche interest specializing in a specific thing, or something that others consider childish.
NT: I have no interest in my co workers beyond work and dont want them to know about my life outside of work.
If you have to spend 33% of your life around some people, why not have it be people you know and enjoy?
I enjoy the work and I like doing and talking about work. I already enjoy the people i work with on a casual level and dont desire taking that any further.
Plus with how corporate is I dont want to put myself at any risk by expressing more than a bland shell of a man. Better to blend in that stand out.
Also NT but an introvert: I don’t want my co-workers to understand more than the superficial layer I project. It’s fucking exhausting to exist socially all the time but hiding behind a facade helps.
Even most NT introverts would find this exhausting at best.
Sometimes as people who may have been bullied before, there is a lack of trust at times
If I want to share with you, I will. Usually this will happen naturally if we’ve worked together for a while and I like you. I’ll start mentioning some of my interests, and depending on how you respond I’ll mention other interests or experiences.
I have been invited to events like this before, and I have managed to avoid them through rescheduling calls with vendors so I have an excuse not to attend, coming up with critical things that could not wait so I’d be able to skip, and by just flat-out taking a sick day. I do not want to be forced to share my personal life with my coworkers.
If you make me share in front of a group, I will spend the entire allotted time talking about something incredibly trivial that applies to everyone.
For an example of how this works when I can’t avoid it, my manager recently started asking how we’re all feeling on a scale of 1-10 during some team meetings. If you give a low response, he’ll start quizzing you in front of the entire team as to why you’re not feeling better. If you answer too high, he’ll ask about why you’re feeling so happy. My response in all of the meetings has been 8, no matter how I’m feeling, because that’s average and there’s no follow up. It’s none of his business how I’m feeling; if I want to share with him and the others, I will choose to do that on my own and not in a group situation.
I am friendly with my coworkers, but I am not friends with them (with a couple exceptions for people I’ve been working with for almost a decade, and even then they’re not in my inner circle).
What does he do with that information? Is it just idle chit chat that has no effect on the team, or does he try to improve/resolve work situations that come up in discussion when you’re feeling low and help celebrate successes and reinforce positive patterns when you’re feeling high?
I have no idea what he’s doing with it. He’s certainly not improving or resolving work situations with it. We suspect he’s trying to build a paper trail so he can punish people who don’t agree with him.
Whatever his intention, it’s resulted in most of the team quietly agreeing to bypass him in favor of going to his boss if there are urgent or important concerns that arise.
Try walking through a field full of land mines blindfolded and you will understand
What’s an example of a mine in this metaphor?
Picking the wrong picture.
Going in to too much detail about the picture.
Going in to too little detail about the picture.
Going in to the wrong kind of detail about the picture.
Not showing the right amount of interest in other people’s pictures.
Being asked a question about my picture that I’m not prepared for and saying something “weird”.
The amount of stress even thinking about this meeting has caused me is nuts. The amount of masking I’d have to employ to get though this meeting would leave me exhausted for days. I know it’s not rational, but it’s how our brains work. Luckily my supervisor is awesome and agreed to give me cover for skipping it.
What a relief!
It isn’t clear what the social expectations and if we get it wrong we get rejected. (Neurotypicals have their subconscious to tell them what to do. That same subconscious will decide friend vs foe)