I think your argument applies at least as strongly to Happy Hour.
In both cases, parameters should be picked to accommodate the preferences of as many people as possible, the experience should be set up to allow some participation by those unable to participate fully, and it should be optional in the first place.
I don't think the argument applies nearly as strongly to happy hour. if you don't like drinking, you can still enjoy some food and talk to your coworkers. I understand it's not very fun to be sober around a bunch of drunk people, but they really shouldn't be having more than a drink or two at a company event in the first place. I guess it's especially tough on recovering alcoholics, but no more than the entire outside world.
Depending on the game and setup, you can probably talk to your coworkers during the game without actually playing. This should be taken into account in selection of game and setup.
I was thinking about it in a remote context. personally I find sitting in discord but not playing the game is a lot more boring than being at a bar and not drinking.
at an irl event with games, it's not weird at all to socialize without playing.
Without a doubt, you are correct that alcohol is not universal either. I have never had the "luxury?" of working for a company where sponsored happy-hour was a thing.
I've only worked in Western Europe, and regular social activities in the workplace have been a common feature, across countries. Usually either as a weekly lunch outing or post-lunch activity (e.g. daily foosball or Friday timeout (beers optional)).
They were all during work hours, though.
EDIT: also, the level of "officialness" varied. Some were organized by the company, others by the direct manager of a team, and others by the employees themselves on a more personal basis.
Going to a work outing once every few months to talk to people over free beers isn't preventing me from having a life outside of work. Plenty of people skip it too.
Ultimately not everyone will want to take part and the ones that do will form a clique that is in the know. I’ve experienced this and other unofficial cliques over the years. People who smoke was one; people at all levels of the company forced into a small area a few times a day. They were always well informed. Another is people who like to come in late and work all evening. This excludes those with family, and I worked at several places where important meetings and work were done after 6pm
Side note: I found it quite difficult to read the article with the fast motion animated gifs.
I noticed that animated gifs are increasingly used to "spice up" content, but in reality, their motion is distracting and can make it hard to read the surrounding text. A relevant still image works fine.
Historically, in IE and Netscape/Firefox, pressing escape would pause all gifs. Webkit-based browsers don't have that functionality, though, and Firefox removed it seven years ago.
Unless you’re happy with playing a supporting role, gaming should be left as an activity for friends only. Higher-ups do not like being shown up by lower-downs. This doesn’t only apply to team sports.
I learnt this by coming second in a solitary, competitive sport for the Christmas event, which the higher-ups were into in their free time, and which I had no experience with, as a new, young employee. I came first in a similarly solitary sport we all participated in the following year.
My project manager had been going around telling everyone how good he was at this sport, how we shouldn’t even bother. This encouraged me to make even more of an effort. He came second, his manager third. He and a few others booed me while I received the trophy.
Sounds like a good learning experience. Cocky arrogant people will generally resent you for showing them up, you should only do so if you don't mind the possible consequences.
Better to learn that in an inconsequential game than in a project, where you might weeks or months of work shot down (even at the expense of the company).
Thankfully most of my bosses weren't like that, they had their flaws but I never feared such pettiness. If your local job market is good, don't settle for that crap.
I once had a bet with the CEO that I can implement one very competitive functionality in 10 minutes. I won. The functionality never made it to production and any questions regarding it (even from customers) were deflected. Some people hate to lose and become completely irrational about it.
In retrospective I should have as it manifested itself later in some shady moves (almost mafia-style); but I was traveling around the world, having time of my life, and could work on my own side-business, so I didn't mind. Since then I did a top 10 ML degree and MBA, moved to a completely different orbit and it gave me a "good" experience observing red flags and correlating them with behavior that might come handy when dealing with business partners.
I once played chess against one of the owners of the company at the Friday afternoon drinks event. When things started to look good for me he just left the drinks event. He does not seem to hold it against me in any way, though. When the other owner arrived a bit later at the drinks and was told about this, he found it rather funny and said that it was typical of the other owner. All in all, it was kind of funny.
Like someone pointed out, seems like a problem you would have either way with that kind of person (bad losers). Still, competition can get though, that's why one of the ideas is to compete against other teams/companies' teams.
As a remote engineer these days, not sure a gaming session with my team is what I need on top of work. I do my own gaming, and have pretty different preferences from everyone else. We do physically get together 4x a year, which is honestly more then enough to develop strong social bonds.
One thing my company did for a while was a “random coffee chat”. You could opt in and get matched up with someone, and basically chat for 30 minutes about whatever once a month. This was awesome, because I actually met very different roles at the company, like sales engineers or the head of HR. Not exactly the “social time” of happy hour but almost more valuable
Honestly, I couldn't see it really working much more frequently with some functions and people spread out over timezones. It was common to not be able to meet up at for a week or two with some roles - sales would be traveling, too many issues, meetings. etc
When I started last job my friend who hired me for a small team hooked me on dota2.
We played 1 hour each day in the break time. It was fun, but there were downsides:
- 1 hour later at home
- addictive
- it's very frustrating when you play well and lose
Eventually we stopped it and instead started play ing oing-pong with guys that rent offices in the same building. It takes much less time, it's exercises, and even if you lose it's all on you and there's much less competitiveness than with dota.
Of course it wouldn't work for remote teams. If I can give advice - choose games that can be over quickly (15 minutes not more, certainly not 1 hour), and that aren't very competitive.
A bit disappointing that the article doesn't discuss gender at all and whether making Fortnite, which is 75% male players, a key part of company culture ends of making it hard for women to get promoted, be recognized, etc.
Even if you find a game that has a gender balanced community, that's no guarantee that it will be as attractive to an equal number of each gender on your team. Also if you're going for gender equality why would you not also go for racial and ethnic equality too? At my last job we had three developers from Nigeria. All thought games (excluding actual physical sports) were for children and looked negatively upon adults who played games. How would you not end up excluding them?
Having been the person that despised going to the various sportsball games that everyone at the company went to, and wound up being excluded without so much as a second thought? I'm not sure I'd worry too much about excluding them. No matter what you pick, there's bound to be some people that just can't enjoy it.
Why pick only one thing? If this is a weekly or monthly event, there’s no reason it has to be the same every time; why not have a variety of events on rotation so that you’re not alienating the same set of people every time?
are you using the statistic to imply that women would be less likely to enjoy fortnite in the first place, or that they would be more likely to encounter embarrassment what would be a work-related event?
if the game isn't as appealing to women for whatever cultural reasons, it's probably not appropriate to endorse it for team building. if the pervasive harassment is the main concern, this is much easier to work around. very little is lost by disabling area comms in battle royale games; I usually disable it because I don't want to hear fifty people eating their mics in spawn. in games like CS, you can just host a private server for a trivial amount of money.
in general though, I have mixed feelings about company events after work hours. inevitably, there will be people who don't care for the "fun" activity and but feel obligated to participate or worry about missing networking opportunities if they don't. especially when it comes to something like videogames, it's quite easy for people to organize this stuff themselves without an official endorsement from the company. I don't really see any reason why a company should go beyond just giving employees space in slack to organize activities outside of work.
For someone who's tried seeking remote work (and kind of failed because most of my colleagues don't work remotely), remote work is all about work-life balance for me, and it signals that my employer intends to be lean and agile (mostly small companies?) and/or values my work-life balance.
If it's done the way it's proposed in the article then I think I'd think twice about working remotely for that company, this part is a particularly huge red flag for me:
> Also, the founders (or management if it’s a bigger company) should signal that this is something good, encourage it.
It also feels a bit odd that a remote team needs to "foster cohesion". Isn't the whole point that remote work is successful for some companies because the people who are involved with it are good at communication, function cohesively, and hyper-focused when it comes to getting stuff done?
Admittedly I have never worked a truly remote role, but the reasons given in the article are all the reasons that I don't want to apply for a particularly remote role.
>It also feels a bit odd that a remote team needs to "foster cohesion".
Some people (in SV?) seem to be unwilling or unable to work on a team where everyone just does their job, they want to be friends with their teammates as well. They justify that with "team chemistry is really important."
I think you all are missing the point of happy hour. It’s typically a place where people talk about things that are inappropriate for work. The coworker that sucks, the boss that’s bad the project that everyone knows is doomed. Maybe you talk though a difficult problem and admit some level of failure but all of these are inappropriate for gaming hour.
Highfidelity is not mentioned. They started by building a VR alternative to second life, but then they pivoted to 3d chat for remote teams. In fact i think plain secondlife is a fun environment for a virtual team to socialize. Teams can run the open source opensimulator server and use it as a virtual watercooler.
I know of a team at an AI-oriented company that uses Reinforcement Learning to find cheats and exploits in 2600 games as their happy hour activity. No need to work late (though one could), just start that training run and hope for the best.
I like the idea of trying to find a replacement for happy hour. I think the better idea is taking that money and randomly distributing it among employees. If the Company wasn’t going to pay for it, just letting me go home is a better idea.
Better social cohesion makes the company perform better. Companies don’t allocate money for no reason (sadly) and it’s shown that monetary incentives only increase individual motivation so much.
Maybe there is proof to your first comment. I would remain more committed to a job that randomly gave me $100 once a year than a company that sponsored happy hours or (in the case of my last employer) had cookies and milk delivered. The biggest driver of loyalty is job satisfaction and overall compensation is the biggest driver of that after enjoyment of the job.
Then these events should be on company time and company dime, since they are clearly profitable, and designed mostly to get more output through morale and communication.
The idea is that you can do it in working hours and it would be totally optional. Probably a good idea is that you have some hours to spend on social interaction, and you spend them however you want it can be playing the game with coworkers or even meet with people outside the org. Anyway, in most remote roles you manage your time.
For me, remote work was first and foremost the experience of continuously being whipped around by timezone differences between me and the HQ, so I'm a bit disappointed the article seems to not mention that aspect. I wonder if asynchronous games can help for remote work in locations with a large time zone difference.
While it is a constraint for sure, it is not so different from accommodating other people schedule anyway. As a professional, I am not available 90% of my time to interact with others: I have things to do, and if you want to get a piece of me you have to deal with my schedule. Same with my client. So what do we do ? We plan, we make compromise.
Time zones managing is the same, it just add a bit more friction to the process.
When I see people having problem with time zones, it's usually more a symptom of an deeper issue elsewhere: bad organization, unhealthy communication habits, unnecessary coupling between parties, micro-management, people not doing their job and so on.
Avatar based communication seems likely to be a key tool for remote teams for a variety of reasons including informal hang-out time. We are developing hubs.mozilla.com to help fill this need while not compromising on privacy, etc.
Jim Halpert: "At the Stanford branch they all play this video game called 'Call of Duty'.. and they're all really into it. I'm told it started as a team-building exercise. Unfortunately I really suck at it."
But what if I don't play video games? I don't enjoy them and don't really like them, and have moral objections to the content of quite a few. I don't care about others playing them, but don't think my workplace ought to pressure me to do so. Also, I don't want to spend several hundred dollars on graphics processing.
I will never understand this trend where, during your worktime, you do lots of stuff that have nothing to do with work. Be it gaming, playing pingpong, getting drunk, rallying for your favourite political cause, making friends, psychological therapy, or whatever.
Actually I recommend trying different games, even in the same night. And some of the old games are really good, like Command and Conquer, which seem to have their own magic to them.
Have you ever been to Japan? They have gaming bars where you play Nintendo and other console games while ordering drinks. They're really fun and better than usual bullshit chats at bars or restaurants.
Someone over twitter shared "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes " as a great game to play among peers. Still, I totally agree that trying different games is a great idea.
I joined a team that did this. Unfortunately I’m pretty picky about games and hated the one they played. Tried to get into it for the sake of team bonding but I just really didn’t like it.
I genuinely wondered if this was parody for a moment. How about stepping away from the screen and unplug for a while, maybe even go outside and actually talk to real people?
I totally agree that's really important to keep a balance and nurture irl relationships. But, one has nothing to do with the other. It's supposed to be at working hours in which you would still be at the computer anyway. And from my perspective after working remotely for a while is that there's a point where you want to know more about your peers and share some non-work time.
To me, this would sound like "mandatory fun time."