| The pub lunch is the thing I miss most about my first job. Every Friday almost the entire office would decamp down to a local pub for lunch and a pint or two. The quality of the food was always very hit-or-miss (unless we went down the king's arms*, but that was seen as a bit pricey and fancy), and for many places if there were too many of us would get arsey for not booking ahead. But it was a great opportunity to just hear what everyone was up to and have a good chat in an unstructured way. I don't know if it's changing attitudes over the past 20 years, the particular companies I found myself at, the price of going to the pub, but it hasn't really been a thing at any of my places since. Now with WFH of course there is a complete absence of unstructured conversation. Every meeting has a purpose, every interaction there's something someone has in mind they want from the conversation. And while it's not impossible to chit chat still, it is impossible to overhear chit-chat, which is an underappreciated thing. Overheard conversations are a gold mine of knowledge sharing, many an interesting idea has come about because, "I couldn't help but overhear...". Now don't get me wrong, I don't want to suffer an hour long commute for that benefit, the cost-benefit skews all wrong. But I would like if everyone lived a 5 minute walk from the office. * might have been the king's head, memory plays tricks. |
Not only that, but looking back on my early career I feel I learned a shedload just by sitting in an office surrounded by people older than me talking about work, about life, etc. I learned what was acceptable, what not, how people handled issues that arose, how to basically operate in the world of "work" in a wider sense. None of that would be possible now. Not that I'm pro working from offices - but something will change because of it long-term.
BTW this also reminds me about office printers back in the day (circa 1998 this was). They ALWAYS had a massive pile of uncollected printouts around them. I learned so much from just rifling through stuff there. Emails, always emails (who prints emails? loads of people apparently) with stuff about other employees, clients, costs, money, opinions. Then there was PowerPoint printouts too - projects you didn't know where happening, kite flying of all kinds. I know the words "gold mine" are a cliche, but until they had "secure printing" systems, this was my world.