First, it’s work time, not your time, so if it is wasted it is on their dime. Learn the joys of solitaire while on the call.
While I hate cocktail parties I love public speaking - I’d rather talk to 1,000 people than be in a party with 20. It’s a performance, it isn’t you, which helps with the social anxiety problem. Think of something to say, and try to break in. People will interpret what you say from their own viewpoint, so it doesn’t have to be brillinat. Most comments aren’t.
The best meeting approval strategy I’ve ever seen is a short feedback period where each participant says what worked and what didn’t. This turned a really useless meeting I went to to a great one where we made tons of progress. Your meeting sounds too big for everyone to talk, but suggest voluntary feedback, or feedback from a sample of attendees. I bet you aren’t ehe only one who thinks the meeting goes on too long. And you can hardly get into trouble suggesting a feedback system.
One thing that I find frustrating is that it’s rarely clear whether or not you should just stop asking people if they want to go to X if they always say no. There’s a certain type of person that feels pressured and bullied by a simple invitation because they hate to say no, and another type of person who feels excluded and hurt if they don’t get asked . . Even though they don’t want to go. Sometimes the same person feels both ways.
At my age, I have learned how to just ask, but even then, I worry super socially anxious introverts don’t feel they can tell me the truth (whichever it is). I really, really appreciate it if the person that turns me down tells me if I shpupd keep asking without me having to prompt them.
That’s the basis, but exclusionary groupthink that makes someone a running joke for not being or doing something extrinsic to the job in hand - that’s how bullying develops. And a good HR department is alert to the risk and challenges it, rather than going along with it.
Nah, it’s a case of bad time-management. The meeting has been established to last two hours, therefore the meeting shall last two hours. Two hours shall the meeting last; not one hour and fifty-five minutes, nor two hours and one minute, nor will it be considered finished once the agenda is completed. For two hours is the established time, and the established time shall be respected.
Apparently the established time is more important that things such as people needing to pee. I had a few projects where that kind of meetings were announced as “X time or less”; if we finished after five minutes we wrapped up real quick. Those meetings usually had better attendance, less people coming in late, and I could swear they even had less people forgetting how to mute/unmute than the ones without the or less.
Agree with the OP, and I hope, OP, that when you spoke up, that it wasn’t with an emotionally-charged, not-in-control delivery. Your points are excellent, and hopefully they were ultimately received and will help to change things at your work. And, for the other posters who shared their work ‘helpful’ feedback that ends up becoming public humiliation, those people in charge are so very out of line and are magnifying discord in the work place. So much for teamwork.
The only thing I disagree with is conflating introversion with social anxiety. The latter is a mental illness. A person needs to confront their anxiety, not indulge it. But introversion is an interpersonal style. In some contexts it can be a disadvantage. But most introverts know how to do the socializing thing perfectly fine. They just don’t want to do it all the time or in an element that doesn’t work for them.
Making contacts through close professional relationships, I totally get. Trading banter in the breakroom, I totally get. Raising your profile at work by volunteering to participate on special committees and events (river clean-ups), I totally get. Showcasing your work at professional meetings or informal brown bag seminars, I totally get. But I draw the line at schmoozing at the bar with rando coworkers I probably don’t even like. That’s not my scene and that’s not where my social skills shine the best.
Thankfully it was pretty much a one-off, one of those fads that burns through the management layers then fades out.
You certainly have a point, unfortunately it was held in a meeting room with one of those triangular conference phone thingies (stop me if I’m getting too technical) so no place to hide and/or play solitaire.
Last year I was teaching in a school doing “redesign.” They were trying to completely change how elementary education is done, and they had good intentions.
One thing they wanted was to have students able to work together and collaborate on projects. This is good, but I felt the need to suggest that some students don’t always work well in groups and introverts need time to be alone and regroup instead of constantly being in loud groups. From the principal’s reaction, you’d think I was trying to give work space to future serial killers. To her, no one should ever be allowed to be alone, and every student should always be extroverted.
There’s a problem when a culture wants to change or eliminate all people with one particular temperament type.
You know what’s a running joke in most companies? HR departments.
Always remember that the HR department works for the company, not for you. If they try to shame you into going to social functions, it’s not because they care about your career advancement. There’s some other reason, like they want their employees to be a bunch of loyal drones.
It is not the company’s business why someone doesn’t go to social functions. An employee is there to do a job and get paid for it. Happy hour isn’t part of the job description anywhere I’ve ever worked. You may be an introvert, or you may have social anxiety, or you may have other things you want to do with your life, or you may have children you need to take care of, or you may hate being around drunks. . .
I have worked with many people who didn’t go to social functions. None ever became a joke, at least not because of this.
That’s horrible. I participated in such an exercise at work once, where the results were, fortunately, kept secret. A few months later I read (probably an article on LinkedIn) that this is an example of what NOT to do when team-building.
I’m glad that there may be a growing awareness of the needs of introverts. I am mostly introverted (engineer) but have been in highly-social, sales and marketing departments for most of my career. The social outings were always exhausting to me. I think extroverts just assume everyone else is either an extrovert or an a**hole, which doesn’t bode well for those who just don’t want to party with colleagues during their personal time. Good HR policies should embrace all types.
It is ridiculously unprofessional of anybody in management to publicly suggest – and condone! – that certain people are being mocked by others at work.
That said, I found a good article about how an introvert’s social battery works. It may help you explain to those who don’t get it.
Others have already touched on this, but the other thing that a lot of extroverts don’t get about introverts is that it isn’t socializing, per se, that’s difficult for us. It’s unstructured socializing. You put us in a room with others and tell us “Mingle”, or “Network”, or “Hang out”, and we’re lost, because we don’t know how to do those things. But if you put us at Board Game Night, we know what we’re doing: We’re playing board games. That’s much easier.
I know this is MPSIMS, but do you have a cite for this? I ask because it seems that you’re conflating introversion with an absence of social skills. In my understanding, introversion is not an *inability *to engage with social situations but a *disinclination *to do so.
I disagree - my introversion manifests directly in proportion to the number of people and number of strange people I’m dealing with, compounded by how noisy and uncomfortable the space is. Board Game Night is nice because there are only four people that I already know in a relatively calm room, but you have me mingle with those four people in a quiet room without the game and I’ll last just about as long.
Yeah, I agree with RadicalPi. That sounds like a rather idiosyncratic definition of introversion.
Personally, I am okay with “unstructured socialization”, where everyone is just chitchatting and goofing around. I’m okay with being thrust in a room full of strangers. I just don’t want to be in either situation for a super long time since I get tired and/or bored.
For me, the problem with happy hour networking is that it’s at a bar. I really don’t enjoy bars, since I don’t care for drinking. Happy hours held at popular spots tend to be crowded and loud, which means I’m not going to be good at conversation either as a listener or a speaker (I struggle with tuning out background noise). However, drop me in a casual restaurant, and I’m good. I like to eat so I can hang in that setting.
I think if I were in the OP’s management meeting, I would have emphasized the importance of creating a diverse set of networking activities–not just the standard “let’s do Happy Hour!” Even extroverts have their preferred way of “hanging out”.
