The Challenges Of Socializing At An Office Job (When You're Less Social By Nature)

Socializing at work doesn't seem to enjoy the best reputation among people who aren't naturally outgoing. This article will focus on the unique social circumstances that office jobs create. I'm hardly a veteran, but I've put in some time at these types of places. Part-time jobs and blue collar jobs have different dynamics, and I won't deal with them here.

Sometimes when I hear someone who describes themselves as not naturally sociable, and they're complaining about the aspects of socializing that they don't enjoy, I wonder how much of their opinion of the interpersonal world is based on all those unrewarding hours they've spent at the office. I mean hanging out with your friends is one thing, everyone likes that. The people you work with can be harder to click with.

Challenges of socializing at work

Challenges everybody has to deal with

In no particular order, here's a list of ways socializing at work can be less than ideal. At a glance this list may seem way too detailed, nitpicky, and whiny. I admit most of these things aren't horrible issues, especially once you get used to them. However, I'd say that they are all still technically social issues that can come up at work:

• You don't get to choose your coworkers. While you'll probably get along with most of them alright, some of them you may not be able to stand.
• Even if you superficially get along with your coworkers, they may come from a variety of backgrounds, and you may not have a ton in common with them. You may be the only young guy in an office full of forty-year-old soccer moms, for example. Ever sat around a break room table while everyone but you was talking about day care? Or everyone could be your age, but have different interests and value systems. The lack of a true common ground and rapport you have with them can wear on you after a while.
• Because you may not share deeper interests or know your coworkers too deeply, conversations often stick to safe, general topics like the weather, recent news events, upcoming holidays, and pop culture T.V. shows. If you've been following the reality T.V. show that everyone is gabbing about, then the conversation might be fun, but day after day of this fare can get old.
• Work itself is another all-too-common fall back topic. When there's a lull in the lunchroom conversation, it's tempting to fill the silence with a review of the latest project's status.
• Since you won't run into everyone at once, you tend to get asked the same questions over and over by different people throughout the day. Coming back from weekends or holidays are especially bad, when you might have to recite your "How was your weekend?" answer to a dozen different people.
• Even if someone rubs you the wrong way, for the sake of teamwork and office harmony, you have to bite your tongue and do your best to get along with them. In fact, an annoying person's coworkers may let them get away with a lot, because they'd rather keep the peace then risk a messy confrontation that will leave lingering tensions.
• An atmosphere of fakeness and false chumminess can pervade the air as everyone tries to get along, not step on any toes, and be a team player. Some places are the opposite though, and have an overly gruff, macho culture that can quickly get tiresome.
• The workplace itself can create reasons for people to not get along, such as office politics or because one department is not fulfilling its obligations to another one.
• Your average person probably wouldn't be working at their job if they had a choice, so they may be a little more gruff and unsociable than they would be otherwise.
• The demands of their job can cause various socially annoying traits to develop in otherwise likable people. For example: The anal person, the stressy person, the phony person, the Machiavellian ladder climber, the power abuser, etc.
• Job stress and pressure can also bring bad parts of people's personalities to the surface. A person who's nice and easygoing on Day One may be a total jerk seven months into a death march project.
• The need to be 'professional' causes people to submerge aspects of their true personality and present a more bland front to their coworkers. You may not hold everything back, but you'll second guess whether you should reveal certain things, like what you really did on the weekend at that party. As a result, everyone ends up seeming more generic and boring than they really are. Dress codes don't help either, making everyone seem basically look like the same type of person.
• Part of being professional also involves behaving yourself. You can't swear too much. You can't tell politically incorrect jokes. You can't get too carried away at the Christmas party. Well in some jobs you can be crude, but not all workplaces by a long shot. Sure, if you trust someone you can drop your guard a bit, but you have to be cautious by default.

Challenges specific to employees who aren't super social by nature

Besides from more systemic problems, being at work usually carries specific challenges for less naturally sociable people:

• You have to be social all day. At any time during the eight hours you're at work you may have to perform socially. You never know when someone will drop by your office or if you'll run into someone at the coffee machine.
• You have to be social day after day. Just because you had a good conversation with someone yesterday doesn't mean you're off the hook for today. You have to consistently perform. The pressure can really drain you.
• You have to make lots of casual small talk, which you probably dislike if you're the type of person who likes their own space.
• You have to be around a variety of people. You can't pick and choose a select few who you want to socialize with, like you can your friends.
• If you're the type that tends to be a little insecure and paranoid (e.g., you tend to think people don't like you), then seeing the same people day after day gives all your conspiracy theories lots of time to develop. Someone may look at you funny in the hall one day, and three weeks later you're avoiding them because you're sure they hate you. Even if you get along with someone fine for months, you'll find something to worry about eventually.
• You'll probably be branded as anti-social and aloof if you avoid your coworkers too much. They'll take it personally when you don't want to sit with them at lunch or always cut conversations short. They follow an unwritten rule that you should socialize with your coworkers a certain amount of time each day, and think it's weird if you don't follow the guidelines. You're not expected to be 100% productive every minute, some of that should naturally be sacrificed for chatting.
• Speaking in broad strokes, less naturally social types are better at the serious, logical side of interacting with people. When they do talk, they want to have meaningful conversations. In contrast, work is often more about the light, casual dimension of socializing. Their relative weakness in this area may leave them feeling bored and unfulfilled with most office chit chat.
• If your coworkers have better social skills than you, they may not feel like accommodating your own shortcomings in that area. Their attitude may be, "Well if she's uncomfortable with socializing, she should get better at it. Why should I act differently towards her because she can't handle a two minute conversation in the hall? She's the one who needs to change, not me."

My suggestions for making socializing at the office more tolerable

Below I'll cover two broad approaches to handling the social issues that crop up in the office. Before that, here are some more general points.

Your coworkers probably aren't that bad

In spite of the dozen or so reasons I gave as to why socializing at work can be annoying, most of your coworkers are probably pretty good people if you give them a chance. If you get to know them better you'll probably find things to like about them. If you dig around, you may find hidden commonalities.

That said, some of your coworkers may not be the greatest. You can't expect to get along with everyone. But you may be able to get on with even these people a little bit better if you try (i.e., you never become best buddies with them, but they're not quite so intolerable).

Accept that the office environment isn't totally set up the way you want for socializing

Similar to dealing with loud, chaotic group conversations, I think a big part of improving your attitude towards working at an office can be to realize it's probably never going to be an ideal environment. Even if you take steps to bend it to your style, it's not going to be 100% perfect. You aren't always going to have space when you want it. Sometimes you'll have to give ten different people the same summary of what you're planning to do on Thanksgiving. Your coworkers are going to have certain social expectations of you that they're never totally going to drop.

When you believe there's a possibility of that you can have your own space, or that your fellow employees will be understanding of my needs, it's only normal to get annoyed when you're deprived of these things. If you have no expectations, and don't feel any of these things are a given, you can't care as much if you don't get them. Similarly, if you see all the "How was your weekend?" stuff as unavoidable, you may become more easygoing about playing along and making the best of it.

As much as you can, try to take what you need from the work environment

Most of the advice I've read on this topic falls into this camp. You may have heard it before too: Close your door and recharge your batteries for part of the afternoon, go for walks at lunch, tell your co-workers you like some space, and that they shouldn't take it personally if you don't always want to eat with them. Some people even manage to set up work-from-home arrangements.

These ideas fits into the idea of getting away with doing your own thing socially.

The idea of solving these problems by being more social, not less

Lots of people go the route above and leave it at that. My own experiences at work led me to come to a solution that's very counter-intuitive. It may not be for everyone, and those readers can always stick to the ideas from before, but I found the following very helpful. It goes like this:

Often, when people feel things weren't going well socially with their coworkers, their natural tendency is to pull away from them. If socializing with them is causing issues then it seems the solution would be to avoid the problem. Ironically, this avoidance often just makes the the situation worse. If things with their co-workers were vaguely distant and awkward before, now they're even more so.

When people are having these problems, it may be because they're not being social enough, not that they're socializing too much and that's annoying them. They may not click with their co-workers because they haven't spent enough time trying to build a good relationship with them. It's not everyone else at the company is inherently irritating or incompatible with them. They need to get out there and talk to everyone more, instead of trying to hole up in their office.

This suggestion assumes your coworkers are good people, and you just may not be giving them a chance due to your "I need my space" nature, or a general mild pickiness you have towards others. This isn't a cure-all though, if all your coworkers really aren't your style, then being a little more sociable won't solve all your problems.

This advice also assumes that your people skills are alright, and that you could get along with your coworkers reasonably well if you tried. But if you're really awkward, reaching out to the other people in the office may backfire and leave you discouraged. But when you think about it, they have to be cordial to you. This can make work a good place to practice your people skills.

This advice may go against your instincts. It may feel like selling out or too much work to be worth bothering about. It's one of those things where you have to try it out, and you may see where the philosophy is coming from once you're on the other side. Like, "Oh, this isn't so bad at all. I'm glad I tried it."

This suggestion also believes that you can get used to having less space and alone time in certain contexts. The idea is that if you put yourself around your co-workers more, you'll build up a tolerance to not being alone when you're at work. I think this is definitely possible for some people, but not everyone feels this is something that can be changed.

Here are some suggestions for how someone could be more social at work:

• Be sure to have lunch with everyone. Even if the time isn't totally ideal for you, eat when the group eats. If they go out to a restaurant, then go too. Lunch is your best time to chill out and really get to know people. If you skip it too often, then everyone else will end up becoming friends with each other, and you'll be left behind, and it will be harder for you to join the fold later.
• Make small talk with people when you run into them. Even if what you're talking about is uninspired, it doesn't matter too much. It's more that you're making an effort to be friendly and showing you want to talk to them.
• Take little breaks throughout the day to stop and chat to the people you particularly get along with. Obviously be respectful of their work load, but at the same time, nothing is really wrong with shooting the shit for five minutes in the morning or at three in the afternoon. This kind of friendly chatting throughout the day makes work tolerable for most people. Unless you're working at some real "Time is money" place, most offices don't care if you socialize a little. Actually, most workplaces prefer the casual, likable person who still gets all their work done vs. the uptight, anal robot who only does a slightly better, overly detail-obsessed, job.
• Try to get to know what your coworkers are really like as people. It's so easy sometimes to just talk about other topics that are immediately at hand (e.g., the weather, upcoming movies, the latest hiccup with Graphic Design) that while you may get along with your coworkers, you don't really know them. Once you learn more about them, your relationship tends to improve and go to a more rewarding level.
• Keep in touch with people from your desk. Send the odd chatty or goofy email to certain people throughout the day. Or call someone up and briefly catch up with them.
• Make nice little gestures towards your coworkers, like bringing in donuts or treats one day.
• Join in those office pools. It gives you something to talk to your coworkers about and gets you more deeply into the social life at the office.
• Similarly, if everyone is into a certain T.V. show or sport, then consider following along too. You don't have to actually watch anything, just read a recap the next day so you can chip into the conversation. This is a very pragmatic suggestion, of course. One way to get yourself temporarily into something is get involved through a pool. You'd be surprised how much you can get into a dumb reality show when you've got $5 riding on a certain contestant.
• If people go out after work, join in at least some of the time. This is usually a good time as people will let their true, fun selves show more.
• Show up to all the staff events, like the Christmas party. It's totally understandable if you don't like having to do corporate stuff on your own time, but having to do this kind of thing a handful of times a year isn't too too bad. And if all goes well, these events are a fun way to bond with everyone.
• If you're feeling particularly unsocial one day, that's a cue to be even more social than normal. Instead of letting those feelings fester and grow worse, go seek out a fun coworker right away and improve your mood by talking to them. If things feel tense with someone, seek them out to have a nice, quick chat. This all reminds your brain that socializing is often rewarding under the right circumstances and that your your coworkers are good people.

If you follow some of those points, hopefully your work situation will get a bit better. You may not become soul mates with everyone in your department, but the atmosphere may become less awkward, and you may have more fun little moments each day. If things go really well you may even start to look forward to going to the office, or having lunch with everyone and joking around, or being able to grab drinks after hours every so often.