Companies love to go on and on about how important it is to create opportunities for team building and social interaction, but they would never go as far as creating these opportunities during work hours. Nope. Instead, they force their own employees to spend their evenings and time off prolonging their stay at the office for weird, mandatory social activities that no one gets paid for.
But oh, don't you love getting that email from HR, informing everyone that they came up with another revolutionary activity for the office, that will get everyone out of their office chairs (and away from their families) and encourage some much-needed bonding time?
Well, after you read the story below, you might feel better about your forced activity. This company took the whole "team bonding" concept one step further and implemented a game night for its employees every single Thursday. Yep, you read that right: the poor employees are forced to stay after work hours every week, play board games, and obviously not get paid for a single minute they are forced to spend playing Monopoly with people they only pretend to care about.
Making this activity a repeated event every single Thursday is what made one senior employee seriously consider quitting and finding a new job. The poor guy has a wife and two young kids at home, and the last thing he wants to do is spend the only free time he has in a day being stuck in the office and playing board games with his coworkers. His family is not going to wait around until 9 pm for him to return and start their evenings.
The fact that this employee was not excited about the mandatory game nights did not sit well with the higher-ups at the company, and they made sure he knew it. But at this point, he doesn't really have enough energy left to care…