A Place Where We Belong

The other day somebody asked me “Why do companies keep having company picnics if all of the employees hate these events so much?” The question highlights the commonly-held belief that company picnics and similar events (holiday parties, golf outings, beer calls and the like) are intended as a benefit or service for the employees, albeit a relatively lame one. Unfortunately, such events are not actually held for the benefit of the employees, or at least not directly. Instead, they represent efforts of the part of management to deal with yet another motivating need of their employees: social acceptance.

Let’s return to the Hierarchy of Needs and talk about level 3: Belonging. Maslow notes that human beings are inherently gregarious, and that belonging to social groups is important to us. It’s not an immediate need like food and water (Physiological or Survival needs) or continued safety, but once we are reasonably sure we’re going to make it through the week alive, the next thing most people start looking for is other people to hang out with. In a job context, this might take the form of water cooler buddies, lunchroom cliques, or gossip partners, but the resulting structure is not likely to mirror the management structure of the company itself.

In order to give a work group or department the same cohesion found in a social group, the management personnel will have to persuade the employees within that unit to bond, interact more closely, and (if at all possible) identify with the unit as their own. It is attempts to create this artificial social identity that result in company picnics; the theory being that the employees are more likely to identify with someone they’ve shared food and leisure activities with, and are more likely to consider themselves part of a team (e.g. “us”) if they have collaborated to defeat another group (e.g. “them”) in some competition.

Unfortunately, social dynamics is a bit more complicated than just organizing a picnic. To take only the most obvious example, if the employees involved do not enjoy picnics, or do not enjoy the enforced jocularity of the games and events scheduled by the company at the picnic, or worst of all, if the event is held on a weekend (forcing the employees to give up their own leisure activities in order to attend a mandatory company function) the entire exercise may become counterproductive. The same problems will apply to any similar events (e.g. paintball games, white-water rafting, team-building courses) if these same issues exist.

What management is generally failing to take into account is that these events do not actually address the employees’ needs for social interaction. They are designed to encourage the employees to interact in ways that benefit the company and meet its needs, not those of the employees. Even worse, most employees are intelligent enough to realized that this motivation exists, and many of them will resent being manipulated in this fashion. But the very worst cases occur when the company events themselves conflict with the lower-level needs of the employees (e.g. using up resources such as time off, or subjecting the employees to situations where they do not feel safe) or the employees’ own social activities.

The most egregious case I’ve ever seen personally was a company outing scheduled for the same day as the local high schools’ graduation ceremonies. Since many of the employees had children attending school locally, and a number of them were graduating, this left the affected employees with the choice of missing a mandatory company event (and being fired or disciplined for “attendance problems”) or missing their child’s high school graduation. Curiously, excusing those employees directly affected did not help; everyone else resented them enough for not having to show up that the event ended in total failure. My suggestion at the time (that they reschedule the event for later in the summer – and hold it on a weekday) was ignored because the executive management felt that their prestige would be damaged by having to respond to employee demands…