The events
Compulsory fun and who pays for it
An optional event that everybody attends is not optional. Who absorbs the cost of a social calendar, and why it is never the people who schedule it.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The team's managerTwo working pairs, both from assigned work rather than from any event
- 02The second engineer
- 03The engineer who joined in MarchAttended every event of the quarter and has no pair
- 04The designer
- 05The QA engineer
five people · 10 possible pairs · 2 of them have worked on something together · 2 have only been in the same meeting · 6 have never done either
Five of the eight, chosen because all five attended every social event of the quarter.
For a distributed group, team collaboration productivity tools provides a practical way to review where work travels, where it stalls, and whether responsibility is concentrated in one person.
The broader organisational question can also be checked against resources from Gallup.
Two rows about being together, and the one row about having done something together
The same company all-hands
8 of 8One hour a week, attendance effectively compulsory
A working day that overlaps by three hours or more
5 of 8The three without it attend the all-hands outside their hours
Any such work with somebody other than the manager
2 of 8The two engineers, and nobody else
three things · the team is eight people · the widest is shared by eight, the narrowest by two · one of the three is true of all of them
One further line was given to this panel and is not drawn. It is true of nobody, and a bar of no width on a pyramid sorted by reach reads as a bar that failed to render rather than as a nought.
The invitation says optional. Attendance is tracked by nobody and mentioned by everybody. Three people have children to collect at the hour it runs, two are in a time zone where it falls after dinner, and one does not drink. All six attend, because the cost of being the person who did not is higher than the cost of an hour.
That is compulsory fun, and the thing worth noticing about it is who pays. Not the organiser, and not the people for whom the hour is convenient.
The costs that do not appear on the invitation
Time outside working hours, for anybody whose day does not contain the slot. On this team three of the eight have less than three hours of overlap with the rest, which means any whole-team event is outside somebody's day by construction. A monthly social at five o'clock in one country is eight in the evening in another, and the person it lands on has been asked for their evening in exchange for an hour of trivia.
Care obligations, which fall unevenly and are rarely stated. Declining because of them means disclosing them, which many people would rather not do to eight colleagues.
The social cost of abstention, which is the real mechanism. An optional event that most people attend converts into a visible choice, and visible choices get interpreted. Somebody who misses three in a row is read as disengaged, and that reading reaches performance conversations by routes nobody can trace.
And the format cost, which is specific and underrated. Quizzes reward fluency in a language and a culture. Games with video on reward people comfortable being watched. Drinks reward drinkers. Every format has a group it is easy for, and that group is usually the group that chose it.
The asymmetry
The person who schedules an event is almost always somebody for whom it is convenient, in a time zone where it is reasonable, in a format they enjoy. That is not a failure of empathy. It is that the hour and the format are chosen by whoever is thinking about it, and what they are thinking about is their own calendar.
The result is that the apparatus of team cohesion is systematically easier for the people nearest the centre of the team and harder for the people at its edges — which is to say, hardest for exactly the people the apparatus is supposed to reach.
The worst case
A team where social events are frequent, optional in name, and structurally expensive for three of the eight produces a reliable outcome: those three attend less, are seen as less committed, are given less of the work that forms pairs, and become more isolated. The cohesion programme makes the network sparser.
This is not hypothetical and it is not rare. It is what happens when the only lever being pulled is attendance and the attendance is unevenly priced.
What to do instead of abolishing them
The answer is not to stop having nice things. Three adjustments do most of the work.
- Rotate the hour, properly, so that the inconvenience lands on everybody in turn including the organiser. A team that will not do this has learnt something about how optional the event really is.
- Make at least one thing a quarter asynchronous and genuinely optional: something with no live slot at all, where participation leaves a trace and non-participation leaves none.
- And decouple the social calendar from the structural work entirely. This is the important one. If pairs are made by assigned tasks, review rosters and shared duties, then attendance at the quiz has no bearing on anybody's position in the team, and declining it costs nothing real.
A social event is only expensive to miss when it is the only route into the team.
How to find out whether it is optional
Ask the question that actually settles it: in the last six months, has anybody declined three in a row without anything being said?
If the answer is yes and nobody can remember noticing, the events are genuinely optional and the rest of this note does not apply.
If the answer is no — if everybody attends, every time — then it is not optional, whatever the invitation says, and the honest move is to stop describing it as such. A compulsory event that is called compulsory can be scheduled fairly, rotated, and budgeted as working time. A compulsory event that is called optional is an unpaid obligation that falls hardest on whoever has the least convenient life.
The row that was not drawn
One line given to the panel above is true of nobody: the team has a handbook that no member has opened. It was included because somebody listed it as a thing the team shares, which it is in the sense that it exists.
The sign declines it. A bar of no width is not a small bar; it is an absence, and drawing it would put an absence on a chart of what the team has.