The events
The event only the organiser enjoys
Somebody on every team does the organising, the reminding and the cheerfulness. It is unpaid, unevenly distributed, and usually invisible until they stop.
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.
Where projects cross several roles, employee time tracking for cross-functional work can make hours and handoffs visible enough for the team to discuss capacity with shared evidence.
For further reading outside this collection, see material published by Mind Tools.
Somebody books the room. Somebody writes the invitation, chases the two people who have not replied, prepares the questions, hosts it on the day, keeps it going through the flat patch in the middle, and sends the photograph afterwards.
That is between three and six hours of work for a one-hour event. It appears in no plan, no objective and no review. It is done by the same person almost every time, and on most teams that person is not the manager.
Who it falls to
It falls to whoever minds most that the team has nothing. That is a reasonable-sounding sentence that conceals a selection effect: the person who minds most is usually the person with the least structural power to fix the problem properly.
A manager who is worried about cohesion can rearrange work, which is the thing that would actually help. Somebody without that authority can organise an event, so they organise an event. The effort is real, the intention is right, and the lever is the weakest one available.
There is a second pattern that is worth naming because it is so consistent: this work is distributed along the same lines as other unrecognised work in organisations. The person who organises the socials is frequently also the person who takes the notes, remembers the birthdays and notices when somebody is struggling. None of it is in anybody's job description, all of it is noticed when it stops, and none of it counts for anything when roles are being filled.
What it costs the person
Hours, obviously, taken out of the work they are assessed on.
A particular kind of exposure. Running an event means being visibly responsible for whether people enjoy it, which is a thing nobody can control. A flat quiz is experienced by the organiser as a personal failure and by everybody else as a quiet hour.
And a trap. Having done it well three times, they now own it. Stopping is read as the team giving up on itself, so they continue, long past the point where they wanted to.
What it costs the team
The event keeps happening, which looks like success. Because it keeps happening, the structural question never gets asked, and the person best placed to ask it is too busy organising.
And the organiser's own position gets worse, not better. Time spent arranging social events is time not spent on work that would have created working pairs for them.
What to do about it
Three things, in order of how easy they are.
- Name it out loud, once, in front of the team. Say who has been doing it and roughly how long it takes. The effect of this is larger than it sounds, mostly because several people genuinely did not know the work existed.
- Rotate it, with a list and an end date. A rota of eight means each person does it twice a year, and the second effect of a rota is more useful than the first: everybody discovers how much work it is, which permanently changes how the team talks about it.
- Decide, as a team, how much of it is wanted. Some teams will conclude that four events a year is plenty, which is a better outcome than one person producing twelve out of a sense of duty. A social calendar that the team has actually chosen is also the only kind that will survive the organiser leaving.
What it looks like when it stops
Usually nothing, for about six weeks.
Then somebody notices that there has not been anything for a while. Then somebody says the team has gone a bit quiet lately. Within a quarter it is being discussed as a decline in morale, and the explanation offered is about remote work, workload or the general mood.
Almost nobody connects it to the fact that one person stopped doing four hours of unrecorded work a month, because the four hours were never visible while they were happening. This is the ordinary fate of invisible work: it is noticed only as an unexplained deterioration, attributed to something else, and the person who was doing it gets no credit at either end.
The structural note
Everything above is about fairness, and there is a second argument that belongs to the rest of this site.
If a team's cohesion depends on one person's unpaid effort, then the team's cohesion has a single point of failure, in exactly the way a wheel-shaped network does. When that person leaves — and they do, often sooner than others, for reasons connected to everything above — the events stop within a month and the team discovers that nothing else was holding it together.
Pairs made by shared work do not have that property. They are held by the arrangement of the work, and the arrangement survives individuals. That is the main practical reason to prefer the dull structural interventions over the ones that need somebody to care.