The Importance of Socialising outside of Office Hours
Any business these days that is a good, thriving business is going to have to rely on teamwork. In fact, anything that you do as a business, or as an individual, is going to rely on more than just your own work to succeed. It takes the work, talent and dedication of a lot of people to make your business thrive. One of the best ways to build working relationships is to socialize with others outside of the office and make your people feel as if they are almost working with their friends.
To be clear, you don't actually need to to be friends with your co-workers and there are plenty of pros and cons of being friends with your co-workers. However, you should go out at least a little bit with the people that you work with because you do spend a lot of time with these people and you are going to want to get to know them as people as well as co-workers.
Going outside of work to socialize with your co-workers means that you will have something in common with them outside of work as well as at work. It is great to sit around and gossip about work and stuff like that, but you eventually want to talk about something outside of what happened at the office today. We were all there, we know what happened.
However, when you know that you have people that you can go to the bar after work with to catch a game or grab some food, you know that at least you will have some sort of release at the end of the night. Even the boss can get in the action as long as the business allows for it and you can differentiate between work and personal life. For example a younger boss might be more willing to talk about work too and let things roll off him.
Socialization is something that you need to do because you are going to have to deal with people no matter what you are doing in your life. If you are going to work with people for 40 hours a week or more it makes sense that you are going to be developing some sort of relationship with them and they will be seeing more of your than your friends anyway.
When you hang out with your co-workers outside of work it makes your working experience a lot better. You know you have people you can count on because they are not only co-workers, but friends as well. It makes you care a little bit more about the person next to you and you want to do a good job for people you enjoy working with.
