Businesses have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves to help workers feel at home in the offices where they spend so many hours every day, but sometimes, those efforts can start to infringe on our personal lives and priorities. One woman on Reddit complained of a situation that many of us have probably found ourselves in when she felt that her boss had started to shame her for declining to participate in certain team-building activities.

Team building activities are a great way to build cohesion with your coworkers, but this worker’s story also reminds us that a healthy separation between work and personal life is important for our mental health. Read on to see his story and how other people responded.

Team building can be a fun way to grow closer with your work team, but many agree that it shouldn’t be mandatory

Image credits: Nicole Herrero (not the actual photo)

This worker felt unfairly treated when her boss started to try to pressure her into participating

Image credits: pure_sin

Image credits: prathanchorruangsak (not the actual photo)

One of the dominating topics was whether teambuilding is a useful management strategy in the first place

Teambuilding has always been a valid strategy for offices to build team cohesion, but the practice, like many other aspects of work culture, is transforming in response to the COVID lockdown and its aftermath. Workers have rediscovered an appreciation for work-life balance and working from home, leaving companies wondering how to best approach the need to forge closer connections among their teams.

Image credits: Zinkevych_D (not the actual photo)

In any case, the way that this worker’s boss went about it ain’t it. An environment where people are called unprofessional for prioritizing their private family life over teambuilding is a toxic environment that can stifle people’s confidence and professional development. In such an environment, workers may naturally question whether teambuildings are just about team cohesion, or whether they’ve crossed the line into becoming a way to control workers’ time and make them feel obligated to dedicate more and more of their time to the office.

To this day, there are ongoing discussions in the business management community on how to make the most of teambuilding or whether or not it’s even effective. It can, after all, form toxic cliques or simply waste time as workers decide not to engage in good faith. However, what’s certain is that it’ll make the team situation in your office even worse if it’s used coercively as it was here!

The author’s story clearly struck a nerve with commenters so he stuck around to answer some questions

There was also a healthy dose of criticism for the author’s boss and their shame campaign

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The stories poured in from other disgruntled office workers who had faced similar challenges

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