Work Is Social. For Some People

I spend a lot of time on my own.  I work out of my basement in my house, and most of the work I do is over chat or the phone.  It is rare that I have to venture out into the big bad world of the corporate office and sea of cubes.

I made a conscious decision a few years ago that this was how I wanted to work.  I enjoy the focus that isolation brings ( or at least is supposed to bring ), and I enjoy the accountability of doing work not because someone walks by my cube to make sure I am not surfing for porn on the web, but because I have something to be done and a time within which to do it.  It is all the more true now that I am on my own.  I also like being able to control interruptions.

For one of my clients, I spend some amount of time in one of his client’s offices.  I have been observing as a part of that just how much time gets spent socializing at work.  I am sure I did this to some extent while working in an office, but anyone that knows me knows I am not a big socializer.

There are other people for whom a large part of their life is work.  They hang out with people they work with after work, and some of their best friends are people they work with.  I have never done this.  Work has always just been work for me.  Why would I spend more time with people I already spend almost all of my time with?  It just never made sense.  I can think of maybe five people in my career that I enjoyed spending time with outside of work.

I wonder what the cost-benefit analysis on socializing at work would look like?  Certainly it costs the company money for people to stand around chatting about last night’s football game or episode of Desperate Housewives, and that’s probably something you could quantify without too much work.  But I bet there is some intrinsic benefit to it as well that is not as easily measured.  I would imagine that enjoying the people you work with is pretty important, especially at smaller companies.  When you are slugging it out trying to make a go of it, you don’t want to have to work with some a-hole you can’t stand every day.

Is work where you find and build your social network?  What is the good and bad of it?