All talk, no work?

The case for working in the office

I wouldn't have to deal with this if I was home.

Christina cornered me in the office pantry and now I'm stuck in a conversation about how her son got sunburnt in soccer practice on Sunday. As an aspiring DINKWAD¹, I couldn't care less about her tomato-like little human. I just came to the pantry for some crappy coffee because I need the caffeine.

Why did I decide to work in the office again?

Oh, right, because it’ll get us young people some mentors, soft skills, and weak ties (the network beyond close friends and family). I’ve been following this advice in hopes of professional success, but am finding that it’s hard to get into the productive zone. Having the X factor of colleagues running amok disrupts my flow state (said like a true tech bro in a petite girl’s clothing). How am I supposed to get any deep work done with pointless conversations flying around the cubicles? The office hasn’t really sprouted any “spontaneous collaborations”. Instead, it’s an ideal incubator for small talk. Kind of like this Christina-esque chatter. Spewing on about her son to a pre-caffeinated Becky.

This, I remind myself, is precisely why I come to work. After the pandemic-induced remote working years, I needed to learn how to coexist with other people. If left unchecked — Zoom meetings allow for people like myself to be left to our own devices — I would only be speaking to the people I want when I want to. Many employers now let staff choose to work from home or the office. I could very conveniently arrange to do deep work at home in a conducive quiet and socialize in the office on the other days.

Unfortunately, reality is not often convenient. If I were to be a non-reclusive participant in society, I would have to deal with these inconveniences, even if it gets in the way of my deep work.

In many ways, going to the office teaches me how to coexist in society.

For one, I learn to build relationships with people I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. Christina, for example, is teaching me about her parenting experience, albeit indirectly. Sure, I’m hearing her venting about her son that refused to eat anything during lunar new year celebrations in front of her in-laws, but I also get to hear about the time he made a blueberry muffin for mother’s day. I see how Chrstina and Lia and Brian — all parents in my team — go on vacation with their friends and leave their kids in someone else’s care for a week. My parents never once took a vacation without me when I was still in school, so it’s nice to see different parental behaviours modeled by people who are now my teammates.

Sitting next to my teammates every day also helps to cultivate better work relationships. There are few better ways to form camaraderie than bonding over a common enemy, so ranting about HR is the perfect petri dish for work relationships. Plus, we all share the same environment for the majority of our days. It’s easier to help each other out with small tasks, which are often too small for a Teams chat or a Zoom call. A few times a day, I swing my monitor over to face my colleagues to ask, “Does this [non-crucial] email sound too sassy?” or “Am I formatting this Excel sheet right?”. They’ve also returned the favor by showing some questionable emails from other departments and rolling their eyes. When a passing colleague says something too off-the-cuff, we exchange looks and share sarcastic smiles. It’s all a part of workplace bonding.

Best of all, the office is a great place to develop new, unexpected friendships. Apart from a school or a religious environment, where you’re exposed to a group of people for long periods of time and don’t like them instantly but grow fond of them over time, the office is the only environment in adulthood for such friendships to blossom. After a year of working next to each other, my deskmate asked if I have ever been to Japan. I shook my head, and she asked if I’d be interested to go with her. This January, we spent five days in Osaka and Kyoto. Another unlikely friendship happened with a Singapore colleague whom I shared many projects with. Once while we were chatting, she asked if I would fly over for Taylor Swift’s concert. I ended up staying at her couch for the Eras tour week. Neither of these colleagues are friends of friends, so I doubt I would have chanced upon them in the wild. In the office, though, our friendships bloomed.

Scott Galloway often says that the best indicator for employee retention is whether or not the person has a friend at work. This makes sense. After developing a friendly relationship with my teammates, I’m more keen on covering their tasks if they are sick or helping out with projects when they’re at capacity. We’re a team, after all, so our shared goal is a shared responsibility.

Perhaps what made me appreciate the office this much more is that I didn’t have this experience in my previous company. We were a fully flexible firm. While I was following Scott’s advice and returning to the office every day, my teammates did not. Work felt a lot more like a freelance gig without the squabbles and the giggles and the after-hours drinks. It became not fun.

So yeah, I still find Christina sometimes annoying (before the morning coffee kicks in) and inconvenient (when I’m working a slide deck). But then again, since we see each other daily, our relationship has developed to a point where she has celebrated my wins at work (being a speaker for external events) and personal life (engagement). We have shared many walks around the mall our office is attached to whenever she notices I needed to vent. I truly wouldn’t trade out working with her anytime soon.

Even if it meant more stories about her annoying little tomato human.

Thank you to friends whom I have shared some “small talks” with:

clare chai

,

Wyndo

, and

Linart Seprioto

.

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Update log:

• 📖 Finished reading The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway. Not going to lie, the finance markets parts were so rough to get through, even though I technically know all of this from my finance degree. Is there really no way to make finance fun and approachable? I wonder.

• ✍🏼 Wrapped up Cohort 12 of Write of Passage. It’s my second run as editor and it was a fun though intense few weeks. I’m glad to have made new writer friends and look forward to new ideas on Substack.

• 📔 As it happens every cohort, I fell off the journaling bandwagon because I spend all my free time on student essays. I’m slowly rebuilding this habit, and it gets easier every time. Like how getting back to exercising after vacation is a lot easier the more I build that “rebuild” muscle (too meta?)

• 🍸 Attended a work-adjacent network drinks and had great catchups with people I knew. I tend to avoid these things (I believe the best networking is done away from the drinks) but sometimes it’s good to remind weak ties that you exist.

• 🍌 Heading to Taipei briefly this weekend with some friends to catch Nymphia Wind! I’m beyond excited.

• 🖼️ Signed up for yet another painting class. I’m at a phase with my art where I value personalized critique for my practice. The writing equivalent of this that I can highly recommend is

  Michael Dean
  ’s Writing Studio.

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1. Double income, no kids, with a dog