Staff Furious Boss Forces Them To Share Their Spotify Wrapped For A Team Building Exercise
There is truly nothing worse about office life than forced socialization and team-building activities. (OK, bad pay and a lack of job stability are much worse, but you get the point.) It’s awkward, infantilizing, and often a major time-waster to boot.
One worker’s boss took the whole thing to a new level with an office activity that’s not just annoying in all of the aforementioned ways, but also kind of intrusive.
The staff were forced to share their Spotify Wrapped playlists for a ‘team building’ exercise.
“Why do workplaces always insist on prying into employees’ private lives?” the worker asked in their Reddit postwhich is, of course, the age-old question.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with socializing at work — and it can be an effective way of boosting morale and collaboration if done right. But so, so many management teams take it too far, and this Redditor’s situation seems like a perfect example.
“My entire work team (30 people approx) have been asked to submit screenshots of their Spotify/streaming equivalent wrapped,” they wrote, “showing their most listened-to music and podcasts for the year.”
The worker and many of their colleagues felt that the demand was intrusive, especially since there was no way to opt-out.
Part of what makes ‘Spotify Wrapped’ so fun every year is that it often reveals… well, how unhinged you are, frankly. For the uninitiated, it’s a yearly list of your most listened-to songs and podcasts on the Spotify app (Apple Music also has its own version).
The results are often a bit surprising, and every year, social media is full of posts about how people’s Spotify Wrapped called them out about how obsessed they are with a crush, how terrible their taste is, or how mentally unstable they seem to be — if not all of the above.
It’s lots of fun to share on Instagram, so your friends can roast you, but do you REALLY want your boss to know that you streamed Charli XCX’s paeans to cocaine and generational trauma so many times that she’s literally the only artist who appeared in your Spotify Wrapped’s top-five songs, as a purely theoretical example I pulled entirely out of thin air solely for the purposes of writing this article? Not all of us are buddy-buddy with Bossman like that!
Or, as this Redditor put it, “It’s not exactly their medical records, but it also kinda is.” They posited an all too realistic scenario in which someone has been listening to a lot of podcasts to find help for a mental health issue. Most likely, “they would rather not disclose (that) to 30 colleagues (strangers).”
Of course, the easiest solution is to simply not participate, but that didn’t seem to be an option in this case. The poster wrote that there was “no clear way of opting out given the game depends on everyone submitting theirs.”
Many experts agree that ‘forced socialization’ activities at work are a major morale killer.
Things like office Christmas parties and birthday celebrations are one thing — and one study even showed that today’s young workers are hoping they make a comeback. However, extraneous time-wasters like “team building activities” and forced socialization at the office are something else entirely. In short, workers seem to hate the latter.
One expert, executive leadership coach Adrian Gostick, told the BBC that of all the things the pandemic changed about office culture, the decline in “forced socialization” is the one workers seem to miss the least.
Psychologists also say that it’s not so much the “socialization” part that’s the problem as the “forced” part — rather than fostering inclusion and connection, it often brews resentment in a workforce, and it’s easy to understand why. Work already cuts into the time we have for genuine social connections in our non-work lives in the first place.
The workplace is already fraught enough without these additional pressures. As Gostick put it to the BBC, “Nobody wants to be told, ‘it’s Hawaiian shirt day!’ and then you’re a pariah if you don’t participate.” No worker needs that added pressure.
Keeping one’s private and office lives entirely separate is a perfectly reasonable desire, even if all we’re talking about is a Spotify Wrapped playlist.
“I just wish modern corporate environments could at least have the decency to treat employees as what they are,” the Redditor concluded their post. “Workers, rather than cosplaying as intimate friends.” Hear, hear.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
Comments are closed.