With the rapid increase in the globalization and demand for the heavy socialization, the workstations have been affected to a greater extent.
According to a recent study conducted by the University of Illinois, it is found that 60% of people around the globe heavily mix their office life or business with pleasure through heavy socialization and various other means.
It’s not a classically harmful, but every aspect has its own set of disadvantages.
Even mixing business with the idea of too much of socialization is hazardous in itself.
Let us discuss this issue in details.
What Do You Mean by Mixing Business with Pleasure?
Both in Great Britain or the UK and USA, mixing business with pleasure refers to combine your social part of your life with work life.
This occurs when you get to mix with people or get friendly with your colleagues too much than necessary.
This can be considered as a good thing but as it is said, preference should be given to the negative side i.e. not mixing them together.
Business and office is one part of life whereas socialization is another. Mixing them together can bring high discord in your daily life.
Importance of Mixing Business with Pleasure:
Conventionally, mixing business with pleasure is not preferable since choosing to do business with friends or having friends in business is highly unacceptable.
Yet sometimes, mixed business and pleasure can come to rescue when you need some important issue to be resolved and a person can easily communicate with other colleagues who have grown comfortable due to socialization.
If the barrier is maintained, then sometimes you may be at loss for help. So socialization does have its own benefit.
Even if mixing business with pleasure or doing business with friends and colleagues has its advantages to support, its drawbacks are enormous and huge in number.
Why You Shouldn’t Mix Business with Pleasure:
There are several reasons why you should not mix business with pleasure. The most obvious and widely known consequences of this condition have been explained in detail.
1. Brings about high distrust:
The first step to mixing business with pleasure starts with a casual conversation. Those conversations are nowhere related to official works but instead about personal life or in other words- your private life.
Then you proceed to stay late with your newly found friend in your office, to partying and spending a part of your life with him/her.
Too much of friendliness gives rise to judging and high amount of distrust since you have known many things about the other person and you have already started judging him/her outside his official avatar.
So even if the work is trivial, you may sometimes end up judging too much for simple mistakes and actions, which can not only ruin your friendship, but also an ideal colleague-colleague relationship.
2. Performance degradation:
Socialization and partying take up a major part of your life, and all you think about is finishing up your work as soon as possible to join your colleagues for an after-party or dinner or some pep-talks.
Even during the office hours, you may end up only socializing instead of taking your other colleague as your co-worker.
It affects your performance level by a large limit.
According to the study, people who mix business with pleasure have a high-performance degradation rate than people who don’t do it.
So don’t mix business with pleasure is the best option you can choose if you want to keep up your work level.
3. Building up love and complications:
The most obvious reason why you should not mix business with pleasure is built-up of unnecessary love and complications related to love.
Colleagues fall for colleagues of the opposite sex and then complications like a change in thinking, approach, and behavior towards a particular colleague can adversely affect his/her professional life as well as personal life.
This heavily results in distraction, fundamental oppression and if rejected, depression and degradation in performance level.
4. Office flirting:
Office flirting is the most common form of result for mixing business with pleasure.
Colleagues growing over-friendly with other colleagues of the opposite sex gives rise to the unwanted dispute and the undesired situation in the professional field is very common
This can result in a bad reputation of yours at work. Females take flirting in various ways.
Some term it as casual, while for some it is termed as sheer harassment. So this can cause heavy mental trauma and performance degradation.
5. Too much of socialization:
Socialization to some extent is necessary for professional life. But as they say, too much of everything is very unhealthy.
Too much of socialization gives rise to office politics, professional degradation, unhealthy atmosphere, and emotional stresses if wishes and expectations are not fulfilled.
A climate of falseness and false friendliness can invade your private life as everybody tries to get along with you in office and be a cooperative person-cum-friend.
Sometimes this gets overbearing which indirectly affects your office culture that rapidly gets tedious.
6. Party and alcohol:
Mixing business with pleasure includes over friendship and then going out for parties after office that would include drinking sessions are naturally very unhealthy.
Firstly, drinking in itself is considered as a health hazard and secondly, partying after office hours not only ruins the thin line between the professional and private life that needs to be maintained.
Partying with your colleagues brings about heavy discord in the situation, which directly affects one’s personal and professional life as a whole.
So mixing business with pleasure is not a good choice to opt for.
7. Ruins reputation:
It actually takes years to restore a ruined reputation.
Being over-friendly with your colleagues can lead to unwanted opinion formation about personal life which leads to the formation of opinion in their professional life too.
This leads to a high amount of distrust, unnecessary hatred and behavioral changes which would not have happened if the barrier is maintained between the business and private life.
8. Give rise to jealousy:
If you mix business with pleasure in the professional field then no doubt, negative emotional feelings like hatred and jealousy would crop up.
If your boss promotes you, naturally your friend-cum-colleague will feel the pang. Jealousy driven people are the most dangerous one, a person could encounter.
So keeping your socialization in check is a very important aspect of professional life.
If people have nothing to do with you, the negative emotions won’t harm you either.
9. Loss of productivity:
With the scope of socializing in your office work, chances are the productivity level of yours and your colleagues can drastically decrease.
People generally find it useful if they have a friend working alongside them on the same project as they can be more open about a different aspect of the project and can share the workload.
But in most of the cases, this office relationships generally tends to decrease the competition level and their focus on work as they tend to get distracted by the circle and get engaged in socializing with the work friends rather than focus on the given task.
This distraction is further increased in the case of opposite-sex friendship which generally turns towards flirting and romance.
10. Loss of professionalism:
Professional lives are characterized by the formal setting, a formal code of conduct which includes formal wear, the way different information is conveyed, and the importance of different aspects of the official settings.
In the case of work friendship, this line of difference between professional and personal life gets blurred then it can result in lack of professionalism and also the person may get misguided thinking that they can be casual without any serious consequences.
For example, a worker may be close to his boss to such an extent that he uses his office email id to send informal greeting messages.
Such activities can leave a very bad impression on your colleague and can significantly drop your status in the office.
11. Hurting your senior’s sentiments or ego:
Events in personal life can sometimes go away from normal social norms and standards which may be quite okay within the personals regime.
When people start to mix up their social life with work life, like linking their Facebook with twitter and LinkedIn account or posting certain remarks in public which were supposed to mean for close friends circle, can cause disastrous result on their working life.
In many cases, candidates do not get recruited for the job due to their questionable social life while it can certainly misbalance your equation with your boss in case he comes to find something annoying about you.
It is really catastrophic in case he finds out that you back bitching in online forums.
Dangers of Mixing Business and Pleasure:
It is really hard to argue with a friend, especially over business-related issues. Many people believe that, when business or money comes in between, the relationship no longer remains the same as earlier. It doesn’t happen in all the cases but still, there are chances for it.
Though mixing business and pleasure have few benefits which by the way are practical, there are also few dark shades for the same, which we have to prevent at any cost. Some of the worst cases you have to overcome when not keeping work and personal life separate are
- Lead to conflicts regarding interests and ideas
- Betrayals of trust
- Alcohol should be a big NO at work
- Chances of meaningless office romances
- Fake social networking
How Not To Mix Business with Pleasure:
In general, you should avoid mixing business with pleasure to a larger extent since it would not only hurt you as a person but also, all those people around you.
Mixing them can be easily avoided which most people don’t prefer doing.
A quick chit-chat on various personal topics after office or a few rounds of drinks is the most general way of socializing. So here are few tips on how to avoid socializing too much.
- If you are new to a certain enterprise, then avoid opening up to any random co-worker about various things regarding your personal life, like about family or crushes or moments. Many people don’t want to listen and many do just for their own benefit if you are in a good position.
- If you are trying to socialize, then there would be people working under you or with you who would try to be over-friendly or socialize with you just to get their work done. In that case, avoid too much of business mix with pleasure and keep your business life simple.
- Avoid drinking and partying with your co-workers or juniors after office hours. This would make them believe that your posh attitude in office is nothing but a dud and soon the respect as a colleague would vanish and they would start taking you for granted.
- Never share your personal life problems with your colleague with whom you have gotten too comfortable after a few rounds of drinks or some friendly chats. Those are your personal problems and certainly, you shouldn’t mix it with your professional life.
- No matter how close you get to your colleague, maintain your professionalism well in front of them. If you show them your informal side, soon they would start taking you for granted. Even in situations when you would say them to do certain work, they would take it in a negative way.
- Never talk about last night party or social talks during your office hour. Or avoid talks that would sound personal in professional spaces. Also, in front of your boss. Maintain the barrier. Your other half is not something you can bare in front of anybody.
Conclusion:
Mixing business with pleasure is not a good idea to start with. Yet people all over the world make this mistake because this kind of socialization happens quite naturally without any self-control and specific steps and measures need to be taken to avoid them.
For your benefit, you need to avoid mixing these two aspects together to lead a stress-free life. Now that you have got a fair idea about this, you can try avoiding it as far as possible.
