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End of the workday. Nia and several colleagues are heading out together and stop by Maja’s desk.
— Maja, we’re going to grab something to eat. Come with us — you’ve skipped it every time lately.
— Thanks, but I’ll pass again tonight.
Nia leaves thinking Maja is distancing herself from the group. Maja stays behind, relieved, and puts on her headphones.
How does Empatyzer help when team-building divides the team?
Empatyzer helps you see that closeness to some of the team can look like a closed circle to others. It also helps you see how to build a bond without creating camps.
Features that can help:
- Similarity map: Shows the pattern of similarities and differences in a group, which helps check whether the tension around "I have nothing against you" concerns a single relationship or entire subgroups.
- Talk to Em about your team: Allows you to discuss the "I have nothing against you" issue with Em in the context of the entire team and establish a shared rule that prevents similar misunderstandings in the future.
- Organisational culture: Shows the preferred and actual organisational culture, which helps check whether the "I have nothing against you" situation is related to the dominant norm of the company or team, and not solely to the character of the individuals.
What really happened
Nia experiences after-work plans as a natural sign of group connection: “We are a team, we like one another, we spend time together.” When Maja repeatedly declines, Nia starts reading more into the refusal than Maja intends. For Nia, “I’m not coming” begins to sound like “I don’t want to be part of this group.” For Maja, it means only “After work, I need my own time.” Both can care about the team and work well with the same people while recognizing belonging through different signals. Maja does not have to reject her colleagues in order to reject an evening out, and Nia does not have to be manipulative for shared rituals to genuinely matter to her.
What the research says
A sense of belonging at work develops partly through repeated contact, shared practices, and social cues that communicate “I am part of this group” — workplace belonging (Banchefsky et al., 2019). At the same time, people differ in how strongly they prefer to separate work from the rest of life, a topic studied through boundary management. None of this means that people who skip social events are less loyal, or that after-work gatherings are harmful. The problem begins when one particular form of socializing becomes an informal test of belonging. Someone can perform well and have good relationships at work while still being seen as “less of a team player” simply because they do not participate in a private-time ritual.
How to handle it
Build more than one route to connection: coffee during the workday, lunch together, five minutes of informal conversation before a meeting, and the occasional evening event. Participation after hours should genuinely mean “you can join” rather than “you can decline, but we will remember that you were absent.” If someone repeatedly says no, one low-pressure question is enough: “Do you prefer connecting with the team in a different way?” The general rule is: do not measure belonging through one style of sociability; people can be fully part of a team while protecting time that does not belong to work.
How Empatyzer and Em can help
Empatyzer can help Nia and Maja see that participation in team life does not look the same for everyone. Motivators connected with social contact, independence, acceptance, or calm may make a group outing feel like natural relationship-building to one person and an optional extra to another. Em can help Nia check her interpretation instead of completing the story for Maja: “I’ve noticed you rarely join us after work. I just want to make sure everything feels okay in the team — you absolutely don’t have to come out with us.” The team can then create more opportunities for belonging during working hours as well. Micro-lessons reinforce a simple principle: declining a group ritual is not automatically the same as declining a relationship with the group.
Sources
- Cathrine Filstad; Laura Elizabeth Mercer Traavik; Mara Gorli (2019). Belonging at work: the experiences, representations and meanings of belonging. Journal of Workplace Learning, 31(2), 116-142. https://doi.org/10.1108/JWL-06-2018-0081 10.1108/JWL-06-2018-0081
- Špela Trefalt (2013). Between You and Me: Setting Work-Nonwork Boundaries in the Context of Workplace Relationships. Academy of Management Journal, 56(6), 1802-1829. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2011.0298 10.5465/amj.2011.0298
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