‘What’s your unspoken office tradition that makes no sense?’ – 19 inexplicable work customs that have people confused
Whether you love your colleagues like family, or detest them like… well, family, there’s no doubt that you are part of a close community at work. And just like a family, you’ll be involved in an institution that has its own rules and customs, and some of them will be a bit weird.
Reddit user Parcel2GoUK has noticed this, posing this question on the AskUK page, and following up with an example of their own:
What’s your unspoken office tradition that makes no sense? We have a woman in customer service that works fully remote, but once a month she will come in and drop off a box of homemade sausage rolls and go back home. They are unbelievable as a snack, but I’m unsure how the whole thing came about.
And it quickly became clear that they are not alone in working somewhere with its own unique culture.
1.
‘We have a keen amateur (questionable now!) baker who loves the Great British Bake Off. He tries to recreate the winning showstopper after every show and takes it in the next day to share. We are fully flexible but almost everybody comes in that day!’
–Scarred_fish
2.
‘We used to have an unspoken rule that I would bake a cake for everyone’s birthday because I did it once. People started asking me to make one every time there was a birthday and then it just became the expectation. After making 20+ cakes for my colleagues it came to my birthday and five mins before lunch they got the cheapest tray bake from the One Stop so I stopped after that.’
–edyth_
3.
‘Our MD is a massive cricket nerd. So every year in July we have an voluntary inter departmental tournament officiated by him. Awards are given for best shots, most entertaining etc. The rules state that the person has to be working in your department throughout the tournament. So now, us senior managers actively shuffle staff between departments trying to get the best teams and its not unheard of for catching skills to be asked about at interviews leading up to it.’
–No_Direction_4566
4.
‘When we get to our desk, we log into Slack and say, ‘Morning’. People usually react with a little wave emoji to your login message. Except for some reason, on Fridays, people react with a little image of Rebecca Black.’
–Mearor
5.
‘I have another (been working since mid 90’s sorry!). When you go on your holiday you’re expected to bring back sweets from the place you visited. Doesn’t apply if you stayed in the same country you reside.’
–chefshoes
6.
‘All the greeting cards going around for people to sign. Thankfully the number of them has reduced now. But at one point there was a card going around at least once a week with up to five cards at a time for different people. Work anniversary? There’s a card. Someone’s birthday? There’s a card. Someone is having a baby? There’s a card. Someone is leaving? There’s a card. Someone bought a house? There’s a card. Someone’s getting married? There’s a card.’
–Devify
7.
‘We used to have an old boy come into the office one day a week to do an obscure but highly technical bookkeeping job that nobody else knew how to do. When he finally retired at 80 it was agreed that I’d do it and be paid overtime.
It was at this point that I discovered it didn’t take one day a week, it took about five minutes a month. He’d been taking the piss for decades.’
–smoulderstoat
8.
‘I work on the 9th floor and people like to run up the stairs from the ground floor and record their times on a leaderboard pinned to the wall.’
–CastleMeadowJim
9.
‘Our office tradition is that if someone replies ‘yeah’ to anything, everyone else will echo ‘yeah’. People will be in the kitchen making the tea, hear ‘yeah’ and then lean back into the room to parrot the word with absolutely no idea what’s going on. It’s absolutely stupid, and I love it.’
–Stuvas
10.
‘I usually get a Kinder Egg every few weeks as a snack – to show my colleagues I like them, I build the toy and leave it at the desk as a surprise of whoever is away from the desk at that moment.’
–Scandi101