Is the Party Over for Working Parents?

At an event the other day, my friend – a new mom with a six-month-old – mentioned an upsetting trend at her office.

“I’ll be sitting in a meeting with my boss and coworker, and two minutes into it, they’re reminiscing about last night’s happy hour like a couple of frat boys. Five minutes later, my coworker gets the lead on the project I wanted.”

It’s a development she’s noticed since she began skipping afterwork events. For Allison*, and many new working parents like her, 5 p.m. no longer means Miller Time, but family time.

But in a competitive, dog-eat-dog world, regularly ditching out on team-building and networking centered on work happy hours and industry softball leagues can have a negative effect on your career.

In our twenties, we worried that our hard partying would affect our work life. Now that we’re in our thirties, are we partying hard enough?

“Lots of informal work gets done at social events,” said Wendy Werner, career coach and founder of Werner Associates, LLC, a career and organization development firm. “People are generally more relaxed, and feel comfortable that they aren’t taking time away from their core responsibilities. This means that things get discussed that there may not be time for in the office during the standard work day.

"Relationships are key in any work setting," Werner added, "and social events make it easier to learn more about your colleagues.”

When I worked in advertising, I definitely noticed a difference in my work relationships when I could no longer get my Mad Men on every night. As I regularly backed out of cocktails and bowling nights, my coworkers naturally stopped asking me along, which in my head, turned me into Milton from Office Space, banished to the metaphorical career basement.

Heck, even Snooki felt out of the loop with her costars when she couldn’t bond over work-sanctioned Jägerbombs and pantsless cartwheels because of her pregnancy.

While new parents can’t make it to all afterwork events, Werner suggested a few guidelines to follow to stay connected with colleagues in your industry and maintain your position on your company team:

• Embrace your early morning wakeup call. “Many parents arrive at work earlier than some of their colleagues because of the need to get kids off to babysitters or day care. You can use the early part of the day to check in socially with some of the other early birds in the office.”

• Set a lunch date. “While lots of people don’t take time for lunch, initiating lunch with your colleagues or your boss is a good way to make up for some of the social time that you can’t make at the end of the work day. While there is a tendency to think of going out for lunch as ‘slacking off’ while others are dining at their desks, and it is more expensive than brown bagging, it is really about making an investment in your work culture and relationships.”

• Fit in a happy hour every now and then. “I would probably opt for something between once a week and once a month. It depends in part on how social your office is. Some work groups go out all of the time, and some do only occasionally. Try as well to invest in some of the bigger or more popular events – when more people will be there. The other thing I would recommend is that you can often go to an event and stay briefly. Just making the effort for some face time pays off. You don’t have to be the last person at the event.”

For those parents like me who now associate happy hour with half-price drinks at Sonic instead of beer specials at the local pub, it takes a bigger effort on our part to keep our work relationships going strong – in whatever way it fits our busy schedules.

*Name changed to protect the antisocial hermit.

By Nicole Plegge, Lifestyle Blogger for SmartParenting

Metro East mom Nicole Plegge is the lifestyle and pop culture blogger for SmartParenting. Besides working full time for a local nonprofit and raising two daughters and a husband, Nicole's greatest achievements are finding her misplaced car keys each day and managing to leave the house in a stain-free shirt. Her biggest regret is never being accepted to the Eastland School for Girls.