>> but you may find that the teammate who does bring their spouse along and participates in the bullshit rituals gets consistent pay rises ... Yet another reaso

>> but you may find that the teammate who does bring their spouse along and participates in the bullshit rituals gets consistent pay rises ... Yet another reason why a lot of management is itching to "get back to the office". I am curious what the basis of your world view is. I worked as a manager in some pretty big companies and this doesn't resonate with how I or anyone I knew acted, nor does it make sense to structure things this way from an incentive point of view. I would say there's an angle there where people that like their work and co-workers more are generally more productive than those who punch the clock. So I could see that there could be some (mild) correlation - not causation - between better performance/higher team cohesion and interest in work social events, it would be silly to pay people based on the later because we can just pay them on the former.