Let's start from the beginning, my husband works from home still luckily. However his company, that he has been with for about 6yrs, keeps pushing him to come back to office, and he's told them thats fine but if he works at the office he leaves at 5pm because we live an hour from his work and we only have one car since the pandemic (couldn't afford both payments), if he works from home he doesn't mind working overtime.. They backed off the in office bs and since May he has worked from 8am to 8pm almost every night, and occasionally on Saturdays, averaging about 50 to 60 hours a week. He's the only one in his department working this much, everyone else leaves on time despite a massive load of overtime available. Which like I said he's happy to so long as he can continue working from home.
However, his boss keeps telling him he has to attend team building meetings in office. But when he gets there the day of, there's never an in person meeting and at the end of the day they all leave and go to a bar. For happy hour. Company paid drinks. My husband doesn't drink (he has celiac disease) but they're making it sound like this is a mandatory event because it's team building and he's worried if he doesn't go he will be forced to go back in office or get fired. Each time he has gone and politely played the part and leaves after an hour.
Side story: before this job he had several interviewers ask him about work culture and if he values work culture. He has said verbatim “it's stupid and I don't understand it” both of those jobs did not extend offers.
My husband is very socially anxious and does not like confrontation of any kind. He's stressing out because he thinks they will fire him if he doesn't attend these kinds of events and he's our only source of income ATM so he worries so much about doing everything at work and picks up everyone's slack. Training new hires, doing two positions (which he is paid accordingly but not given any leniency for deadlines despite juggling two sets of jobs duties) because they can't keep anyone else to do the work, fixing the mistakes of others and even creating new procedures for the office in response to not having enough people for the workload. Essentially making everyone else's job easier. He has so much work but can't get it done because if he goes to the office he gets pulled away for these “team building excerises” and he doesn't know how to say no without losing his job.
What makes him the most angry is that it's not his work or even his work ethic that's the problem but the fact that he doesn't want to go to an unpaid “team building” meeting at a bar for Happy Hour paid for by his employer. It's all about schmoozing and who you know instead of his actual work, which he takes so much pride in. They completely gloss over it like it's nothing.
It's frustrating that companies expect people to give up every other obligation they may have for such a stupid reason. What if he had to work two jobs? What about his family? What about time to himself?
Can he actually be fired? Does he have to go to these “meetings”?