The business writer Erin Meyer places the United States among the peach cultures described by Fons Trompenaars. In them people “share information about themselves, and ask personal questions of those they hardly know.” Further in, “you may suddenly get to the hard pit protecting someone’s real, or at least more private, self.”
MIT’s office for international students quotes the same image. Americans are “soft on the outside, easy to approach, but the pit is harder.”
In 2005 Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz published Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time. “The secret, master networker Keith Ferrazzi claims, is in reaching out to other people.” The book separates “genuine relationship-building” from what the description calls crude, desperate glad-handing.
One of the twelve questions in Gallup’s well-known employee engagement survey is “I have a best friend at work.” In the United States, “just two in 10 employees report having a best friend at work.”
In 1999 Gallup called the item “clearly one of the most controversial of the 12 traits.” Employees “get stuck on the word ‘best,'” because they feel it implies exclusivity. When Gallup tried softer wording, the question no longer distinguished the best teams, so it kept the word.
In 1973 the sociologist Mark Granovetter published “The Strength of Weak Ties.” He had asked professional, technical and managerial workers near Boston how they found their jobs. Of those who found a job through a personal contact, 16.7 percent saw that contact often. Most saw the contact only occasionally or rarely.
“It is remarkable that people receive crucial information from individuals whose very existence they have forgotten.”
A Harris Poll published in 2024 found that half of American workers get nervous when they ask for time off. Among millennials it was 61 percent. Twenty-eight percent had taken time off without formally asking for it.
In 2012 Sheryl Sandberg, then the chief operating officer of Facebook, said in a video interview: “I walk out of this office every day at 5:30 so I’m home for dinner with my kids at 6:00.” She said that only in the last year or two had she been brave enough to talk about it publicly.
According to reports of the interview, she sent emails early in the morning and late at night to show she was still working.
In February 2013 Yahoo told employees who worked from home that they would have to come to the office from June. The memo said, “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.” It added, “We need to be working side-by-side.”
At the same time it was reported that the chief executive, Marissa Mayer, had paid to have a nursery built in her office when she joined Yahoo. She had a baby a few months later.
On September 16, 2024, Amazon’s chief executive Andy Jassy told employees that from January 2, 2025, they would be in the office five days a week, “outside of extenuating circumstances.” He gave examples such as “if you or your child were sick” or “if you had some sort of house emergency.”
The exceptions included employees who “already have a Remote Work Exception approved through your s-team leader.”
In August 2015 Netflix announced that new parents could “take off as much time as they want during the first year after a child’s birth or adoption.” The policy covered salaried employees in its streaming business. Workers in its DVD distribution centers were not included.
A Netflix customer started a petition. “It’s wrong for Netflix to create two classes of employees.”
In 2005 Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior, published I-Deals: Idiosyncratic Deals Employees Bargain for Themselves. The book describes personal arrangements that an employee negotiates one by one, such as working from home or flexible hours, which differ from what coworkers have. The publisher says it “challenges traditional notions that standardization is the way to create workplace justice.”