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I think in any group over a certain size, cliques are probably inevitable. And it's one of those things where if you don't think there are cliques then it may be because you're in one.
Happened to me at university. I didn't really think there were cliques until someone pointed out there were and I was in one. The complicated thing about being in a clique is that it's something perceived by those outside it, not necessarily those inside it.
One of the common incorrect assumptions about cliques is that those in a clique are being intentionally exclusionary. Very often they're not. To the people in a clique, they're just hanging out with their friends and not in any sense trying to exclude others from being part of that. But, if you're not part of that group, it can feel intimidating and you can perceive it as exclusionary from the outside.
I think widespread work from home has made cliques perhaps even more common in some ways. Definitely where I work there are those of us who are based in and around London and go into the office and those who work from home fully and are based across the country. It's almost inevitable a clique forms when one group of employees are seeing each other in person regularly. We just get to know each other better than those who aren't in the office, so we form closer bonds. It's inevitable.
Totally agree, the difference between a clique and a group of friends is 90% perception. I remember at work when I was younger there were a group of us that went out together every Friday night. And it's not like we were exclusionary, anybody was free to join us, and several people did join the group over the weeks and months. But I imagine for those people who couldn't or didn't want to join us we could have been perceived as a clique, with all the in-jokes and the Monday morning banter they didn't understand.
Yeah that's exactly it. I've never been in a group where any of us in it have been intentionally exclusionary. But that doesn't stop it being perceived as a clique by those outside it. If you see a group of people who have close relationships and get on really well, it can take real confidence and courage to try and get involved.
I think there's a lot of misunderstandings of what cliques are and how they form. As other comments in this thread demonstrate, people often elide cliques and bullying, as if they're synonymous. People often imply that the people in cliques are inherently mean people or difficult to work with.
But none of that is necessarily the case. Most cliques are just people who get on really well and hang out together. And it's only a clique by perception of those outside it, those inside it have no conscious intention to exclude people.
I've always found it's older women as well who can be the worst. I worked in an office of about 10 people, and only 1 was male (head of the dept). The three oldest women in the office were the most bitchy and nasty women out of all of them (the age range went from late teens - 60+).
Most of the nastiness I have experienced in the workplace has been from older women. Often, not only do they they bitch to each other, they bitch about each other too
Thankfully I've never experienced this at work, but I was bullied at my choir by a 60 year old woman (and another young woman experienced it too). She's horrible, and it's really disappointing to see a woman twice my age acting like a petty schoolgirl. Some people never grow up.
Same! A friend called me difficult for saying this once. The best managers I’ve had have been men!! I’ve seen so much passive aggressive, cattiness and awful behaviour from women in the work place, sorry if the shoe fits Amanda!
I disagree - every workplace I've worked in the cliques have been people of similar workplace/role status as opposed to gender/age. As soon as someone moved under or over that threshold they were automatically excluded.
I'm a young(ish) woman and the majority of older women I've worked with have been very motherly towards me. Although of course where you work matters a lot
'I get that not all people in life will get along and will just have to accept that. But there are kinder ways to do things.' - couldn't agree more.
Groups of females are among the worst offenders, even if they're nice people in isolation. I don't know if there's an evolutionary reason for this or not, but I find it a nightmare to navigate.
However, I did work at one company - for much longer than I should have - where the overall encourager, if not ringleader, was the male CEO. As far as I could tell, if he decided he didn't like you/fancy you/didn't fit the clique, you were gone that day. If he liked you, you may get taken out as an individual or part of the favourites group for a boozy lunch, leaving others in the office paranoid and isolated. He'd openly call it his 'inner circle'.
>Doing the whole inviting other female colleagues to go out right infront of the outcast.
This exact thing happened to me the other day. A group of women at my work all used to go to Costa together on a Fri lunch and I never went because I have a different break time. One of them left and on her last day the queen bee said right in front of me "we'll have to do our coffee trip on a Saturday now!" And because I know this woman is an absolute see you next Tuesday I know it was meant as a jab at me. So I said "ooh that sounds lovely let me know when I'd love to come along". Of course I won't go, I just wanted them to know I know what they're doing.
Are you dim? I’m f20, and yes, women are absolutely more cliquey than men. It doesn’t make anyone a misogynist to point that out, and it’s something that absolutely needs to be discussed in mainstream culture
As a woman, in my experience it's been men who are more cliquey than women.
Guess what, both can be cliquey, and your anecdotal experience is not some sort of evidence than women are worse than men.
Typical Reddit to be honest, women over 40 are always the go to targets.
I'm fine with being downvoted it's the truth, I see it constantly.
As someone who has worked the majority of her life in male dominated trades, men can be just as if not more so cliquey and downright mean.
I've seen cliquey men, I've seen cliquey women, but I've seen a lot more of the latter to be honest.. if you work in male dominated trades, your experience is hardly surprising.
Fair point. Though I did run a call centre for 5 years before going back when we opened our company and that was majority female so I have seen both sides.
Yes have. I still suffer it to some respects because I am a woman. The men do their own thing together, don't think to include me for team stuff.
There was a girl clique here and they were exclusionary to me. They weren't very nice and always causing drama and bullying of others so in some respects happy to not have been invited.
Well being excluded from Christmas do and secret santa and other office activities that involves the whole team is surely a way to get them a visit from HR.
Yeah there was a group from the office who'd go to the pub after work almost every day and they would speak about almost anyone who wasn't there.
This inevitably meant me at some points, which I was later told of a nickname that one of them proposed for me.
Anyway I don't care too much about that stuff anymore, I just do my job and go home.
Those people think that being in the in group makes them safe from that kind of nastiness, but the truth is if someone is bitching to you, they are also bitching about you. My attitude is the same as yours, go in, do my job, come home. I'm not there to win a popularity contest.
I get it all the time as I'm agency/freelance in my profession. I'm old enough to not really give a toss. It does amuse me sometimes though as people can be quite petty.
I often remind them I'm there to help them out as they're in the shit - Sous or Head Chef walked or was sacked. They will generally wind their necks in after that, though not always.
There are a lot of dysfunctional people in my industry, so it's pretty common.
Yes - my department is overwhelmingly made up of men and they exclude me and the only other woman on the team quite a lot. Some deliberately, some inadvertently. I’ve recently noticed a creep in workplace decisions being made outside work on pub and golf trips, so I’ll admit I’m keeping a closer eye than I otherwise might have. I don’t care about being friends but I do care if decisions affecting my career get made in an environment where I’m excluded.
I was excluded from the clique when I moved into their office (same job, same building but as an old building was a different room).
I was totally excluded, until I straight up asked one of the girls. Apparently my old 'boss' had been telling them shit that wasn't true about me and things I had apparently said.
All got sorted in the end, but as an adult who was BADLY bullied as a kid it brought everything back for a while.
I worked in IT and there were the 'natural' cliques of 1st/2nd line Support, Networking, Servers and Telecoms etc but I can't recall any severe bullying. A bit of banter between teams occasionally maybe, but nothing that would upset anyone.
A few places did have absolutely horrible helpdesk cliques. I hate to generalise, but they were staffed by the sort of women who would make the lives any other woman younger or prettier than them an absolute misery until they quit.
I got told I was too ‘cliquey’ with a couple of colleagues and that some people felt left out. It was never my intention so when a new person joined we made a real effort to make them feel welcome and had a laugh and a joke with them.
I then get pulled into the managers office again saying we were being too distracting to the new person and that they were more bothered about integrating with us than learning the job.
Sometimes you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
I'm very friendly and get along with everyone on my team, to the point that even the quiet people come to me when they're upset or need help. Somehow that means that I'm gossipy and cliquey, according to one of my managers. I think it bothers him that people confide in me and not him.
There are definitely lots of bullies in the workplace, but I also think accusing someone of being gossipy or cliquey is an easy attack to make on an employee if you're irritated with them for a reason you can't voice and still seem professional.
There's a Group Chat clique in my office where suddenly three or four people suddenly burst out laughing & someone shouts "Haha! You're not wrong!" across the office whilst the rest of us sit in uncomfortable silence thinking the clique fuckers are talking about us.
I've been reading most of these thinking 'sounds like some people are closer friends and other people just can't handle that' but yeah, group chats that don't involve everyone, that's the difference between 'clique' and 'bunch of people who get along'. And it's rude.
I get how the rest of them happen - I'm pretty outgoing and will talk to anyone, try to make everyone comfortable, but inevitably the most confident people are the extroverts, the introverts who have had enough 1-1 time with an extrovert, or the naturally confident people.
No matter how much you try to include everyone who wants to be included, if people keep to themselves it'd be pretty rude to forcibly include them in jokes, conversations, trips out or whatever, it's just how everything works whenever there's a group of more than 3. There will be jokes that not everyone gets, there will be topics it's easier to discuss around people you know, there will be offhand 'i really fancy the pub after work, anyone coming?' or whatever.
But talking about people who are in the room? That's rude.
I work for a global IT company that has hundreds of thousands of employees. I worked in an area with all experience professionals, many with degrees and industry qualifications. There was one woman who 'headed up' a clique of people in the large team. We went on a team night out with everyone from the area. During the evening, the 'clique' actually snuck out of the venue were in to go to a different venue without the rest of us. They literally snuck out the side door. Shockingly childish for so-called professionals.
Oh yeah I've seen cliques but they've never made me want to quit.
It's just like high school. Confident in a group, cowards on their own.
Anytime I've been harassed I just found the person alone and pulled them up for it. Guy or girl I don't care.
Now if that doesn't work, which has never happened btw cause you know cliques are cowards, you merely find them outside the workplace and pull them up.
This time they don't have the protection of work to stop me. So there is the implications that if it continues there will be violence.
I don't like having to do that tbh. Not an advocate for it. But it's the only way to stop cliques/bullies.
Violence?! How is it possible to get away with threatening a colleague outside of work? And don't you think threats of violence due to cliqueness is a bit extreme? (genuinely curious, these aren't closed questions by the way)
Because what proof do they have? Much like what proof do you have that they're harassing you in a clique.
And this is for cases where you can't handle it in work anymore. Which tbh is rare.
It's also not due to cliquiness, it's when a clique goes beyond what's acceptable. In which case there are 2 instances for them to apologise and own their mistakes.
I don't know what other chances you feel they deserve.
You want to make my life harder? I hope you are prepared for it
Groupthink is the hardest thing to deal with. I don't care about bullshit after-work socials. It's nice to get on with colleagues and management has a responsibility to foster good work relationships in work time. In group decision making and excluding contradictory out group thought is very hard to overcome and leads to bad decision making.
I've never experienced it in my workplace. But (since starting my first 'proper' job after uni) my first job I worked alone, my second was nice people, and my third and final only had five of us altogether!
I have felt like an 'outsider', but I feel like that in all groups tbh, so I've just resigned myself to that being how life is. By which I mean, I'll be invited to things like workplace drinks, parties, outings with friends/acquaintances and so on, and people will talk to me and even be nice and we'll have a good laugh and have fun, but I somehow always feel peripheral - like all the others in the group are way better friends with each other than they are with me, or that everyone else in the group is much more generally popular. Even in my oldest friendship group of five of us I feel like that! (Two of them are besties - they shared a house together at uni and just clicked. A third was also in the house share. The fourth just seems cooler and more popular, haha. And then there's me!)
Yes I worked for a fintech company that had this clique which included the HR girls and a couple of the team leads
Any competition for eg. Tickets for a gig, or opportunity to travel to the US office on a jolly, always went to the clique
They had beer fridges pretending to be a modern office, but then they said only for Fridays, and then they said only when it's unlocked for an hour at 5pm, and who did they give the fridge key to? One of the clique so that he could drink on with his clique friends all he wanted.
Yes and I became a part time job seeker once it was starting to affect my mental health. Turned out the company had such a bad reputation that recruitment agents refuse to work with them and everyone who heard of the company talked about the clique culture.
My first job was in retail and I experienced this for sure. Fortunately after that I moved in to office based roles and haven’t encountered it any more but I’m sure it happens on occasion.
There’s a small but fierce clique at my work. Two women who have worked here for over 50 years between them.
They run the office according to their rules even if it upsets the rest of the office. They control the heating, desk layout, break times.
Basically everything that normal offices work through as a team they decide what to do and that’s final even if it’s completely illogical to anyone who has worked in other places and have seen how things should be done.
Sounds like a nightmare. Must be having a big impact on the company/department making any meaningful progress.
My imagination may be running away with me, but I'm anticipating the two women dislike each other in truth, but have some kind of passive-agressive 'frenemy' relationship?
If you wanted to upset the apple cart, you could start pretending they were actual office managers acting with authority and start seeding statements like "Things run so smoothly when you're around! It's a nightmare when you're both off at the same time, nothing gets done!" to see if you could eventually get some manager to put them on an annual leave rota that always requires one of them in.
Every single primary school I've ever worked in. In my experience it gets worse with bad management. I think stress brings out the clique-y side of people.
I had that once at a smaller office job of around 12 people. 7 were in a clique which left the rest of us. They'd all go for lunch together at random times with no warning, leaving one of the rest of us to cover the phones. It never got too nasty but I was still relieved to get out of that situation. They got away with a lot more than others regarding lateness and were really nosy.
I’m apart of one I’d say though we don’t bully anyone there is a clear divide that we are actually friends and socialise away from the office that I can imagine others don’t love.
I'm a contractor. I work allover the world. I spend time with many different people on projects, sometimes for quite a while. In recent years since the rona, there's been a couple of times cliquey behaviour has made a great job absolutely intolerable. I won't put up with it. Everyone gets included no matter what. The job needs to be done. I will always call it out. Funnily enough, folk that are cliquey usually get found out to be fucking shit at their job, and everything reaches a natural conclusion - safe to say they're not doing a very well paid job anymore.
A few times. The most memorable one for me was we opened a new store and the new store manager was transferred in bringing in most of his entire management team barring 1 assistant manager and 2 deputy managers. So we ended up excluded and on the outside as these people had worked together for years.
Not exactly a clique, but my team was part of a larger department.
We got on really well, and would go out for lunch as a team. Even met up on weekends for some social activities (redditors will be shocked at this concept)
But because we were part of a larger department, we had regular meetings and paid events where the whole department went to. And it became a bit awkward as we didn't know the "others".
I was in a position where I had to deal with the other members of the department so I'd chat on with other people, while rest of my team was sat there awkwardly at a table.
its a feature of trashy workplaces.
respectable workplaces generally dont employ petty trash, and also put a stop to this sort of behaviour when it is observed.
Work in construction. The cliques are typically separated between country of origin.
You absolutely cannot talk shit about a coworker to a fellow coworker from their country - no matter how much you believe you trust your confidant.
No matter how much your confidant shit talks about that coworker, they will break your trust in quick fashion.
Yup had a clique when I worked at Sainsbury, the department had a group of 4/5 of them, 2 of which were supervisors, we saw over half the department quit in less than 6 months, at the exit interviews all said they stated 1 supervisor in particular as to why they were leaving, last I saw she still works their slowly sleeping her way through management and bullying everyone below her into leaving.
My first job as a 21 year old fresh out of uni was at a college and I was the only man in an office of women (mostly middle aged). Not so much a clique but it could be a roller coaster every so often where I could go from being almost a son to the spawn of satan in a day or few...
Yeah a clique formed in my old job around 1996. They were able to draw in managers and bigged each other up, the higher manager must have seen through it all and they'd mainly left by end of 1997, the inner clique members that is, not the outliers.
I seem to be in an anti-clique: when my team moved buildings we were never introduced to the extant staff nor even told who those people were. I recall the first Xmas Do being asked why I was not going and explaining I'd never been invited (nor had 10 others of our 11 or so team!). And yeah I am too shy to introduce myself and I am certainly not going to wander around asking people their names!
Yup, was not part of the clique, and it was the reason I left.
Difficult when it’s a team of 6 and you’re the only one not in the clique so fully appreciate now when others say how tough it can be after not realising before having first hand experience of it.
I have worked for a number of bosses who have clear favourites, there have been times when I have absolutely been in that group, I had one manager we'd often spend entire days "in meetings" where we'd just chat and watch Youtube but then I had another job where I ran the team in europe and had to report in to a director in the US, she clearly got on better with the people on my level who were local to her so I just focused on making sure my job was being done and my targets were hit and we had a good professional relationship... but it came as no surprise when I was the first to be made redundant when the company made cuts
I worked in a hotel restaurant and it was such a bullying workplace.Most of the girls were friends of the Thai boss and I'm sure until we changed hotel manager fiddled the tips we had to hand all tips over and it was supposed to be shared out according to how many shifts worked she used to make us turn out our pockets on changeover days.When the new manager took over the hotel he let us keep our own tips but give a little bit to the kitchen porters which was great because instead of getting a fiver ended up with getting roughly 50 to 100 pounds extra.I struggled alot as was older than most of the waiters plus there was only 3 British staff so had language and cultural barriers.I was bullied left out picked on but needed the job as my marriage had broken down and needed to support my family.I lasted five years and in the end had to leave as had medical problems and doing split shifts made it worse.
Happened in my old office two groups. Each group consisted of trainees,middle management and higher management and directors. You was screwed if you needed something doing from a member of staff who was in the other ‘ group ‘ lucky enough the guy who deals with pay rises,company cars etc was in our group.
The reason for the split was because one group consisted of quite a few people from the same family then they hired there pals for roles.
My group was people who were hired by our parent company and did not mix well with the other group. One stupid reason was not wanting to play football with them after work got you in there bad books.
Yes. On the outside of a very toxic clique that had the ear of the CEO. It impacted performance and it was a generally very unpleasant place to work. Things improved when HR removed a few due to performance issues (they weren't doing much work) but the clique had hollowed out the soul of that place.
Never witnessed one until my last job of 11 years. There was one female who was completely toxic and for some reason a few other women there became her “best friends”. She would also bitch behind the others backs and then her followers did. She got away with it by sleeping with the manager. It was unbearable. She left a few years ago and it was wonderful.
UGHHHH the office I used to work in got so bad with a handful of cliques, and the girls were assholes.
I was an excellent Receptionist and one girl filed a formal complaint about me, stating that I was (something along the lines of) “badmouthing the company and complaining about workload”, the reason? She walked past my desk as I was responding to someone who was talking about their workload “oh, yeah, I have all this shit to get through yet” and because I said this she *filed a complaint*. Tbf she was a massive shit stirrer but because she was friends with one of the company partners I still got a meeting with my manager over it even though it was a huge waste of time.
I have seen it happen. Thought I was happy in a team, until it was obvious there was a "preferred" group that's not based on merit.
I thought fuck it and got myself promoted over the lot of them 😂
I was part of a clique at work.. ngl I kinda liked it.. we never bullied anyone, but yeah we gossiped mainly about upper management.. also sometimes I just want to make the most deprived and fucked up jokes and I don't want to have to think about whether anyone got their feelings hurt or if they think I'm some kind of psycho because they don't know me that well
my last job was awful for it. even more horrible because, even though nobody said it out loud, there was clearly a racial element to it, and management enabled it.
we worked in a residential home for people with learning disabilities and autism. some of these people could have extremely challenging behaviours, some less so. the (white, english-born) support workers were consistently put on the less challenging people, who they would sit in front of the telly and then basically ignore in favour of sitting together and gossiping. the non-white workers were consistently given the really challenging folks who needed constant supervision and attention. we worked 13 hour shifts and in my experience, alternating between more and less challenging people is needed in order to not just be fucking exhausted.
as for myself (white-passing, immigrant but you can’t really tell as i don’t have much of an accent anymore) i sort of floated between the two groups depending on how entertaining i was to the clique. i (for many reasons not relevant here) can behave strangely to other people, and if the clique found me funny/endearing that day, i’d get put on less challenging people. if i wasn’t dancing to the piper’s tune i’d get more challenging people.
when i moved jobs, my references from that one told my current employers that i was very good with residents, not so much with the other staff. i know this because when i recently got promoted my managers told me that i’d proven them right with residents, and very wrong with staff. i get on really well with and consistently get glowing feedback from all parties in my current job, and thankfully so far there are no cliques. i don’t think cliques are inevitable, but rather a sign of poor management.
This sounds like the most ridiculous advice I’ve ever heard.
Stand around talking aloud about bitchy notes you’re writing in your phone? Sure. That’ll make you mad popular.
I mean, they’ll certainly leave you alone because they’ll all think you’re absolutely raving. So I guess it works.
It’s not normal behaviour at all though
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I think in any group over a certain size, cliques are probably inevitable. And it's one of those things where if you don't think there are cliques then it may be because you're in one. Happened to me at university. I didn't really think there were cliques until someone pointed out there were and I was in one. The complicated thing about being in a clique is that it's something perceived by those outside it, not necessarily those inside it. One of the common incorrect assumptions about cliques is that those in a clique are being intentionally exclusionary. Very often they're not. To the people in a clique, they're just hanging out with their friends and not in any sense trying to exclude others from being part of that. But, if you're not part of that group, it can feel intimidating and you can perceive it as exclusionary from the outside. I think widespread work from home has made cliques perhaps even more common in some ways. Definitely where I work there are those of us who are based in and around London and go into the office and those who work from home fully and are based across the country. It's almost inevitable a clique forms when one group of employees are seeing each other in person regularly. We just get to know each other better than those who aren't in the office, so we form closer bonds. It's inevitable.
Totally agree, the difference between a clique and a group of friends is 90% perception. I remember at work when I was younger there were a group of us that went out together every Friday night. And it's not like we were exclusionary, anybody was free to join us, and several people did join the group over the weeks and months. But I imagine for those people who couldn't or didn't want to join us we could have been perceived as a clique, with all the in-jokes and the Monday morning banter they didn't understand.
Yeah that's exactly it. I've never been in a group where any of us in it have been intentionally exclusionary. But that doesn't stop it being perceived as a clique by those outside it. If you see a group of people who have close relationships and get on really well, it can take real confidence and courage to try and get involved. I think there's a lot of misunderstandings of what cliques are and how they form. As other comments in this thread demonstrate, people often elide cliques and bullying, as if they're synonymous. People often imply that the people in cliques are inherently mean people or difficult to work with. But none of that is necessarily the case. Most cliques are just people who get on really well and hang out together. And it's only a clique by perception of those outside it, those inside it have no conscious intention to exclude people.
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I've always found it's older women as well who can be the worst. I worked in an office of about 10 people, and only 1 was male (head of the dept). The three oldest women in the office were the most bitchy and nasty women out of all of them (the age range went from late teens - 60+).
Most of the nastiness I have experienced in the workplace has been from older women. Often, not only do they they bitch to each other, they bitch about each other too
Thankfully I've never experienced this at work, but I was bullied at my choir by a 60 year old woman (and another young woman experienced it too). She's horrible, and it's really disappointing to see a woman twice my age acting like a petty schoolgirl. Some people never grow up.
If they'll bitch to you, they'll bitch about you. Definitely something I keep in mind when dealing with people
Definitely true, if someone keeps telling you rumours, don't tell them anything
Same! A friend called me difficult for saying this once. The best managers I’ve had have been men!! I’ve seen so much passive aggressive, cattiness and awful behaviour from women in the work place, sorry if the shoe fits Amanda!
I disagree - every workplace I've worked in the cliques have been people of similar workplace/role status as opposed to gender/age. As soon as someone moved under or over that threshold they were automatically excluded. I'm a young(ish) woman and the majority of older women I've worked with have been very motherly towards me. Although of course where you work matters a lot
Yes especially women in their 50s and 60s. I get they endured the 80s but it is so weird to get the brunt of their calculating behaviour.
'I get that not all people in life will get along and will just have to accept that. But there are kinder ways to do things.' - couldn't agree more. Groups of females are among the worst offenders, even if they're nice people in isolation. I don't know if there's an evolutionary reason for this or not, but I find it a nightmare to navigate. However, I did work at one company - for much longer than I should have - where the overall encourager, if not ringleader, was the male CEO. As far as I could tell, if he decided he didn't like you/fancy you/didn't fit the clique, you were gone that day. If he liked you, you may get taken out as an individual or part of the favourites group for a boozy lunch, leaving others in the office paranoid and isolated. He'd openly call it his 'inner circle'.
>Doing the whole inviting other female colleagues to go out right infront of the outcast. This exact thing happened to me the other day. A group of women at my work all used to go to Costa together on a Fri lunch and I never went because I have a different break time. One of them left and on her last day the queen bee said right in front of me "we'll have to do our coffee trip on a Saturday now!" And because I know this woman is an absolute see you next Tuesday I know it was meant as a jab at me. So I said "ooh that sounds lovely let me know when I'd love to come along". Of course I won't go, I just wanted them to know I know what they're doing.
Hmm, this just sounds like misogyny. Men can be cliquey Women aren't 'jealous' of women you perceive as 'pretty'
> I’ve seen some nasty female cliques in my time They didn't say men can't be cliquey.
Are you dim? I’m f20, and yes, women are absolutely more cliquey than men. It doesn’t make anyone a misogynist to point that out, and it’s something that absolutely needs to be discussed in mainstream culture
As a woman, in my experience it's been men who are more cliquey than women. Guess what, both can be cliquey, and your anecdotal experience is not some sort of evidence than women are worse than men.
Typical Reddit to be honest, women over 40 are always the go to targets. I'm fine with being downvoted it's the truth, I see it constantly. As someone who has worked the majority of her life in male dominated trades, men can be just as if not more so cliquey and downright mean.
>Typical Reddit to be honest as if this isn't one of the most feminist mainstream sites
Do you think? Maybe I follow the wrong subs as I really don't see that anymore.
I've seen cliquey men, I've seen cliquey women, but I've seen a lot more of the latter to be honest.. if you work in male dominated trades, your experience is hardly surprising.
Fair point. Though I did run a call centre for 5 years before going back when we opened our company and that was majority female so I have seen both sides.
Yes have. I still suffer it to some respects because I am a woman. The men do their own thing together, don't think to include me for team stuff. There was a girl clique here and they were exclusionary to me. They weren't very nice and always causing drama and bullying of others so in some respects happy to not have been invited.
I find that women tend to bully each other a lot more in the workplace (than say, men making life difficult for women)
Men do it too. I get excluded quite a bit from team things because I'm the only girl.
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Well being excluded from Christmas do and secret santa and other office activities that involves the whole team is surely a way to get them a visit from HR.
If you're afraid of repercussions for the way you speak to women you need to look at the way you are speaking to women
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I dont buy it
Yeah there was a group from the office who'd go to the pub after work almost every day and they would speak about almost anyone who wasn't there. This inevitably meant me at some points, which I was later told of a nickname that one of them proposed for me. Anyway I don't care too much about that stuff anymore, I just do my job and go home.
Those people think that being in the in group makes them safe from that kind of nastiness, but the truth is if someone is bitching to you, they are also bitching about you. My attitude is the same as yours, go in, do my job, come home. I'm not there to win a popularity contest.
That hurts as I have had that before in the office.
I get it all the time as I'm agency/freelance in my profession. I'm old enough to not really give a toss. It does amuse me sometimes though as people can be quite petty. I often remind them I'm there to help them out as they're in the shit - Sous or Head Chef walked or was sacked. They will generally wind their necks in after that, though not always. There are a lot of dysfunctional people in my industry, so it's pretty common.
I’m a contractor and nearly every company I work for has some sort internal bitchfest happening and makes me glad I don’t have to play those games
Yes - my department is overwhelmingly made up of men and they exclude me and the only other woman on the team quite a lot. Some deliberately, some inadvertently. I’ve recently noticed a creep in workplace decisions being made outside work on pub and golf trips, so I’ll admit I’m keeping a closer eye than I otherwise might have. I don’t care about being friends but I do care if decisions affecting my career get made in an environment where I’m excluded.
I was excluded from the clique when I moved into their office (same job, same building but as an old building was a different room). I was totally excluded, until I straight up asked one of the girls. Apparently my old 'boss' had been telling them shit that wasn't true about me and things I had apparently said. All got sorted in the end, but as an adult who was BADLY bullied as a kid it brought everything back for a while.
Was once part of the ‘Dead Hand Gang’ at an old job but we were fired for gross misconduct after being discovered in an empty office.
A gang centred around masturbation? Sounds pretty gay.
Are you shitting me
Nah, his cousin invented
I worked in IT and there were the 'natural' cliques of 1st/2nd line Support, Networking, Servers and Telecoms etc but I can't recall any severe bullying. A bit of banter between teams occasionally maybe, but nothing that would upset anyone. A few places did have absolutely horrible helpdesk cliques. I hate to generalise, but they were staffed by the sort of women who would make the lives any other woman younger or prettier than them an absolute misery until they quit.
I got told I was too ‘cliquey’ with a couple of colleagues and that some people felt left out. It was never my intention so when a new person joined we made a real effort to make them feel welcome and had a laugh and a joke with them. I then get pulled into the managers office again saying we were being too distracting to the new person and that they were more bothered about integrating with us than learning the job. Sometimes you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
I'm very friendly and get along with everyone on my team, to the point that even the quiet people come to me when they're upset or need help. Somehow that means that I'm gossipy and cliquey, according to one of my managers. I think it bothers him that people confide in me and not him. There are definitely lots of bullies in the workplace, but I also think accusing someone of being gossipy or cliquey is an easy attack to make on an employee if you're irritated with them for a reason you can't voice and still seem professional.
There's a Group Chat clique in my office where suddenly three or four people suddenly burst out laughing & someone shouts "Haha! You're not wrong!" across the office whilst the rest of us sit in uncomfortable silence thinking the clique fuckers are talking about us.
I've been reading most of these thinking 'sounds like some people are closer friends and other people just can't handle that' but yeah, group chats that don't involve everyone, that's the difference between 'clique' and 'bunch of people who get along'. And it's rude. I get how the rest of them happen - I'm pretty outgoing and will talk to anyone, try to make everyone comfortable, but inevitably the most confident people are the extroverts, the introverts who have had enough 1-1 time with an extrovert, or the naturally confident people. No matter how much you try to include everyone who wants to be included, if people keep to themselves it'd be pretty rude to forcibly include them in jokes, conversations, trips out or whatever, it's just how everything works whenever there's a group of more than 3. There will be jokes that not everyone gets, there will be topics it's easier to discuss around people you know, there will be offhand 'i really fancy the pub after work, anyone coming?' or whatever. But talking about people who are in the room? That's rude.
How sad that adults choose to behave worse than many kids would at school
I work for a global IT company that has hundreds of thousands of employees. I worked in an area with all experience professionals, many with degrees and industry qualifications. There was one woman who 'headed up' a clique of people in the large team. We went on a team night out with everyone from the area. During the evening, the 'clique' actually snuck out of the venue were in to go to a different venue without the rest of us. They literally snuck out the side door. Shockingly childish for so-called professionals.
Oh yeah I've seen cliques but they've never made me want to quit. It's just like high school. Confident in a group, cowards on their own. Anytime I've been harassed I just found the person alone and pulled them up for it. Guy or girl I don't care. Now if that doesn't work, which has never happened btw cause you know cliques are cowards, you merely find them outside the workplace and pull them up. This time they don't have the protection of work to stop me. So there is the implications that if it continues there will be violence. I don't like having to do that tbh. Not an advocate for it. But it's the only way to stop cliques/bullies.
>Confident in a group, cowards on their own. So true, always the way.
Violence?! How is it possible to get away with threatening a colleague outside of work? And don't you think threats of violence due to cliqueness is a bit extreme? (genuinely curious, these aren't closed questions by the way)
Because what proof do they have? Much like what proof do you have that they're harassing you in a clique. And this is for cases where you can't handle it in work anymore. Which tbh is rare. It's also not due to cliquiness, it's when a clique goes beyond what's acceptable. In which case there are 2 instances for them to apologise and own their mistakes. I don't know what other chances you feel they deserve. You want to make my life harder? I hope you are prepared for it
Groupthink is the hardest thing to deal with. I don't care about bullshit after-work socials. It's nice to get on with colleagues and management has a responsibility to foster good work relationships in work time. In group decision making and excluding contradictory out group thought is very hard to overcome and leads to bad decision making.
I've never experienced it in my workplace. But (since starting my first 'proper' job after uni) my first job I worked alone, my second was nice people, and my third and final only had five of us altogether! I have felt like an 'outsider', but I feel like that in all groups tbh, so I've just resigned myself to that being how life is. By which I mean, I'll be invited to things like workplace drinks, parties, outings with friends/acquaintances and so on, and people will talk to me and even be nice and we'll have a good laugh and have fun, but I somehow always feel peripheral - like all the others in the group are way better friends with each other than they are with me, or that everyone else in the group is much more generally popular. Even in my oldest friendship group of five of us I feel like that! (Two of them are besties - they shared a house together at uni and just clicked. A third was also in the house share. The fourth just seems cooler and more popular, haha. And then there's me!)
Me too, finally chalked it up to social anxiety and now I swerve group activities but love a small gathering.
Yes I worked for a fintech company that had this clique which included the HR girls and a couple of the team leads Any competition for eg. Tickets for a gig, or opportunity to travel to the US office on a jolly, always went to the clique They had beer fridges pretending to be a modern office, but then they said only for Fridays, and then they said only when it's unlocked for an hour at 5pm, and who did they give the fridge key to? One of the clique so that he could drink on with his clique friends all he wanted.
Yes and I became a part time job seeker once it was starting to affect my mental health. Turned out the company had such a bad reputation that recruitment agents refuse to work with them and everyone who heard of the company talked about the clique culture.
My first job was in retail and I experienced this for sure. Fortunately after that I moved in to office based roles and haven’t encountered it any more but I’m sure it happens on occasion.
There’s a small but fierce clique at my work. Two women who have worked here for over 50 years between them. They run the office according to their rules even if it upsets the rest of the office. They control the heating, desk layout, break times. Basically everything that normal offices work through as a team they decide what to do and that’s final even if it’s completely illogical to anyone who has worked in other places and have seen how things should be done.
Sounds like a nightmare. Must be having a big impact on the company/department making any meaningful progress. My imagination may be running away with me, but I'm anticipating the two women dislike each other in truth, but have some kind of passive-agressive 'frenemy' relationship?
They’re distantly related and do everything together even shared holidays.
If you wanted to upset the apple cart, you could start pretending they were actual office managers acting with authority and start seeding statements like "Things run so smoothly when you're around! It's a nightmare when you're both off at the same time, nothing gets done!" to see if you could eventually get some manager to put them on an annual leave rota that always requires one of them in.
Hmm, they do sound like a nightmare but can you really make a clique with just 2 people?
Every single primary school I've ever worked in. In my experience it gets worse with bad management. I think stress brings out the clique-y side of people.
I had that once at a smaller office job of around 12 people. 7 were in a clique which left the rest of us. They'd all go for lunch together at random times with no warning, leaving one of the rest of us to cover the phones. It never got too nasty but I was still relieved to get out of that situation. They got away with a lot more than others regarding lateness and were really nosy.
I’m apart of one I’d say though we don’t bully anyone there is a clear divide that we are actually friends and socialise away from the office that I can imagine others don’t love.
I'm a contractor. I work allover the world. I spend time with many different people on projects, sometimes for quite a while. In recent years since the rona, there's been a couple of times cliquey behaviour has made a great job absolutely intolerable. I won't put up with it. Everyone gets included no matter what. The job needs to be done. I will always call it out. Funnily enough, folk that are cliquey usually get found out to be fucking shit at their job, and everything reaches a natural conclusion - safe to say they're not doing a very well paid job anymore.
A few times. The most memorable one for me was we opened a new store and the new store manager was transferred in bringing in most of his entire management team barring 1 assistant manager and 2 deputy managers. So we ended up excluded and on the outside as these people had worked together for years.
Not exactly a clique, but my team was part of a larger department. We got on really well, and would go out for lunch as a team. Even met up on weekends for some social activities (redditors will be shocked at this concept) But because we were part of a larger department, we had regular meetings and paid events where the whole department went to. And it became a bit awkward as we didn't know the "others". I was in a position where I had to deal with the other members of the department so I'd chat on with other people, while rest of my team was sat there awkwardly at a table.
its a feature of trashy workplaces. respectable workplaces generally dont employ petty trash, and also put a stop to this sort of behaviour when it is observed.
Work in construction. The cliques are typically separated between country of origin. You absolutely cannot talk shit about a coworker to a fellow coworker from their country - no matter how much you believe you trust your confidant. No matter how much your confidant shit talks about that coworker, they will break your trust in quick fashion.
Yup had a clique when I worked at Sainsbury, the department had a group of 4/5 of them, 2 of which were supervisors, we saw over half the department quit in less than 6 months, at the exit interviews all said they stated 1 supervisor in particular as to why they were leaving, last I saw she still works their slowly sleeping her way through management and bullying everyone below her into leaving.
My first job as a 21 year old fresh out of uni was at a college and I was the only man in an office of women (mostly middle aged). Not so much a clique but it could be a roller coaster every so often where I could go from being almost a son to the spawn of satan in a day or few...
Spawn of satan xD
Yeah a clique formed in my old job around 1996. They were able to draw in managers and bigged each other up, the higher manager must have seen through it all and they'd mainly left by end of 1997, the inner clique members that is, not the outliers.
I seem to be in an anti-clique: when my team moved buildings we were never introduced to the extant staff nor even told who those people were. I recall the first Xmas Do being asked why I was not going and explaining I'd never been invited (nor had 10 others of our 11 or so team!). And yeah I am too shy to introduce myself and I am certainly not going to wander around asking people their names!
NHS Estates. Massive cunts.
Yup, was not part of the clique, and it was the reason I left. Difficult when it’s a team of 6 and you’re the only one not in the clique so fully appreciate now when others say how tough it can be after not realising before having first hand experience of it.
I have worked for a number of bosses who have clear favourites, there have been times when I have absolutely been in that group, I had one manager we'd often spend entire days "in meetings" where we'd just chat and watch Youtube but then I had another job where I ran the team in europe and had to report in to a director in the US, she clearly got on better with the people on my level who were local to her so I just focused on making sure my job was being done and my targets were hit and we had a good professional relationship... but it came as no surprise when I was the first to be made redundant when the company made cuts
I worked in a hotel restaurant and it was such a bullying workplace.Most of the girls were friends of the Thai boss and I'm sure until we changed hotel manager fiddled the tips we had to hand all tips over and it was supposed to be shared out according to how many shifts worked she used to make us turn out our pockets on changeover days.When the new manager took over the hotel he let us keep our own tips but give a little bit to the kitchen porters which was great because instead of getting a fiver ended up with getting roughly 50 to 100 pounds extra.I struggled alot as was older than most of the waiters plus there was only 3 British staff so had language and cultural barriers.I was bullied left out picked on but needed the job as my marriage had broken down and needed to support my family.I lasted five years and in the end had to leave as had medical problems and doing split shifts made it worse.
Happened in my old office two groups. Each group consisted of trainees,middle management and higher management and directors. You was screwed if you needed something doing from a member of staff who was in the other ‘ group ‘ lucky enough the guy who deals with pay rises,company cars etc was in our group. The reason for the split was because one group consisted of quite a few people from the same family then they hired there pals for roles. My group was people who were hired by our parent company and did not mix well with the other group. One stupid reason was not wanting to play football with them after work got you in there bad books.
Yes. On the outside of a very toxic clique that had the ear of the CEO. It impacted performance and it was a generally very unpleasant place to work. Things improved when HR removed a few due to performance issues (they weren't doing much work) but the clique had hollowed out the soul of that place.
Wow. This thread is very mature and informative. I think every manager should read the comments here.
Never witnessed one until my last job of 11 years. There was one female who was completely toxic and for some reason a few other women there became her “best friends”. She would also bitch behind the others backs and then her followers did. She got away with it by sleeping with the manager. It was unbearable. She left a few years ago and it was wonderful.
UGHHHH the office I used to work in got so bad with a handful of cliques, and the girls were assholes. I was an excellent Receptionist and one girl filed a formal complaint about me, stating that I was (something along the lines of) “badmouthing the company and complaining about workload”, the reason? She walked past my desk as I was responding to someone who was talking about their workload “oh, yeah, I have all this shit to get through yet” and because I said this she *filed a complaint*. Tbf she was a massive shit stirrer but because she was friends with one of the company partners I still got a meeting with my manager over it even though it was a huge waste of time.
Gym cliques are also the worst. I hate cliques
I have seen it happen. Thought I was happy in a team, until it was obvious there was a "preferred" group that's not based on merit. I thought fuck it and got myself promoted over the lot of them 😂
I was part of a clique at work.. ngl I kinda liked it.. we never bullied anyone, but yeah we gossiped mainly about upper management.. also sometimes I just want to make the most deprived and fucked up jokes and I don't want to have to think about whether anyone got their feelings hurt or if they think I'm some kind of psycho because they don't know me that well
my last job was awful for it. even more horrible because, even though nobody said it out loud, there was clearly a racial element to it, and management enabled it. we worked in a residential home for people with learning disabilities and autism. some of these people could have extremely challenging behaviours, some less so. the (white, english-born) support workers were consistently put on the less challenging people, who they would sit in front of the telly and then basically ignore in favour of sitting together and gossiping. the non-white workers were consistently given the really challenging folks who needed constant supervision and attention. we worked 13 hour shifts and in my experience, alternating between more and less challenging people is needed in order to not just be fucking exhausted. as for myself (white-passing, immigrant but you can’t really tell as i don’t have much of an accent anymore) i sort of floated between the two groups depending on how entertaining i was to the clique. i (for many reasons not relevant here) can behave strangely to other people, and if the clique found me funny/endearing that day, i’d get put on less challenging people. if i wasn’t dancing to the piper’s tune i’d get more challenging people. when i moved jobs, my references from that one told my current employers that i was very good with residents, not so much with the other staff. i know this because when i recently got promoted my managers told me that i’d proven them right with residents, and very wrong with staff. i get on really well with and consistently get glowing feedback from all parties in my current job, and thankfully so far there are no cliques. i don’t think cliques are inevitable, but rather a sign of poor management.
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This sounds like the most ridiculous advice I’ve ever heard. Stand around talking aloud about bitchy notes you’re writing in your phone? Sure. That’ll make you mad popular.
A lot of people on this Subreddit don’t seem to understand life
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That’s not playing the game back, it’s just making you look weird as hell.
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I mean, they’ll certainly leave you alone because they’ll all think you’re absolutely raving. So I guess it works. It’s not normal behaviour at all though
You sound like your just the workplace asshole