When looking at their workplace, leaders often like to say “we are a family,” and of course, families often do fun things together.

There are things you like to do, things that keep you relaxed and help you to recharge your batteries. Maybe it’s running, maybe it’s cooking, maybe it’s just going out drinking with people. Having gone out and done your thing, you can come back to work recharged and ready to go. Very often, you can do a better job and be happier about your work if you have something fun to help you take a break and take your mind off of the deadlines you are facing.

But what’s fun for you is not necessarily fun for others. And that is where “mandatory fun” can become a problem.

When you are in a leadership role you might feel like you have to come up with fun things for your employees to do. Maybe you want to help people relax, or perhaps you are encouraging team building, or maybe you want to bring everyone’s families and significant others together. You might have picnics, dragon boat teams, parties in the office, “escape rooms,” fun runs, rock climbing, golf tournaments, or something else that you think would be a good time. But just because YOU think it is fun doesn’t mean anyone else does. And when you make this sort of thing mandatory you can lose a lot of the benefits you are hoping for.

Consider the goal of trying to help people relax and forget about work for a while. How easy is that to do when they are surrounded by other people from work? Even if you are out of the office, all of the office relationships still apply. What happens to employees who have never picked up a golf club…will they be penalized when their bosses see their skills are more suited to video games than to the back nine? Probably not, but they cannot know that for sure, so instead of helping them relax you are putting extra pressure on them. An office function still has the word “office” in there, so it is hard for people to really relax…even if you pick an event they would normally enjoy, which is hard to do anyway. A group of employees will have very diverse interests, so finding something everyone finds enjoyable is going to be tricky.

How about team building? That seems like a good objective, particularly in collaborative fields like advertising or software development or other places where group work is necessary. But is an out-of-office event the best way to do that? Perhaps the best way to build teams is to do it where it matters: in the workplace. If you need people to work well together then let them do that through work rather than through some artificial “team building” event. A lot of people resent the suggestion that they are not professional enough to do what the job requires, so be careful about using some fun event to try to accomplish what you should be accomplishing in the workplace.

One of the favorite reasons for mandatory fun is that it provides a chance to get families involved in the work environment. Well, so what? Is that necessarily a good thing? Is there some reason your kids need to play with your co-workers’ kids rather than with the other kids in your neighborhood? If your employees want to bring their families together and do things together, do they really need you to be the matchmaker? Of course, the single employees without a current significant other, the gay employees who are not yet “out” to everyone and do not feel they can bring their partner, and that employee who is in the middle of an ugly custody battle in an even uglier divorce, are all going to feel excluded, and that is not helpful at all.

None of this is to say that socializing within the workplace is a bad idea, but what IS a bad idea is forcing people to do it. Plenty of the people who work for you will want to spend time socially together, but they can do that on their own without your oversight. Lots of people will want to organize office outings and parties, but it is best to let them do that on their own so that your involvement as the boss does not make people feel pressured to participate. Office environments develop their own social culture, and trying to purposely create that culture through required events will advance that development…but possibly in a direction you will not like.