The workday moment employees look forward to

Ask employees what gets them through a long working day and the answers rarely involve appraisals or the next long weekend. More likely, it is the morning chai with a colleague before opening the laptop, the lunch break that turns into an impromptu gossip session or that one person who knows exactly what to say when a meeting has gone badly wrong.

These moments seldom feature in presentations on employee engagement. They are too ordinary to be announced as initiatives and too spontaneous to be reliably organised. Yet they often become the stories employees remember long after the details of a project or quarterly review have faded. Three HR leaders reflect on the everyday moments that make a working day worth showing up for.

“Chai peene chalein?”

Praveen Purohit, CHRO, Vedanta Aluminium, Ports and Mines

Praveen Purohit has spent enough long days at work to know that uninterrupted concentration is not always the best way to get things done. When the working day stretches to eight, ten or twelve hours, the moments away from the desk can matter as much as those spent at it.

At Vedanta, he has noticed that some of the most useful conversations happen away from formal meetings. Colleagues gather over tea in the innovation lab, exchange thoughts without an agenda and occasionally find themselves discussing something that neither had planned. The absence of a formal structure often makes the conversation more productive, precisely because nobody has arrived expecting a presentation or a decision.

The difference is easy to recognise. An employee might hesitate to suggest an unconventional idea in a meeting attended by senior leaders, with a presentation on screen and an agenda to follow. Around a table with chai, the same people may find it easier to speak freely. Someone offers a thought, another adds to it, and an informal exchange gradually becomes a discussion worth pursuing.

The familiar invitation, “Chai peene chalein?”, is therefore rarely just about the tea. It offers a brief escape from the structure of the working day, allowing people to think aloud without having to establish the importance of every idea before expressing it. Purohit’s observation is that organisations which make room for such pauses may gain more from their people than those that regard every minute away from a task as lost productivity.

The day the boss joined the dance competition

Shailesh Singh, senior HR leader

Shailesh Singh has spent time considering the difference between a great place to work and what he describes as a joyful place to work. The distinction, in his experience, often becomes visible during an annual offsite or festive celebration, when the usual rules of workplace interaction become a little less rigid.

These occasions allow colleagues to see one another outside their professional roles. The senior leader who spends most of the year discussing targets joins a dance competition. Employees who rarely interact beyond meetings find themselves playing on the same team. Festive stalls, food, costumes and friendly competition create an atmosphere in which the office briefly becomes something quite different from its everyday self.

Singh recalls celebrations around Diwali, Dussehra and Christmas where employees gathered around stalls, sampled food and spent time with colleagues they might otherwise have known only through work. Offsites brought similar opportunities through games and dance sessions that drew people together across levels. The manager who usually assigns tasks becomes a teammate, while the senior leader who normally commands a room becomes someone everybody can laugh with.

What interests Singh most is how long these memories survive. Former colleagues from his time at GE and Axis Max Life still share photographs from such occasions in WhatsApp groups. Pictures of senior leaders dancing, colleagues competing in games or teams enjoying themselves continue to resurface years later. The event may have lasted only a day or two, but the stories and jokes have acquired a life of their own.

There is something revealing about what survives in those photographs. Employees may forget the formal agenda of an offsite, but they remember the unexpected sight of a usually serious boss attempting a dance step with great enthusiasm. For a brief moment, hierarchy gives way to something more companionable, and the memory remains long after everyone has returned to their usual roles.

The ten minutes before work begins

Anju Jumde, Head-HR, Aditya Birla Money

Anju Jumde’s answer to what makes a working day better is not a programme or an initiative. It is a friend at work. Not necessarily someone who knows every detail of one’s personal life, but a colleague with whom it is possible to share a coffee, discuss a difficult day or seek a second opinion without worrying about being judged.

The value of such friendships is easy to underestimate. An employee arriving after a difficult commute, feeling anxious about a deadline or still recovering from an unpleasant meeting may find that a short conversation changes the mood of the day. Sometimes a little reassurance is enough to make a problem feel manageable. At other times, a colleague offers a perspective that had not occurred to the person struggling with it.

Jumde believes these relationships make work less monotonous and give employees something to anticipate beyond their responsibilities. A shared lunch, a conversation between meetings or an evening spent together can create familiarity and trust that formal workplace interactions rarely achieve. Such friendships also provide a space where concerns can be discussed without immediately becoming performance issues or problems requiring managerial intervention.

Not every colleague needs to become a confidant, nor does every employee want their workplace to double as a social circle. But having someone trustworthy nearby can make a considerable difference to how a difficult day unfolds. There are occasions when employees are not looking for advice, a solution or another wellbeing initiative. They simply want someone who will listen long enough to understand what happened.

For Jumde, that is what makes these relationships valuable. They allow employees to experience the workplace as somewhere they are known beyond their job titles, where an ordinary conversation can offer relief without having to serve any larger organisational purpose.

What makes an ordinary Tuesday memorable

The working day is usually measured in meetings attended, tasks completed and targets achieved. Employees experience it through a rather different collection of moments. They remember the colleague who saved them a seat at lunch, the unexpected joke that rescued a difficult afternoon or the friend who waited at the station so they could travel home together.

There is a temptation for organisations to turn every positive workplace behaviour into a programme. If informal conversations help generate ideas, perhaps they need to be scheduled. If friendships improve the working day, perhaps they need a structured initiative. If celebrations bring people together, perhaps the calendar needs more of them. Yet part of what makes these experiences enjoyable is that they are not always organised around an outcome.

That does not make the organisation irrelevant. Leaders influence whether people have the time, space and freedom to connect naturally. A workplace where every pause invites suspicion or every informal conversation is treated as a distraction is unlikely to produce much spontaneous camaraderie. Equally, making social participation compulsory can drain the pleasure from something that works best when people choose it for themselves.

The distinction is worth remembering. An organisation can arrange an offsite, provide a comfortable place to gather or allow time for a tea break. It cannot manufacture the friendship, the conversation or the joke that employees will remember years later.

Perhaps that is why the moments people most look forward to at work are so often the ones that were never part of the day’s agenda.

What is the workday moment you look forward to most? Share it in the comments.