how much socializing at work is too much?

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I am a manager at an office of 35 employees and everyone is fairly autonomous in managing their workload. We’re a pretty social and casual group, so it’s no big deal for people to socialize with one another to a certain extent. However, I’ve recently noticed that there seem to be more frequent, prolonged socializing sessions with some groups of people. I would guess it’s 3-5 days a week for 45 minutes or more each time. I think it probably starts out as work-related conversations but then wanders into more social territory. Is this pretty typical? My concern is that people are getting too relaxed and putting off the actual work that needs to be done and then quality is suffering (quality is hard to measure in my job so this is difficult to track). My concern with addressing it is that I don’t want to kill morale. If you think it does need to be addressed, how would you do so?

I answer this question over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.