Advice for office parties: Lose the mistletoe
With a series of highprofile workplace sex scandals on their minds, employers are making sure their holiday office parties don’t become part of the problem.
There will be less booze at many. An independent business organization has renewed its annual warning not to hang mistletoe. And some will have party monitors, keeping an eye out for inappropriate behavior.
TV and movies often depict office parties as wildly inappropriate bacchanals or excruciatingly awkward fiascoes, if not both. But even a regular office party can be complicated because the rules people normally observe at work don’t quite apply, which makes it easier for people to accidentally cross a line — or try to get away with serious misbehavior. Especially when too much drinking is involved.
According to a survey by Chicago-based consulting company Challenger, Gray & Christmas, only 49 percent of companies plan to serve alcohol at their holiday events. Last year that number was 62 percent, the highest number in the decade the firm has run its survey. The number had been going up each year as the economy improved.
“As soon as you introduce alcohol at an off-site activity, people’s guards are dropped,” said Ed Yost, manager of employee relations and development for the Society for Human Resource Management in Alexandria, Va. “It’s presumed to be a less formal, more social environment. Some people will drink more than they typically would on a Friday or a Saturday because it’s an open bar or a free cocktail hour.”
A survey by Bloomberg Law said those kinds of safeguards are common. While most companies ask bartenders or security or even some employees to keep an eye on how much partygoers are drinking, others limit the number of free drinks or the time they’re available. A small minority have cash bars instead of an open bar.
The National Federation of Independent Businesses recommends all of those steps, and adds another that might seem obvious these days: Don’t hang mistletoe. It’s been giving those suggestions for several years.
Yost said he always gets a lot of requests for advice in planning and managing these events, but he’s getting even more of them this year. He said he’ll be spending his corporate holiday party the way he always does: patrolling hallways, checking secluded areas and trying to watch for people who look like they are stuck in an uncomfortable situation — for example, inappropriate touching or a conversation that’s taken a bad turn. If they’re visibly uncomfortable, he’ll intervene and plan a later conversation with the person responsible.