Is alcohol at work a perk? Not for some young job seekers
Drinks during recruiting dinners, team bonding over happy hour, beer kegs at trendy startups.
Companies looking to attract talented young workers might think projecting a drinkingfriendly workplace culture is a smart strategy. At first, Anthony Klotz thought so, too.
But the assistant professor of management at Oregon State University discovered through a recent study that the opposite is true: Many young prospective employees are turned off by signals that companies embrace alcohol during work-related events.
And even the most politically skilled — those who excel at networking, influencing others and adapting their personalities to fit social situations — found companies that project an alcoholfriendly culture are no more attractive than similar companies that don’t.
Mr. Klotz and co-author Serge da Motta Veiga of American University tested the idea with two experiments.
In the first, 180 students in an upper-level college business class were given one of two recruitment flyers for a fake company. One version mentioned “happy hours” among company perks, like retreats and a gym, and included a picture of employees gathered in a lounge holding wine and cocktail glasses. The other flyer was identical except it switched out the booze glasses for coffee cups and mentioned “luncheons” instead of happy hours.
The second experiment asked 122 business students at a different university to say what drink they would order during a recruitment dinner with potential colleagues. In one scenario, the future colleagues ordered water; in the other, they ordered wine, beer and a cocktail.
In both experiments, the students answered questions about their attraction to the company and how well they thought they’d fit there, as well as questions that indicated their level of political skill — that is, their ability to get ahead through means like positioning, influence and social savvy.
Students with high political skill didn’t show a marked preference for the imbibers over the coffee and water drinkers, but students with low political skill — those who would rather not schmooze and deal — saw the companies that didn’t feature alcohol as significantly more appealing.
That has implications for companies that might be “inadvertently scaring off individuals” that have a just-get-the-job-done character and instead might be filling their ranks “with these socially astute, slick networkers,” Mr. Klotz said.
“The research is pretty clear: Political organizations are stressful places to work because you’ve got people making deals all over the place,” he said. “So if you don’t want to have a political company, you might want to tone down the alcohol messages.”
On the other hand, he noted in the study, in industries that prize networkers and influencers, “It may very well be a harmless idea to expose applicants to the moderate use of alcohol during recruitment, almost as a test that their abilities would fit the demands of the job and the culture of the organization.”
The study, which was published in the journal Human Resource Management, also offered a broader lesson: Job seekers tend to interpret even subtle signals to draw conclusions about what a company values.
Companies should think about whether the messages they send with their recruiting pitches and company perks are the ones they intend.
“Before you roll out a perk that you assume everyone will like, maybe collect a little bit of data first and see if that backs up your hunch,” Mr. Klotz said.