This year, the holidays simply aren’t the same. We won’t be visiting our families, seeing our friends or even heading out to shops to do our holiday shopping, as we shelter in place to keep COVID-19 from spreading.
But there’s a silver lining as we hunker down at home this winter, one that’s like its own present: We won’t have to go to a work holiday party this year. One alternative that has emerged is the Zoom holiday party, which sounds like the only thing that could be worse than an in-person one. (PayPal is leaning hard into this with a marathon 29-hour Zoom party for its global workforce. Exhausting.)
As you can imagine, I have never liked work holiday parties. In fact, I hate them — and I’m an extrovert! If I don’t like them, then who does? I like people and I like parties, but work holiday parties are tedious and awkward, like going to a wedding where you only know one person.
Maybe I’m projecting because I hate them, but I also can’t believe that anyone else wants to be there. Not you, not your spouse, and definitely not your coworkers and probably not even your boss. In fact, 90% of workers would rather skip it, according to Randstad USA.
Who would blame us? I’ve worked for large companies and small, and no matter what, the work holiday party has always been an exercise in extreme mediocrity. This is not a slam against the hardworking office managers and event organizers who work on these, it’s a slam against the very nature of the work holiday party.
Office holiday parties are meant to celebrate employees and their efforts, but they are “breeding grounds for bad behavior, flings, and unemployment,” Fast Company wrote. The internet abounds with these tales: One employee drank so much that he started a fist fight with an executive, then was fired after he was arrested by the police, Forbes reported. In another incident, three employees lost their jobs after a holiday party, according to NPR. “Let’s just say they were discovered in a restroom,” their coworker wrote, “and they weren’t resting.”
Office parties are such an odd and uncomfortable part of our culture that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has an entire exhibition from artist Alex Prager dedicated to satirizing the office holiday party, complete with Bing Crosby soundtrack.
A man strikes a pose dancing in the middle of a group of older women at an office Christmas party in Newport, Wales, around 1990.
UniversalImagesGroup/Universal Images Group via GettyIn general, I like my coworkers, and I hope they like me. But even if we enjoy sharing drinks or lunch together, like we did in the Before Times, the holiday party can be an awkward occasion, with tiresome team-building exercises. On the flip side, what holiday parties mostly point out is that there are cliques amongst your coworkers — and you are not a member of any of them.
Let’s face it, most of the time, the only reason a work holiday party is remotely tolerable is because there’s free booze. And part of the reason that I dislike work holiday parties is because I’m not a fan of alcohol.
Yes, I’m a real killjoy. But the truth of it is that my face turns a bright red rivaling Rudolph’s nose with only a few sips of wine, thanks to my genetics. And I get drunk very quickly because I’m a complete lightweight, and I find it embarrassing. So all in all, I prefer not to drink. But when you’re the sober one, it’s embarrassing to witness the cringe of drunk colleagues or worse, if it ends up in sexual harassment or assault.
A former coworker of mine once got very drunk at a holiday party, serving up the contents of his stomach to the rest of the company. Our CEO found it hilarious, and brought it up constantly in all-hands meetings. That coworker became known as “the guy who got so drunk he puked at the work holiday party,” which isn’t the reputation anyone wants to build in their career.
If you’re in a toxic work environment, the work holiday party is sheer torture. I worked in a small startup with a deeply dysfunctional culture (surprise), and that year, our holiday party was booked for a cruise on the bay.
Taking a cruise around the bay sounds lovely, but I’d rather crash into an iceberg than be herded onto a small ship with literal Mean Girls, plus the manager that did nothing but dump all of his work on me and the other manager, a San Francisco liberal who exhibited endless white fragility. Instead, I said I was sick and enjoyed a nice quiet night at home with my husband, watching Jeopardy. Spending time with Alex Trebek was infinitely better than being stuck on a boat on a cold winter’s night with abusive assholes.
The one office holiday party that I did enjoy was the one that was not my own. That year, I visited a friend in Portland who worked at an animation studio, and I was his plus-one. What made that party a fun one was precisely the fact that it was not my own workplace party, so it was just an event for me. It also helped that they served a very excellent seafood paella, one that was so delicious that I still remember it years later.
An office Christmas party in Newport, Wales, in 1989.
UniversalImagesGroup/Universal Images Group via GettyIf there’s one good thing about office parties, it’s that they provided local restaurants a critical source of income. At least, they did, before the pandemic. Many restaurants have closed this year, partly because those office orders have all gone away as companies transitioned to remote work to avoid the spread of COVID-19.
This year, many of our local restaurants and catering companies will be facing a long, cold winter. Every day brings a new closure of a much-loved restaurant. Since there are now fewer office parties, companies could donate the money they would have spent on catering to restaurant worker funds, GoFundMes or to local food banks. Particularly the Bay Area’s tech companies, many of which we have seen thrive during the pandemic even as small businesses have faltered.
Supporting our communities in need would be even better than splashing out for team building, not only this year, but every year. Even better, companies won't have to fire anyone for bad behavior.
December 21, 2020 at 07:04PM
https://ift.tt/38qNwdT
The pandemic has canceled this holiday tradition. Good riddance. - SFGate
https://ift.tt/2QoXNjh
Holiday
No comments:
Post a Comment