As Christmas 2019 approaches with the news dominated by Brexit and the general election, the spectacle of lavish corporate Christmas parties is not exactly in-keeping with the country’s mood: this is not the time for Wolf of Wall Street style escapades. But recent reports suggest that City firms scaling back their party plans are less concerned with excess or cost-cutting, and more with pre-empting scandal.
For decades, corporate socialising has been covered in the sticky fingerprints of ingrained sexism, whether it is the crisis-management firm that throws its company-wide Christmas do at the Playboy Club (all welcome!) or a new – male – employee welcomed to the firm with a slap-up lunch at a lapdancing bar round the corner.
Now, according to the Financial Times, one of the UK’s largest accountancy firms, BDO LLP has issued an internal memo requesting that any staff Christmas parties are assigned two teetotal ‘chaperones’ to monitor events and ‘ensure everybody can get home safely’.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that other companies are also keen to avoid a scandal, with both KPMG LLP and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP suggesting that departments celebrate the festive season with daytime events rather than boozy evening parties.
Vague Christmas party policies are not much more than a sticking plaster.
No doubt, these moves are, at least in part, motivated by fears of post-#MeToo retribution – the swift fall from grace of the Presidents Club after last year’s now infamous men-only dinner spooked the City, which continues to be plagued by unsavoury headlines. Last week insurance market Lloyd’s of London launched an initiative of putting up anti-harassment posters in City pubs with slogans like: ‘Uninvited advances or physical contact. That's not a joke, that's harassment’. This came after a survey found that almost one in ten Lloyd’s employees had witnessed sexual harassment at the company.
While it is commendable to make attempts to change, vague Christmas party policies are not much more than a sticking plaster, in part fuelled by the inaccurate belief that incidents of sexual assault, bullying and discrimination only happen in the drunken early hours.
In practice, some of these moves might improve office culture: the fact is that a huge amount of workplace-adjacent socialising is still focused around alcohol and late nights, so one (possibly unintentional) by-product of a lunchtime event is that it’s more accessible for working parents. But really, it reeks of a desire to avoid potentially embarrassing, inconvenient or legally and financially costly incidents rather than addressing root causes.
Insisting that somebody stays sober to keep an eye on everyone is like pretending that the only problem up until now has been that extra glass of warm white wine at 1am, and not a systemic, gender-based power imbalance.
READ MORE:
8 Ways To Have An Office Christmas Party Without Blowing Your Budget