For companies with the cash to go all out on a holiday party, the ideal spot might look something like Freehold. The industrial-chic venue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is equipped with everything an urban Millennial could want: It has a coffee shop, a lounge, a courtyard with twinkly lights, and a Ping-Pong table. The last holiday party I went to in the Before Times was there. It wasn’t exactly a raucous bash—in an effort to cut down on the risk of drunken misconduct, the company limited everyone to two drinks—but the turnout was easily in the hundreds. I remember a line down the block to get in, the press of bodies on the way to the bathroom, and making small talk in a distracted manner, as you do in any large crowd.
Brad Gallagher, a co-founder of Freehold, remembers this party too: He wound up working the door because so many people showed up. For obvious reasons, it’s been a while since the venue hosted a holiday party of that magnitude, he told me. Among all of the other things the pandemic did last year, it forced companies to forgo the December tradition of the office holiday party, whether that meant an unfussy, in-office gathering or an extravagant function costing tens of thousands of dollars or more. “Last year I really look at as a mulligan,” Gallagher said. “It really didn’t happen.” With no other option, companies trying to round out a terrible year with something nice for their workers went the route of Zoom parties (somewhat of an oxymoron) or, if they had the budget, gifts.
But things are different this year. Only 11.3 percent of employed Americans are still working from home because of the pandemic, and thanks to vaccines, getting together in person is no longer the COVID threat it once was. The nature of holiday parties has gradually been changing for years, and exactly how—and whether—companies decide to ring in the holidays this year is the first step in figuring out yet another pandemic unknown: Will the office holiday party ever be the same?
The HR experts and event professionals I reached out to agreed on this: The company holiday party has officially returned, though in fits and starts. Elissa Jessup, an HR adviser at the Society for Human Resource Management, told me that even pre-Omicron she’d heard of fewer in-person parties overall, and that those still happening are generally smaller than they were before the pandemic. She said that in-person parties seem to be concentrated among companies that have fewer than 50 employees and those based in places with a warm climate that allows for gathering outdoors. At Freehold, Gallagher is also seeing holiday parties coming back in a smaller, more intimate form. These micro-parties are a far cry from the ones with hundreds of attendees that the venue hosted pre-pandemic: “I’d say 10-to-30-person parties are really what we’re seeing, and then the 40-to-70 [range],” Gallagher said. He’s getting more inquiries from start-ups with small staffs, and the relatively few large companies that have reached out tend to be interested in breaking up their parties by team to keep the gatherings as small as possible.
The office holiday party has a reputation for being either a painfully awkward form of social purgatory or a messy bacchanal—or both. In decades past, it was more common to encounter holiday parties that were blowout affairs with lots of free drinks, expensive food, dancing, inappropriate behavior, and next-day embarrassment, Peter Cappelli, an HR expert and a business professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “They were much more like college parties than adult parties,” he said, noting that out-of-control work events date back to the days when corporations were exclusively male at the management level.
That didn’t change when women entered the ranks of corporate America. But over the past few decades, businesses have gradually scaled back their holiday celebrations, first because of pushback against Christmas decorations during the 1990s and later due to liability concerns when it comes to drunken behavior. The #MeToo movement pushed things in an even more toned-down direction, with employers cutting back on alcohol and dancing. Cappelli believes that the social atmosphere of a holiday party can have a useful humanizing effect among managers and colleagues. But achieving that doesn’t require getting drunk and making a fool of oneself.
Though it’s not necessarily in his best interest to say so, van Wyck feels that volunteer days and team activities can have a better return on investment than a holiday party. In recent years, his own team has done service work instead of having a party. “Another party can, for us, be exhausting,” he explained. By being forced to come up with new ways to celebrate, companies will possibly move out of the pandemic with a better, safer, more enjoyable—and perhaps less expensive—approach to holiday gatherings. Gallagher, for one, is hopeful that this year’s smaller parties will prove to be more special than massive events, with employees getting meaningful face time with the higher-ups. And if we continue to see COVID surges in the winter for years to come, companies may have little choice but to eschew large indoor holiday parties like the one I went to at Freehold.
