When is a party actually kinda like a work event?
Johnson’s ‘work event’ take on what, basically, everyone is calling a party has inadvertently highlighted issues with how we socialise and work...
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What do we call a coming together of multiple people for a primarily social or recreative purpose? Is it a party? A knees up? A get together? Perhaps, for anniversaries, commemorative or award-bestowing occasions, we might say it’s a celebration, a bash, a do, a function. And if that congress of recreation - okay, yes, worketc will write plainly here: a party - gets raucous, lairy, or a little bit OTT, we might say it's become - dependent on where we grew up, or what kind of institutions we were shaped by - a bit of a mad one, or was accented with a sense of the bacchanal. (Unfortunately, worketc has been privy to certain settings where the latter might be stated, without irony or Google’s synonym function to hand, completely earnestly.)
Even the above short run through is nowhere near a comprehensive list of the types of, or ways of describing, parties. There are, simply put, seemingly infinite sub-categories and descriptions of these social occasions. We have raves, reunions and garden parties. There are house parties, cocktail parties, tea parties, receptions, soirees, dances, balls, block parties and hootenannies. Not forgetting: pres, afters, graduation balls (and proms), as well a variety of showers (baby and bridal being central here) and mixers. And these different types of party are, in different ways, and by different measures: messy, staid, formal, informal, Fitzgeraldian (Great Gatsby comparisons are a frequently (overly?) used metric when painting a picture of what a social occasion is like), awkward, laid back, chill and wild. (Or, as one of my University lecturers once described, after I sheepishly admitted to him that my less-than-alert state in a one-on-one morning tutorial was the result of partying in a different city and getting the first train back to, at least physically, make the slot: “they can be dens of iniquity”.)
When is a party a work event?
You might be thinking, after two paragraphs of this: why the focus on the different ways of explaining and talking about parties? Well, what worketc is trying to get at with this list of the different types of, and ways of describing, parties is there are untold ways of answering the question in the first sentence of this article. Indeed, there are untold ways to describe being asked to meet up in a garden with your own booze in order to make the most of the good weather. Rarely is such an invitation described as a work event. Yet it is this description used by the incumbent (me-ow!) Prime Minister when trying to explain his way out of the ‘booze and garden’ event - made public via a leaked email, from Martin Reynolds, the Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary - that is now making headlines and could end up with Boris Johnson losing his job. If you haven’t already viewed the original ‘work event’ excuse, it’s here. If you don’t have the time or the psychic bandwidth for that, the key words from the original Johnson commons address are as follows: “When I went into that garden just after 6PM on the 20th May 2020 to thank groups of staff [remember: a group email had been sent out prior this advocating the bringing of one’s own booze into ‘that garden’]… I believed implicitly that this was a work event.”
Primarily, the ‘work event’ description has sparked ongoing, and countrywide, palpable anger. Not, worketc hazards, because the UK public feels it’s always possible to draw a definitive line between what might be considered a work event and what might be a social occasion (a lot more on this later!) or where professional and personal spheres should stop. The pandemic, for many more of us, has taught this lesson; in some cases, as parents juggled schooling kids and working, and as work bled into personal spaces, painfully. Rather, it’s because the email invite made the occasion look and smell like a party, rather than something that had even a smidgen of work-centricity about it, and because restrictions placed on all of us at the time had no excusal for boozing outside with colleagues. It just seems like the majority of us were being had for fools
Inadvertent Johnson
The big stories here are obvious, and are currently being covered by the national press in a wall-to-wall manner. The first regards the Prime Minister either himself breaking 2020 lockdown regulations himself and/or presiding over a work culture where breaking lockdown regulations was okayed (either explicitly or implicitly). The second, of course, is whether he is lying about his understanding of those May 2020 events. Rightly so, these are the major headlines. Yet worketc believes Johnson’s excuses, likely inadvertently, shine a light on another issue: that which regards whether parties (organised through work, for work, or with industry and organisational colleagues), or work adjacent activities, might ever be considered to be work and, if so, is there anything that needs to change in how we perceive, value or remunerate these activities, especially if they benefit the organisation they’re undertaken on behalf of.
The work-social continuum
To get to the root of the issue, it’s important to denote that work and socialising, perhaps as in the May 2020 Downing Street instance, are not always clearly separate. In fact, it was a little bit facetious of worketc to imply that simply because there are so many different types of party, and so many ways to describe parties, that Boris Johnson describing drinks in a workplace garden as a work event is incredulous. (That’s not the incredulous part; it’s the instance, the lack of ownership and lockdown context that has caused incredulity; a time when firmer lines, in law and regulation, between social and work contexts did actually exist.) Usually all of us know work, work events, work-adjacent activities and social occasions can all blur together in one long continuum. It’s because there are so many types of party and social occasion, and because the lines of work and our own lives are so often blurred, its hard to tell what one clearly is, and what one isn’t.
On many occasions, it’s all just a bit intertwined, isn’t it? For those following details of the ongoing furore around allegations of parties and drinking cultures at Number 10, they will be aware that a previous allegation of a social gathering happening in the Downing Street gardens during lockdown was dismissed by Dominic Cummings as actually being work. Although wine and cheese were present and a publicly-shared photo appears to show a convivial atmosphere, Cummings maintains it was all an outside chat about policy - as he says: work! - that had merely evolved to be in the garden setting and was a indicative of a time when many meetings took place outside as it was safer to do so.
Whether you believe Cummings’ version of events is up to you but its not outside the realm of possibility that the photo does show a work meeting (however boujee/relaxed it might look). Many of us likely have been at a working lunch, an after-work chat in the pub, or at a restaurant with a boss or senior colleague that might look social from the outside in - drinks in gardens, pints in pubs and food at restaurants are all the centrepiece of more obviously personal and social occasions - but is actually more work-related. Indeed, many industries run, or ran, like this. Consider the insurance industry, which was infamous for it’s deal-making boozy lunch culture and other corporate spaces where the social-come-work setting - be it an organised company social or a more spontaneous bar visit - is a chance to self promote for one’s own ladder-climbing goals, or lay down the law to other colleagues. All very work related.
The work-social blur is very common
In fact, many industries have a ‘work-social bleed’ where work doesn’t always stick to usual office hours - this Guardian take on Cummings’ views on what constitutes a) a successful political operation and b) where the lines of work end is indicative of this - and it is hard to distinguish where work ends and socialising or partying begins. This is obviously the case in politics and seems to be the same for many white collar professions. For instance, a 2017 study shows that 89% of office workers spend time socialising with colleagues around work (where it would not be inconceivable that chat about work bleeds into that social time). Whilst for many working in industries such as publishing, sales, consultancy, journalism and executive-level management - to name but a few obvious ones - feel that part of the job (for benefit of employer and their own career) might involve attending events that seem primarily social or party-like at a glance (pub trips, awards attendance, product launches, network mixers, dinners) but are work adjacent: and are settings for information-gathering, sounding-out-of-clients-or-partners-or-projects (again, for both benefit of the individual and the organisation).
In fact, many of these events are hard to avoid. In 2016, a BBC article on at-work socialising mused that if one were to reject a chance to spend time chatting with colleagues it might be viewed as a social rejection of the group, or the work culture, with consequences for the rejecting individual’s ability to get ahead in that organisation or be able to complete their work well. Furthermore, another study found that over six in 10 think that socialising with colleagues - be it party setting or otherwise - is essential to their careers whilst another study found a correlation between socialising with colleagues and better performance reviews. As one worker told the BBC in 2016: “[socialising outside of work with colleagues gives] you need the moral support - and this gives you confidence [to perform].”
However…
Yet, not everyone sees workplace socialising so positively or accepts it as just, well, something that naturally happens (or should happen). In the same mid-2010s BBC deep dive, one worker spoken to for the piece said that he thought that socialising with people at work often ended up just being a chat about work. “I spend 10-12 hours with the same people, why would I want to then go out with them in the evening? I need to be able to relax and unwind and I can't really do that with people from the office. I don't want to talk about work issues,” he said. Many others feel this way, too. In fact, in a 2020 poll on Christmas parties - the work-social event most of us have had to attend/endure/have in common - it was found that over half of workers didn’t really want to go to such an event. Although the poll was taken at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, half of respondents said they wouldn’t even be attending a seasonal get together if it was virtual. There could be multiple reasons for this. Christmas parties can be awkward and people can easily make an arse of themselves - as discussed on this podcast - but it’s not too much of a stretch to the imagination to say this might be because people simply see these posited-as-social events as work - neither relaxing nor something they want to attend.
In fact, many instances of having to attend social events, industry parties, award ceremonies and work adjacent activities can be “draining” for the worker, as one person who works in publishing told worketc. As they said: “I was constantly going to press events, awards shows and on trips – despite being glam, it was pretty knackering and I don't miss it really [and] was never paid for this time. I think that kind of situation was much more beneficial for my employer, because it meant brands were more likely to advertise with the title – they got coverage, felt supported and the revenue increased. Meanwhile, I just felt really tired and kind of exploited.”
There’s a wider truth to this: insomuch that work events, that might appear to be fun, do have a real benefit for employers and bosses and therefore can, somewhat, be conceived to be part of work that could be compensated. As the person who works in publishing told worketc: “I definitely would have liked to have been paid for trips, work at conferences and trade shows that happened in the evenings or at weekends. It would have made me feel more appreciated, and it would have acknowledged that I was giving up my own time to put in extra hours.”
This benefit-for-the-employer-via-social-activity is something that is commonplace - and it doesn’t just come about via an individual representing a company within the wider industry. Some of these employer benefits can be gained from socialising that happens within company walls, be they physical or virtual. For example, a study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that social activity such as chatting with colleagues can improve productivity (good for the employer!) whilst Forbes reporting states that employees with social connections at work, perhaps fostered by those work-adjacent social connections, tend to be more loyal and engaged. Research by one recruitment firm even suggests that a social workplace - it’s a vague qualification but could include a place of work which has socials, parties and outside of work hours events connected to it - can increase the quality of work by up to 35%. Many HR consultancies expound on the benefits of this, linking work social events to better performance in areas such as workplace culture, employer brand, and workforce morale.
Employers know socialising has benefits
Of course this socialising might make work easier for the social individual - by creating a network, mentors, and friends - but it benefits the company and many know this. There’s a tell here from a 2019 New York Times article: “Cutting-edge companies are starting to treat company mixers and retreats as an effort to challenge employees, not coddle them, in an effort to inspire them to new professional heights.” In simple terms: these businesses believe that putting on socials, including very fancy events, makes employees work harder, faster, more innovatively and, well, profitably. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Many of us have heard of workforces getting big-ticket trips as part of their reward for hitting targets; in part driven by an understanding this should further cement loyalty, good culture and intra-workplace connection. There are more lowkey and commonplace examples of this, too. In fact, in the pandemic era, when whole teams and companies are more likely to be remote, many companies are giving team or departmental leaders budget for socialising, increasingly aware of the benefits this can have for business operations as a whole whilst others are redesigning or repositioning their office as a social hub.
GitLab are one such firm who have a ‘social budget’. The California-headquartered technology firm essentially create tools and processes to help programmers programme - I wrote about their working practices, at length, here - and have been remote since their inception in 2014. At the tech firm, every manager has a team building budget for events, presumably social, as well as a premium budget for end-of-year socials. For a company so deeply attuned to how networking and socialising and culture drive business goals - if printed, GitLab claim their web document on how they work would number more than 8,000 pages, including values, aims, videos from executives, links to learning documents, processes, and how to contact the CEO directly if you think you would like to ask them to tweak part of the culture - it’s unlikely this is done without a clear understanding of why funding socialising or work adjacent activities benefits the business.
Some firms will ‘pay’ you to socialise
It goes further still. worketc is aware of many firms - now remote - which effectively pay for employees to attend a central location for social events, be they end-of-quarter days or parties. This is on the company’s time, and dime, and is considered super beneficial for the employer. In fact, it’s not too dissimilar from social events, such as Friday drinks, that may have happened pre-pandemic and definitely occurred during work hours. Again, likely not because these employers are overwhelmed by the need to be charitable or radically alter what labour exchange looks like. Rather, driven by a sense or deep understanding of what employee socialising gives to the business. And this thinking might have to come to the fore even more as employers move, in increasing numbers, to a hybrid model - according to stats from Willis Towers Watson, compiled in late 2021, more than 40% of employers will operate this model by 2023. That will require, as laid out by Professor Lynda Gratton, in a recent Harvard Business Review article, the careful management of socialising, driven by an understanding of the benefits it brings to the business. In her thinking, it will involve creating work schedules and office structures which allow contact and meetups and allow “employees [to] have the chance to get to know each other and socialize”, she writes, as this drives innovation (common business thinking correlates this with profitability) something which, on a business landscape that evolves ever-faster, is seen is necessary.
So, when is a party a work event?
So, the big question: when is a party actually like a work event? Actually, that one isn’t the big question, really, as the answer is fairly simple: quite often, parties are like work events, are undertaken as part of work, even if that work isn’t recognised in a way that we’ve come to expect (with some form of remuneration). The real big question is, rather: should employees get paid for the time they might have to socialise or party in a way that represents, or benefits, their employer? Similarly, the answer might also be fairly simple and follows the same logic many are using to defenestrate Boris Johnson this week. That is: if it looks and smells like a party, mate, it is a party. Ergo: if the social event has an element of work to it, and has a tangible benefit to the employer, its work and thus should be remunerated.
However, this might not be always so easy to measure. In some ways it will be. For example if an employee is going to an awards bash or an industry drinks reception in order to represent the business, get new customers, or boost the brand, that seems to be an obvious example of work undertaken. Consider here the person who works in publishing that worketc spoke to who said their attendance at evening events - though they may have been glam and fun - resulted in clear benefits for the employer. That is work though it might have taken place at something that looks like a party. (However, even this type of work isn’t likely to be paid for anytime soon, especially as there is already an unpaid overtime epidemic in the UK, with recent ADP Research finding that the amount of unpaid overtime the average UK worker undertakes is rising and now stands at eight hours a week).
In other ways that measurement is difficult. Consider if an employer wants all their employees to attend an office Christmas Party, which isn’t on company time, but is paying for drinks and food, and is allowing frivolity and drunkenness and not expecting work, or outside networking with clients or prospects. Obviously, there is no benefit to the business there in terms of their consumer brand, acquiring new customers or industry networking. However, as laid out earlier in this article, that party might benefit the informal employer brand, internal networks, engagement, culture and loyalty. All things that do have a benefit for the business. It’s a tricky one. However, in some places, employers and thinkers about work are already actively rewarding staff, or advocating for it, for types of activity that might seem primarily for the benefit of the employee but does also benefit the employer intangibly.
Paid for sleeping, smiling and commuting
In some places, this is done by time in lieu. A simple exchange of the employee getting time back for attending something that might look social, like a glam awards bash, but is actually work. For example, getting to have the morning off after attending a work event in the evening. In some places, employers are thinking about this even more holistically, considering how their employees might be rewarded or remunerated for taking care of their health and wellbeing, elements usually considered to be purely personal but that are, in recent times, more broadly considered to also have benefits for the employer. This has happened at General Electric in the US where, in one experiment, cash rewards were given out to employees who engaged with trying to give up smoking or gave it up altogether. It also happened in Japan with one wedding planner giving points to employees who slept better, tracked via a special mattress (yes, that comes with its own data and work-life divide issues) which could be redeemed for cash in the work canteen. In both instances, this was driven by an understanding of what better employee health and sleep gives to the employer.
Even more radical still are calls to be paid for one of the most commonly engaged in work-adjacent events: the commute. In June 2021, the conversation cropped up fairly loudly in left wing spaces on social media sites, with some thinkers arguing it should be paid for. As Will Stronge, Director of Research at work thinktank Autonomy, wrote for Novara Media: “Commuting costs aren’t just another form of consumption: the price of getting to and from work is what the economist Joseph Stiglitz has called a ‘hidden tax’ on our working lives. It isn’t employment strictly speaking – we are not yet on the job. But it isn’t free time either – we have to get to our work, and we wouldn’t choose to be on that packed train or bus if we had any choice about it.
“We can therefore understand commuting as a form of ‘shadow work’ that, while unpaid, is no less arduous and time-consuming. And while it’s a utility for workers (it allows us to get to work and earn a wage), it’s a significant one for employers too: commuting is essential to the success of their business, as it gets their workforce to and from the site of production.”
There are some who take it one step further still. Dr Jamie Woodcock is a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford and has written about ‘affective labour’ in the workplace which, in laypeople terms, involves looking at how workers perform emotions for their work, and then how that work is perceived. It involves, but isn’t limited to, the emotions we’re expected to display on the job and inspire in those around us - both customers and colleagues. With increased expectation to perform ‘happy’ on the job, Woodcock posits that this can be draining and correlates with high levels of burnout and as such employers should see it as going above and beyond and a stress that should be fairly paid for. “My argument is that this should be valued as part of your profession and you should be able to take time off because of it…it is not an expectation this is valued,” he previously told HR Grapevine.
Should we be paid for…everything we do?
worketc hazards a guess that this argument could be made infinitum: should we be paid for eating, for washing, for cleaning and making our home workspaces, if we work remotely, more conducive to work? This all benefits the employer, right? It might sound facetious or silly but actually hints at a deeper question - that has gained more prominence over the pandemic period - about the starring role, for many of us, that work plays in structuring our time, our behaviours, our social circles and our priorities. Whilst it is unlikely that the unpaid overtime epidemic is likely to be solved soon, or that the work-event-social-event-party continuum is going to get any easier to demarcate, it is clear that employers need to be aware of the expectations they put on their employees, how work filters into less-work-seeming environments, and whether this needs adequate reward. Otherwise it might just be work-event-gate over and over and over again for all (though less headline making than Johnson’s), with tired and burnt out employees not feeling that their efforts are recognised. Something all businesses should keep in mind at a time when talent is at a premium; and all employees should keep in mind when organising or simply trying to understand what is a perk and what is work.