Holiday office parties may be waning nationally, but not in Wichita

Wayne Chambers said it’s a given that High Touch Technologies includes in its annual budget an employee holiday party.

That’s the way it always has been at High Touch, or at least for the 10 years that Chambers has led the 135-employee technology services provider.

“We try to go to different venues in town,” said Chambers, High Touch’s president and chief executive officer. “We’ve been to Abode, Drury (Plaza Hotel Broadview), Exploration Place. We try to … have it in a nice venue … with a nice dinner and entertainment. We try to make it an evening where the employee and their spouse or significant other just have a pleasant evening.

“It’s just kind of our way of celebrating the season and the reason for the season.”

But national trends indicate that the traditional company holiday party may be falling out of favor.

Two national surveys of company human resources professionals showed that a growing percentage of firms are forgoing end-of-year holiday parties for employees.

Last week, national outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in its Holiday Party Outlook that 19 percent of respondents said their companies would not have a party this year, up from 10 percent in its 2014 survey.

That followed a survey released by the Society for Human Resource Management in late November in which 30 percent of HR professionals said no holiday parties were planned at their companies or organizations in 2015, up from 25 percent in 2013 and 17 percent in 2012.

“They may have been cut initially because of tough financial times during the recession or because of other reasons,” said Evren Esen, SHRM’s director of survey programs. “But the fact is that more organizations are saying they are not having parties than in the past.”

That doesn’t seem to be the trend in Wichita, however.

Chad Eberly of Eberly Farm, a longtime northwest Wichita event venue, said this year’s holiday corporate party business was about the same as the year before.

“Really, everything is pretty normal,” he said.

Eberly Farm offers a venue for corporate parties that seats up to about 250 people, Eberly said, and the companies it typically serves have 100 or fewer people attend their parties.

But the corporate holiday party business was more robust this year for Corporate Caterers of Wichita, said owner Ben Arnold.

From Dec. 3 through Dec. 23, Arnold said, the 15-year-old professional catering company catered 197 holiday parties, breaking a previous record for the company in December 2014.

“We stopped taking orders in mid-October for December company events,” he said. “We had so many that we just couldn’t take them any more.”

Holiday party issues

In the SHRM survey of 385 randomly selected HR professionals, 82 percent of companies with up to 99 employees said they planned to have a holiday party for their workers, while 41 percent of companies with more than 2,500 employees planned to do so.

Of all the companies planning a party, only 10 percent reported having a larger budget to pay for it, while 80 percent said this year’s party budget was about the same as last year’s.

Also, 67 percent planned to hold their parties away from the office, while 27 percent planned to hold it at their workplaces. In the Challenger survey, 30 percent of the 75 human resources executives it surveyed said their companies would hold their parties at the office.

And according to both surveys, the majority of respondents said alcohol would be served at their parties: 59 percent in the SHRM survey and 54 percent in the Challenger survey.

The serving of alcohol could be one reason why a local SHRM official thinks holiday parties for employees could be waning.

Dan Hamel, 2016 president of the SHRM chapter in Wichita, said the serving of alcohol can be one of several pitfalls for companies that host year-end parties for employees, adding there could be liability issues for the employer.

“If alcohol is involved, that creates other issues you don’t want,” he said.

“The dos and don’ts list, which is already pretty long when it comes to workplace functions, becomes even longer when alcohol is involved,” Challenger Gray CEO John Challenger said in a statement accompanying the firm’s survey results. “Actions typically governed by common sense take on an entirely new level of potential risk as the level of good judgment shrinks in direct inverse proportion to the number of drinks consumed.”

The SHRM survey said companies try to regulate the consumption of alcohol through several means.

Seventy-one percent of respondents said their companies regulate alcohol intake by providing drink tickets or enforcing a drink maximum at holiday parties. Twenty-five percent said only certain types of alcohol are served at holiday parties, such as beer or wine, while 18 percent said their companies require employees and their guests to pay for their drinks at a cash bar.

But Hamel said alcohol is not the only reason for fewer holiday parties.

There are diversity issues – “How do you include some (employees) without inadvertently alienating others?” – as well as issues of personal time, Hamel said. After-work parties mean that’s one more event that people have to commit to during a holiday season in which there are lots of events for some people to attend: school and church holiday concerts and plays, kids’ sports games and friends’ holiday parties.

“Families are more pressed for time,” Hamel said. “Those are the things I sense from my HR colleagues around town.”

Hamel said that while holiday parties do serve as a way to create camaraderie among a company’s employees, allowing them to get to know one another on a personal level and in a more relaxed setting, some companies are opting to accomplish that through other celebrations not tied to the holidays.

One example is a company hosting a wellness event – “There’s so much push on the wellness side” – in lieu of an employee holiday party, which still serves to “bring employees together,” Hamel said.

But some companies like High Touch see value in having an annual holiday party and don’t see that changing anytime soon, according to Chambers.

“It brings employees and spouses together so spouses can get an idea of the company and who their significant other works with,” Chambers said. “There’s no agenda, no nothing.

“Whenever we discuss the (annual) budget, we have this event (on there). We encourage them to have this event.”

This story was originally published December 23, 2015 at 5:19 PM with the headline "Holiday office parties may be waning nationally, but not in Wichita."