The Weekly COVID Update: Summer Party Edition
No less august of a publication than the Harvard Business Review recently stated that the office summer party is essential to corporate competitiveness.
Well, it didn’t say that exactly. It did say that culture is essential to competitiveness and that culture is experiencing profound transformation, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. We made the logical leap that a party is required. It is the middle of summer, after all.
According to HBR, one in five employees were experiencing a corporate culture crisis before the pandemic. Now working from home, employees no longer receive the daily cues about the guiding attitudes and behaviours that will have the greatest impact on their organizations.
We can ill afford to wait until things return to normal to pay close attention to corporate culture.
To a great extent, how we have led our organizations through the past five months have told our teams more about our culture than any amount of written or verbal communications. Our behaviours have demonstrated the truth about our culture. This is very powerfully recounted in a NY Times article about Airbnb. The loss of their culture of belonging has had profound effects.
With many people working from home who may never return to the office in the way they once knew it, we must be even more intentional in building the culture we want and need to have.
While it can seem amorphous, culture is the way things get done around here, why things get done that way, what people do when no one is looking and the worst behaviour it will tolerate. With this in mind, we turn to the lost art of the summer party.
The five-step recipe for a fun and strategically-resonant summer party is pretty easy to manage. All you need is two hours:
Be safe and let people define their own safety (preparation).
Talk openly about how the business is doing (20 minutes).
Recognize some people who have exemplified the culture you’re nurturing. From leaders to the front lines (20 minutes).
Have some fun (80 minutes).
Give back to the community (built into #4).
The fun component can be the most stressful. You can combine fun with community-giving by doing socially distanced outdoor activities such as river clean ups or random acts of kindness. But this might not include your entire team.
Another approach is to use our old friend Zoom. Here you can invite the whole team and engage them with demonstration/participation activities like:
Have a chef teach you how to prepare a meal. Everyone shops for the ingredients beforehand. The chef provides an on-line lesson. People can ask questions and get tips. Everyone eats their meal together in small groups to laugh/humble brag about their creations.
If you didn’t know it already, everyone needs one great magic trick in their dinner party repertoire. Hire a magician to do a short show and then teach a trick to everyone. Practice with each other on Zoom with the appropriate laughter and humble bragging.
Online games like Skribbl.io (Pictionary with a mouse) or any of the Jackbox Games can be great ways to hang out in small breakout rooms on Zoom. Rather than playing to win, play to be as funny as possible. It’s way more fun.
Ask a bartender to create a corporate cocktail. Have everyone mix the ingredients together and migrate through online breakout rooms to chit chat in small groups. Alternatively, nominate people to create cocktails and use breakout rooms to prepare the cocktail of your choice.
Here’s our corporate cocktail – the Rock Bob:
1½ ounces good gin (Søbrii is a good zero alcohol alternative)
¾ ounces lime juice
¾ ounces ginger syrup
2 basil leaves
3 cucumber slices
To make the ginger syrup, place about ¾ inch of ginger, grated or finely sliced into ½ cup of sugar and ½ cup of water. Bring to a boil and simmer for 1 minute. Strain into a jar and keep for a few months in the fridge.
To make the Rock Bob, stir together the gin, lime and ginger syrup with ice in a tall glass. Add basil and cucumber. Top with sparkling water.
One sure way to amp up the cool factor of a party is to wear masks, but not the COVID masks we are wearing today. Perhaps you could consider having people wearing the fun, Hallowe’en / British Baroque Ballroom masks in the Zoom summer party. It would be a nice change of pace.
Wearing face masks has become quite politically charged. Calgary has led the way mandating the wearing of masks in indoor public spaces. Lest we have a sense of superiority over the US because of the severity of their COVID outbreak, 67% of Canadians think mask wearing in public should be mandatory, significantly less than the 72% of Americans who think it should (Leger & Associates).
In fact, Canadians rank fairly low on a global scale when it comes to wearing a face mask:
Regardless of your mask wearing preferences, consider strengthening your culture with a fun and strategically-designed summer party for your organization, for your department or even for you and your office dog. (Admit it. If you invite the office cat, she probably won’t show.)