Month: December 2019

How the office came by a room full of champagne

This contribution is a joint production by the harlequins RGE and BCO.

RGE: We enjoyed celebrating at our office. Good deals, for example, or new customers. With bubbly.

Sometimes business even went much better than expected. From the management’s point of view, this was not very fortunate because our units were organised as profit centres. The general demand for business growth was about 5% per year. If it was actually higher, it automatically increased expectations the following year.

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Lukewarm champagne and tepid speeches – the office Christmas party

In the course of my working life I have participated in many – and different – office/company Christmas parties: with tea and cookies in the office, with pizza and games in the canteen, at the sausage stand at the Christmas market, in a specially rented small theatre (including performance) and at the big ball in an “exclusive location”. The number of guests has varied between 5 and several hundred, and as far as dress was concerned, anything from jeans to evening gowns.

But one thing all Christmas parties had in common was of course the speech by the management. Often this address has weighed on the shoulders of the selected (or coerced) managers since the previous October. And it also entails different strategies, depending on whether the previous fiscal year was successful or not.

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