More than a third of all businesses may have organised a Christmas event this year and it looks like virtual experiences are here to stay, according to a recent poll by Executive PA Media.
The Linkedin poll ran for 14 days and attracted a total of 111 international responses – ninety eight of which were from executive assistants and office managers.
Despite a worldwide pandemic, temporary mothballing of many industry sectors, a shift to remote working for employees & then back to the workplace, lockdowns, border closures and two COVID spikes (phew!) businesses seem determined to bring their employees together and celebrate.
Thirty six percent of the responders said their businesses were either planning an event for everybody or had broken down their celebrations into smaller departmental Christmas events.
And whilst forty percent of the responders said their organisations had nothing planned this year, nearly a quarter (24%) were looking forward to a fun virtual event to bring everyone together. A virtual option for a social occasion would have been an unlikely consideration twelve months ago, but the responses suggest that 9 months of zoom meetings has opened up ‘virtual’ as another social opportunity to add to the mix.
The responses for the poll comes 4 months after the second Executive PA Media ‘Back to Work’ Survey, which indicated that organisations that had started the return of their teams to the workplace and had a plan to achieve this, were 9 times more likely to be organising a Christmas event than those with their staff still working remotely.
Furthermore, the ‘Back to Work’ survey which took place in July, indicated that only 30% of the businesses returning teams to the workplace were planning a Christmas event. Findings from the Linkedin poll, which ran from the 8 December, indicate that 36% of all organisations have Christmas events planned, regardless of where their employees were working from.
