Management & HR Related Articles

Holiday Office Parties Really Aren't Any Fun If You're the Spouse
By Jared Sandberg
The Wall Street Journal December 15, 2004

The holiday office party may officially begin at 7 p.m., but for spouses it starts during the car ride over. That's when Katherine Hughes has to cram her head full of data whose main purpose is to keep her from trashing her husband's career.

First, she memorizes the roster of executive names, some of them many syllables long (Mukhopadhyay), that don't exactly sound the way they're spelled. Then there's keeping track of the many things she's not supposed to know, such as potential layoffs and the secret details of projects. "Remember," says her husband, "you don't know anything about Eagle," the code name for some new product. "And I didn't mention that the COO is considering firing" so-and-so.

And the party hasn't started yet. Once it does, she says, "you're eating and drinking food and wine that you would never settle for in a restaurant, listening to music you hate, you don't know a soul, and if you say the wrong thing or let on that you are not having fun, you might torpedo your spouse's chances for that big promotion."

In a recent survey conducted by the employee-assistance firm ComPsych Corp., 28% of nonattendees said they planned to skip their company's office party because they didn't like their co-workers; an additional 38% thought the party was too formal and not enough fun.

Just imagine what their spouses think. After all, nowhere in their wedding vows, amid all the talk of sickness, health, richer and poorer, is there any mention of the holiday office party. But annually at this time of year, there it is: a high-stakes pressure fest poorly disguised by awkward smiles, pregnant pauses and the nagging knowledge that much more can go wrong than right. For spouses, holiday parties are the workplace equivalent of meeting the in-laws.

"It is going way beyond the call of duty for work, and maybe even beyond the call of duty for marriage," says Daisy Chin-Lor, a former marketing executive. She says she no longer asks her husband to attend her office parties, adding that she used to warn him to "remember not to say this and this," but some things fell through the cracks. He once asked a staffer and his spouse if they were excited to be moving to Australia from Hong Kong. But the spouse didn't know about the move. "What happens after that," says Ms. Chin-Lor, "is they go home and have a fight."

Bill Kalmar, a quality consultant from Lake Orion, Mich., says he got so many preparty instructions that "I wished that I had taken a written script so that I could remember all the things I shouldn't discuss!"

Another problem is that spouses tend to get clumped together, a result of the fact that the only thing they have in common is that they have only one thing in common with everyone else. If things get awkward enough, they can even turn mutinous. Years ago, Craig Sparks worked for a large law firm where couples were separated from each other during the holiday dinner. "It was really awkward for the young lawyers who were bringing a date instead of a spouse," says Mr. Sparks.

Perhaps that's why Mr. Sparks's wife simply "picked up the card of the woman who was to be seated next to me and moved it," he says. Since then, the firm, which he left, no longer splits up couples.

Marketing consultant David Carrithers notes that the problem for spouses isn't just what they know about the people at the office. It's what those people know about them. "There is fear they will bring up that operation you had, or the really smelly shoes you always wear," he says. In his case, it was the time he fell into the trunk of his car, an event memorialized by his wife in a photo that she had apparently shown to all her colleagues.

He also recalls attending a party where an executive got so drunk that he made lascivious pronouncements to one of his female colleagues. The man's wife, who witnessed the exchange along with everyone else, immediately "went down to the garage, took his new Cadillac and slammed it into a big concrete pillar," he says. Ultimately, the recipient of the advances was promoted, and the executive was moved into a "special projects" division.

That's not to say that some spouses don't love to attend holiday parties. If Tom McCall's wife, Karen, were to miss the office holiday party, it would be "like sitting in the last row of the balcony," says the chief executive of a Dallas insurance company.

In fact, some spouses end up saving the party. Mr. McCall, who tends to throw the office party at his house, once had a staffer who had spousal problems and made a few too many trips to the punch bowl. At one point during the party, "she tipped over and we tucked her in," he says.

In fact, his wife discreetly did the tucking and made sure the woman had fresh towels the next morning, which was a little more than awkward. "She apologized and it took a long time for her to look us in the eye," says Mr. McCall. "But we love her."