#194 - Holiday Parties and the Law: What Every Business Owner Should Know
The end of the year is a time of celebration and joy, but as a business owner, it's important to remember that your legal responsibilities don't take a holiday. One aspect that requires careful consideration is the end of year Christmas party. In today’s episode, I'll provide you with some tips and tricks to ensure a safe and enjoyable event for everyone involved.
The most important thing to remember is that your Christmas party is still a work event. This means that you have legal responsibilities towards your employees, even if they are not being paid for attending the party, and it's essential to be mindful of this fact throughout the planning and execution of the event.
If you choose to serve alcohol at your end of year party, extra precautions are necessary. To ensure the safety of everyone, you need to provide a controlled environment for alcohol consumption. The best way to do this is to have someone with the appropriate qualifications serving drinks at your event.
I’ll talk about what to consider when choosing a venue. Opting for a venue outside of your premises can be a great way to ensure a safer environment. However, it's crucial to do your due diligence and understand the details of the venue so that you can mitigate potential risks and liability.
It’s important to clearly communicate to your team that the standard of behavior expected at the party should be no different from what is expected in the workplace. It's also helpful to establish a clear end time for the event, setting boundaries and allowing employees to plan accordingly.
Secret Santa can be a source of potential issues in the workplace. To avoid any conflicts or uncomfortable situations, it's important to make it clear to all team members that the gifts exchanged should be G-rated and neutral. The gifts should be suitable for opening in front of family members to prevent any potential cases of discrimination or harassment. Humorous gifts, in particular, should be avoided, as humor can differ greatly from person to person, and what may be funny to some can offend others.
Ultimately, the goal of an end of year celebration is to foster a sense of appreciation and joy while keeping your business and employees safe. By taking a proactive and mindful approach, you can create a positive and safe environment for your team, allowing everyone to ring in the new year with a clean slate and without legal headaches.
Wishing you a joyful and risk-free end of year celebration!
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Tracey: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and thank you for joining me for another episode of the rise up in business podcast.
as we are getting closer to the end of the year, a topic that's coming up a lot and I want to share with you here is end of year Christmas parties.
I have my views on these things, unpopular opinion, most of the time.
I want to share with you why I have these views, and I want to give you some tips and tricks around what to think about as an employer, as a business owner, when it comes to your end of year Christmas parties.
The first thing I want to say is you need to be mindful as a business owner, when you're inviting your team to have celebrations with you, that you are still responsible as an employer during
, So whether you have it at the office or at your premises or warehouse or out at a restaurant or some other party venue, it's still a work event.
Which means you have legal responsibilities to the team, to your employees.
That's the first thing, and that's something that not a lot of business owners appreciate.
They think we've clocked off, you're not getting paid, therefore, it's not a work event. This is a social function. It's not, let's be clear.
Just because the team members aren't getting paid doesn't mean you're free from responsibility.
It is a work function.
So you have a duty to keep people safe.
Let's talk alcohol.
So if you are hosting privately, let's say your warehouse or your home or your premises.
You've invited everybody to have a Christmas gathering to celebrate a fabulous year. Thanks so much. I'm a fabulous employer. I really want to reward you and celebrate you and share my appreciation in this way.
If you're [00:02:00] serving alcohol, you need to be really careful that you have paid attention to the quantity or volume of alcohol in conjunction with the ratio of food.
This is your responsibility, this is what you need to do, and my advice, best advice that you will get is make sure that you have somebody there serving the alcohol who has qualifications.
So responsible service of alcohol qualifications and you might be thinking, are you serious, Tracy? You actually want me to hire someone to come and serve the alcohol? Yes, I do.
That is exactly what I'm saying.
If you've got a function where you've got people sitting around and they've got their eskies and they're pulling out their drink, red flags, potential exposure here for you as an employer, this is a work function. Please don't do that. That's my advice. Please don't do that.
And so already, I bet you're thinking to yourself, gosh, this is becoming complicated. Yes, it is becoming complicated. Guess what? It's always been complicated. We as business owners, though, and many employers just didn't realize the complexity thinking it was a social event because everyone was off the clock.
It's always been this complicated, but these are the things you need to know. let's say then you think, okay, then Tracy, I'm not going to have it at home. I don't want to deal with responsible service of alcohol. I don't want to be responsible for somebody getting rolling drunk and injuring themselves.
Or doing something or engaging in some type of altercation or offensive conduct or whatever it may be. So we're going to go out, we're going to go out to a venue. Great do that, but please take the time to do your due diligence, to understand whether or not you've got exclusivity at that venue, whether you're sharing the venue with somebody else, who else is going to be around?
What's the plan for afterwards? There's court cases on this and I won't. bore you with the details, but there's court cases that actually go into liability for business owners and employers in a shared venue, where one was a work party got really rowdy. The other party at the venue was a family. And [00:04:00] the rowdy people engaged in what the family viewed as offensive conduct.
Please don't swear in front of my daughter. Bang altercation, you know how it ends. So there's court cases on this where the courts have found that the employer had the obligation to ensure the safe work environment, and then the other party ended up commencing action against the rowdy. partygoer at the work function.
So these things can get really messy. So when you're thinking end of year function, you've got to be really mindful over where it is, who else is going to be there, whether alcohol's being served. Alcohol's the biggest red flag because of what follows.
If you are, engaging in a dinner or a party or a function, and you get to the end of the function, you need to make sure you've got arrangements in place for your team members to get home safely, and that might mean you paying for taxis, giving vouchers, you paying for the Uber, but you as the employer need to make sure you have got arrangements in place for them.
What I say to business owners is make it crystal clear to your team well in advance of the end of year celebration that it's a work function, that the standard of behavior that you expect at the work function is the same as what you expect in the workplace.
Because guess what? It is. It is the same. You do need to expect that same level of behavior, that same professional conduct and make it really clear what time it ends. So have an end time. I've got two children and I love the birthday invites at this age because they have a start and an end time.
And I think that's particularly fabulous and we've just drafted my daughter's birthday invites and we've got the start time and the end time. So as a parent, I've got a line in the sand. This is when we wrap it up. I'll have everything tidied up within an hour and then I'll sit down with my glass of wine to unwind a bit later.
So I've got those crystal clear boundaries and I love that about kids birthday invitations. I encourage you to do the same with your end of year work [00:06:00] have the start and end time. So it's very clear to everybody what time. Your work function ends.
However, if you as the boss or the business owner or as the manager or somebody in that senior role, then kicks on afterwards with some or all of the partygoers from the work function, and you're shouting some drinks, there's a very real chance that as far as the law is concerned, you might be continuing your work function.
So it might actually be continuing and it may not have ended at that end time. That's a really great area and it's really important to know that your conduct after the end time, what you choose to do and how you choose to do it is really important. Let me talk about Secret Santa. Holy Dooley. I don't know if there's something that I enjoy less at Christmas than this concept of Secret Santa.
Really? I'm not a Grinch by any means. I'm the eternal optimist. I love Christmas. I love the joy it brings. I don't necessarily buy into all the commercialism around it, But when it comes to the workplace and we've got Secret Santa. We need to make sure we've made it very clear to all team members that whatever it is that you're sharing or you're gifting, it's got to be G rated, it's got to be neutral, it's got to be something that's capable of being opened in front of the family, if you get what I mean, because otherwise you can fall into grey areas of potential Discrimination, sexual harassment, those types of areas.
If something's really offensive, we've got gender, religion, age, there's a whole lot of things that need to be considered and respected when giving secret Santa gifts, and you need to put yourself in the shoes the recipient as to whether or not they're going to necessarily think it's humorous. I don't like humorous gifts.
Let's just be honest. I. Don't like them on any level. I don't think they're funny. I don't think they're enjoyable. I don't like them at all. I have a sense of [00:08:00] humor, but I don't find those types of humorous gifts of any value whatsoever. And I don't think they have any place in the secret Santa at the end of your Christmas party, because you don't know what's going to offend somebody else.
And if somebody does get offended because it's a work environment and they've got a reasonable expectation of safety and respect, it becomes an employer issue. So if you are going to do secret Santa, make sure the parameters are outlined really clearly for your team.
So now that I've shared that and put a real dampener on that end of year spirit, what's my view?
My view, honestly, is two things.
One, as business owners, take a moment to pause, and ask yourself the question; do we really need it?
Do we actually need to do this end of year function, this dinner, this lunch, this, whatever, with all this alcohol at this place and expose the business to all this potential liability?
Do we actually need it? Do my team really want to come?
I love this question so much because our team work with us. Every day or thereabouts prorated whatever their arrangement is throughout the year. Is it a celebration for the team to be forced now to come and spend even more time with you and everyone else?
For some people it absolutely is not. The thought of going can cause anxiety. The thought of going just fills some people, some employees with dread. Oh, they've said it's not compulsory, but if I don't go, I'm viewed negatively and they'll talk about me. So I need to go to be seen to be a team player.
I have to go. It's the last thing I want to do at this time of year. I'm so busy. What I'd really love is. to do something else. So just pause and ask the question, do you need to do it? And do your team actually want to go? That's the first thing. It may be that it's a resounding, yes, your team loves you and they love the opportunity and they all want to do it.
Great. Bear in mind everything else though, that I've said in this episode around your [00:10:00] potential liability.
The next thing I say, though , is there a better way to express your gratitude and to extend thanks or a gift or some sort of recognition to your team members? And there may be, it may be some type of group activity.
If you've decided that everybody desperately wants to hang out even more together, but it also may be a beautiful gift voucher for your team member to go out to dinner with their partner or a movie ticket or a gift or so many other things that you could actually do to express gratitude to your team so that you're engaging in the end of year cheer and joy, but you're keeping your lawyer happy because you have limited your liability completely.
Because there's none of those drunken, high alcoholic, end of year type celebrations. If you don't know me, you may be thinking I am just the Grinch of Christmas, but I promise you, I'm not. I love it. I do love it. I'm just very risk averse for my clients. And I'm very mindful of what can go wrong and what typically does go wrong year after year after year at these end of work Christmas functions.
I have worked for employers. Many over the years, and I can assure you that most of the time, an end of year work function was something I wanted like a hole in the head and many of my coworkers shared that view, but you're forced to go. You're obligated because otherwise you're viewed badly and we all know what happens from there.
So just take a moment to pause and think about what you're doing. And why you're doing it. And if you are going to host that lovely celebration, please just take on board everything I've shared around your liability and your responsibilities, make sure there's a plan to get people home safe. I hope this has been helpful.
Please. If you think there are other business owners in your circle that would benefit from this episode of the podcast, please share far and wide. The intention here is to help business owners get [00:12:00] to the end of the year. Without being sued and to start next year, really fresh with a clean slate without things hanging over their head that could come back to bite them as a result of the interview parties, as always.
Thanks so much for listening. I'll catch you next time.
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