Chances Are: Christmas Party Romance

“Men significantly more likely to brag about kissing a colleague”

The run up to Christmas heralds the office party season. In honour of this festive tradition, and with a nod to the recent firing of Steve Easterbrook, the McDonald’s boss who had a consensual office affair, we wondered what’s deemed permissible and what’s actually happening in practice? Specifically, what proportion of the UK end up smooching a co-worker under the mistletoe?

Given the topic, we figured there may be some hesitation to come clean. Accordingly, we employed a behavioural research technique called ‘unmatched count’ to reveal the true underlying incidence and compared this to what people were prepared to admit when asked directly. The results, shown in the graphic alongside some prior ‘taboo subject’ research findings, surprised us.

Overall, when asked directly, 7% of people admit to kissing a colleague at last year’s event. However, when provided with anonymity, the true proportion was only 2%. Even in these changing #MeToo times, people are still actively boasting about a potentially disciplinary canoodle. And boasting does appear to be the cause since we find men (11%) were significantly more likely to brag about kissing a co-worker than women (3%). So no surprises there!

The self-reported 7% is also consistent with prior BBC research which found that 9% of workers claimed to have experienced some form of unwanted sexual behaviour in the workplace over the prior year¹. But, returning to a topic close to Dectech’s heart, our findings here highlight the probable inaccuracy of direct questioning in this context.

Meanwhile, is it really worth the career risk? It seems that we Brits aren’t quite as lucky as we make out – pun intended – when it comes to romancing our colleagues. Of those who ended up in a clinch, the ratio of good outcomes to difficult repercussions, including colleague jealousy and unwanted affection, is roughly one-to-two. In the cold light of Monday morning, about two-thirds of these trysts are judged to have been a bad idea.

Christmas parties are a hazardous combination of familiarity, alcohol, and informality. Given there are about 30 million employees in the UK and assuming about half of them attend an office party, using the above incidence rate, there’ll be 150,000 such ill-advised tangles over the next month. We wish them all a Happy New Year. But don’t say we didn’t warn you.

¹BBC – Sexual harassment in the work place 2017, survey by ComRes, November 2017