Common Holiday Party Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Have the Best Holiday Office Party Ever!

Holiday Parties are a great opportunity for your staff to have a good time together. But sometimes those parties don’t live up to expectations, on account of a few common and easily avoidable errors. Here’s my list of what you can do to make yours the best holiday office party ever.

Make sure your whole team can enjoy the party
One of the most interesting things about the modern workplace is that it has so many different sorts of people, especially here in the Pacific Northwest. There’s no better occasion than your holiday office party to ensure that everyone feels appreciated and involved, in the workplace as well as in the celebration. Sure, it’s Christmas, but lots of cultures have other reasons to celebrate around this time of year. Talk with your staff and look for additional holiday and winter traditions from their religions, cultures or families. Find a way to include those in your celebration. The more the merrier!

Have a balanced mix of foods
For a really good time, you want to have something for everyone. Check around. Any special dietary requirements? You might learn about vegetarianism, lactose intolerance, wheat allergies and the Atkins diet. You might hear about religious restrictions, especially where meat is concerned. You don’t need to restrict everyone’s pleasure, but you should make sure every person at the party feels included.

Once you’ve done this, make sure the foods you pick out are balanced enough to make a meal, especially if you’ll be serving alcohol. Too many sugary treats can throw people off balance and make it more difficult for them to enjoy the good time. Too much bread or pasta can lead to yawning and early exits. We recommend a good mix of veggies, proteins and starches – bread or potatoes – to keep your party alive. If alcohol’s in the plan, make sure several fatty or fried foods are available. They help slow down the metabolizing of alcohol.

Keep tabs on the drinking
Not every holiday party has alcohol at it, but for those that do, planning is all the more important. Our best advice? Stick with beer and wine rather than hard liquor. They reduce the likelihood of out-of-line activities and post-holiday regrets. Also, the consequences of drinking can be kept in check by having the right foods around. If you spot an over-imbiber, encourage them to drink some water, eat some fatty foods and stay away from sugary treats. That should get them a bit more steady. Remember: there is no “magic fix” to make someone suddenly sober; the only cure for getting drunk is time. You can, however, help minimize the hangovers, embarrassments and apologies.

Let someone else clean up!
Planning, preparing and decorating for a party is hard work and takes time. Getting ready can be a lot of fun, but the work and time consumption don’t stop when the party’s done. All too often, we find that the same people who plan the party are the ones who wind up picking up the mess. That puts a serious damper on enjoying the festive event that they helped create. To sidestep this unpleasant situation, consider hiring a professional catering company, one that will not only bring in the refreshments but will also clean up afterwards. That way everyone at the party can go home and remember nothing but the happiness.

Talk to the experts
While the above four are the most commonly overlooked party-poopers, we know a number of other ways to help you make your holiday office party a success. We invite you to lean on us, at absolutely no obligation. Elemental Catering is currently offering a free hour of Event Planning Consultation throughout the 2007 Holiday season. Let us help you work out all the details of your event, from decoration to menu planning to any other supplies you may need to make your event a success. It’s a $300 value, but we’re offering it at no charge this year, to get to know you better and to help you have the best holiday party ever.

Contact us at parties@elementalcatering.com or call 206.228.6821. You won't regret it.

If a rat can do it, why can't you?

The Elemental Catering team recently went to New York, not to sample crazy new restaurants or experiment with the latest gadgets, but just to see some friends. It was hot. Sticky, stupid hot- the kinda hot it NEVER gets in Seattle. We just had to get into the A.C. While most bars & restaurants have A.C., it wasn't cut out to be that kind of vacation. Restaurants & bars can get expensive, especially when you like food & drinks as much as we do. So we headed to a beautifully restored vaudeville-era theater to see the most awesome food-movie that's come out this year, Ratatouille.

While the animation was awesome and the jokes quite funny, the pervasive theme of the movie, "Anyone Can Cook," was quite a compelling one. I've eaten at street vendors that make food comparable to the most expensive meals I've had, albeit rarely. I've had meals at the home of friends and acquaintances that have made my professional palate unreasonably jealous. And some of those were prepared by people who I felt confident would burn water if left unsupervised.

If you have the passion to make something great, very little can stop you from doing just that.

This principle, Anyone Can Cook, really opens up when you rephrase it to Anyone Can Do Anything They Feel Passion For. Cooking, teaching, office management, skating, biking, realty, cello; it doesn't matter what it is. As long you feel passionate about it you can do wonders in your field.

The Right Food for the Right Event

You know that your 7-year-old nephew is probably not going to want Lobster Thermidor for his birthday. And that your mom's retirement celebration is probably the wrong time to showcase your newfound love for freeze-dried ice cream in mole sauce. But knowing what food's right for your business's events may be a little harder.

Here are some steps we have come up with to help you make that decision:

1. Figure out what time of day your event is happening. Of course, breakfast, lunch, or dinner is an obvious distinction. But, a breakfast-time event at 7.30AM has different contextual needs than one at 9.
   
2. Know what else will be going on. Are people paying attention to a presenter? Is there a DJ? Do they want to network with each other?
   
3. Determine how people will get their food. Will they pick it up, all assembled in a box? Serve it themselves onto plates? Be served by an attendant?
4. Know your audience. If your event's going to be attended by a homogeneous crowd, figure out what they'd like, and give it to them. If it's for a diverse group, provide something for everyone, but don't aim for a middle-road no one wants to go down.
   

When you can determine these factors, and take them all into consideration, you can better craft contextually appropriate food for your event.

These are questions Elemental Catering will be happy to help you answer, and come up with a plan that has your event covered. It's our job to know what to serve when.

When DIY is a Don't

Is Doing It Yourself really the way to go when putting together an office lunch? Sometimes. When it goes well, it can save you some money if you're willing to sacrifice some time. When it doesn't go so well, it can hurt more than it helps. Let's look at a scenario recently related to me by a customer who decided to try the DIY thing. The names have been changed to protect the embarrassed:

(The Scene: Thursday afternoon, in a typical office in a large downtown building. The characters: A Boss; Stefan, the Administrative Assistant; and Emily, the Receptionist.)
Boss: We need lunch brought in for 25 on Tuesday. Can you take care of that?
Stefan: Sure. I'm on it.

Then Stefan thinks to himself, 'Hey, I love throwing dinner parties! Surely I can take care of this lunch. I'll save the company some money, and maybe I'll get some sorta kickback...' So Stefan asks Emily whether she wants to help him plan this party. They sit down, Emily volunteers to take care of getting a dessert taken care of, and she'll do all the set up and clean up if Stefan will man the phones for her while that happens. Stefan decides to make his grandmother's famous Italian pasta salad, and he'll get the stuff for people to make their own sandwiches. Then they talk about what's happening on Entourage.

Over the weekend, Emily comes down with a bad case of Strep throat. Monday morning, Stefan finds out that he's going to have to go it alone AND also handle both his regular job duties AND answer the phones. So Monday night, after a long day at the office, Stefan runs to Costco to pick up the stuff for sandwiches. Then he runs to a neighborhood store to pick up stuff for pasta salad. He goes home, starts the pasta salad and realizes he's forgotten to triple the recipe. He has a manic evening in which he totally misses Entourage with all the running around, and goes into work with a pasta salad which is not exactly the perfect medley his grandmother had in mind (he bought the neighborhood store out of basil, and still didn't have enough).

Since it's also the beginning of the month, Stefan's got to coordinate reports, and answer the phone, and 11am comes around like it always does, and he realizes with a shock that it's time to set up the meeting room. He's forgotten to buy plates, and since he hates mayonnaise, he forgot that too, but the breads and meats and cheeses are all there. The attendees will have to make do with mustard and tiny plates that say "happy birthday" or have pictures of snow and holly. Everything gets set up, and he goes, exhausted, back to Emily's reception desk. He realizes with a start that he's forgotten the dessert too! He has an assistant manager cover the phones, runs to the convenience store in the lobby, and buys an overpriced bag of mixed candy to substitute.

Sure, DIY (do-it-yourself) sounds like a great idea - you save some money, get out of the office for a while, maybe showcase your favorite recipes - but is it really? Unless your office has extra staff who are paid specifically to run errands like this one, it's almost always going to hurt your bottom-line. Missed time for employees, who then may have to stay late and get overtime to make up the work they didn't do. Clients who think you're too cheap to do it right.

If Stefan had thought to himself, 'Gee, lunch for 25. Sounds like I should call a caterer,' his reports could have been done on time, the meeting attendees would have been wowed with custom-created dishes, and his boss would have said, 'Good job, Stefan. Maybe we'll finally get you that keyboard tray you've been asking for.'

Elemental Catering at BizJam

Oh Happy Day! Elemental Catering was selected to be the caterer for BizJam - happening Saturday, June 9th. That's great for us, because we get to help a great organization, Biznik, with a great event.

Basically, BizJam is a day-long event for "bootstrapping entrepreneurs" to get ideas from each other, brainstorm how to get their businesses booming, and just energize themselves with the myriad of opportunities out there for everyone to be fabulously successful. There are a score of speakers and many workshops to help fine-tune your business, from choosing a name to effective networking strategies to polishing your business plan.

While we have provided for conferences in the past, Bizjam is our first chance to present our Strategic Catering model to a large section of businesses all at one time. For BizJam we couldn't really customize the attendees' lunches - there are just too many of them, and we weren't able to ask them before hand whether they had a preference for fruit salad or chicken sandwiches, or if they were allergic to tomatoes or wouldn't eat yellow food. So we instead concentrated on providing two energizing lunch options that will allow the attendees some good long-burning fuel to keep them going with a clear head.

We, along with the organizers, Dan & Lara, decided that we'd keep it basic: a Dijon chicken sandwich or a roasted veggie sandwich, with just one side dish - a Southwest bean salad. The side salad option was easy to figure out - it needed to be a low-carb, high-protein option that wouldn't be noisy (like chips) or potentially allergen-ridden (asian-noodle salad). Corn and beans together really pack a protein punch, so even those people who choose the veggie sandwich will definitely get all their lunchtime nutritional needs met.

We're quite sure the sandwiches will be hits. The Dijon chicken was a no-brainer to choose, since it's one of our signature dishes. The chicken takes on the marinade and gets SO juicy. Then we put some red onion and spiced, oven-dried tomatoes. It's delectable. The roasted veggie was harder to decide upon. While a great vegetarian option, it's not vegan (there's provolone cheese on it), but we decided that anyone who was vegan could take off the cheese. It's a little more labor-intensive - each sandwich has sauteed mushrooms, three kinds of grilled, marinated veggies, and fresh basil. Sorry vegans. We promise you that when you outnumber meat-eaters and vegetarians we'll make everyone put cheese onto their sandwiches instead of making you take it off.

Offering sodas for energy and refreshment to your conference attendees may seem like a good idea, but it's just not from a organizer standpoint. All the sugar and caffeine gives people a quick fix and a burst of wakefulness, but that high is very short lived and ends with a sugar crash that can leave people sleepy and scatterbrained. While people will naturally have the option of grabbing themselves a soda from the vending machines, we serve our lunches with a choice of either good-ol' fashioned (bottled) water or seven different flavors of Juice Squeeze by Crystal Geyser. It's a lightly carbonated 70% juice beverage with no added sugars, and all their flavors are quite delicious. They do the job of perking you up just fine, but with the extra benefit of giving you a longer burning energy than refined sugars can give you.

Though it was challenge to pare down our considerable offerings to two sandwiches and a side, we think that it will be worth it - and hopefully the BizJam attendees will want to try our custom-created menus to enhance business events.

Cultivating Appreciation

In my life, I have attended many parties, and have thrown or helped throw many more. The ones that have truly fun and stuck out in my memory have ranged from quiet and modest to loud and lavish, but all have the same common thread running through them: I felt that every guest there, myself included, was very welcomed and encouraged to have a good time. Making everyone feel comfortable, welcome and accepted is an easy thing to do. It doesn't always happen because it takes either a lot of work, or a good deal of planning to make a party where every guest feels like they're the guest of honor. When I'm planning a function, I try to stay focused on "Cultivating Appreciation."

Well, what does that even mean? I'm glad you asked that question. Cultivating appreciation means asking, "what would my guests actually like to do at this event?" What do they already like? What little touches can I add that will give the gathering some focal point, some pizazz? If I'm having food, is there enough variety so that everyone invited can eat some of it? Is anyone attending afraid of ponies, or perhaps guacamole? These questions can be answered quite easily if you are having an event with several of your close friends; less easily if your invite list grows to an extended network of friends and acquaintances. But, when you're hosting something for coworkers or employees, finding something that makes everyone happy, and cultivates appreciation, can be quite the challenge. Since there are already quite a few books websites and shows dedicated to throwing parties at home, and since Elemental Catering caters only to businesses, I'm going to share my thoughts on that latter-type of party.

If you have decided to do something nice for your staff to say "thanks for your hard work" or "thanks for not testifying against the company," or any kind of more special event, then a regular office function should be out of the question. The same old is the same. It's old. No one's hard work should ever be rewarded with something they get all the time. If your intention is to truly show appreciation, appreciation that will help your staff enjoy their jobs more and help your company run better, then it not only needs to be special, it needs to be thoughtful. The more thoughtful a gift you give to your employees, the more they believe your company is where they ought to be working, and the harder they'll work.

Here's an example. A team who I know work together every day, Monday through Friday, from 7am until 4.30. They eat lunch together every day, some of them even eat their breakfasts at work. So when it's time for the "employee appreciation" lunch, I sat down with their boss, who was coordinating this event, and really figured out how to make this lunch different from every other lunch of the year. We brought in fresh flowers, real plates, real silverware, and every team member got to order an individual entree. They knew that each and every one of them was being appreciated for her individual contributions. Not that "the team" was being recognized with a sheet cake or some bagels, but that Sally and Marge and Lisa were being recognized for Sally's and Marge's and Lisa's good jobs. The team didn't have to pick up their break room, or decorate it with the "birthday box" or take care of anything except enjoying themselves.

That's the sort of appreciation that a good event will cultivate.