Every autumn, somebody in an office is handed the Christmas party and a deadline. Most of them start in the same place, with a date and a venue, and most of them discover the same problem about three weeks in: the best December evenings went months ago, and what is left is a Tuesday in a room somebody else’s company booked the night before.
The party itself is rarely the hard part. The hard part is the handful of decisions made early, often in September, that decide whether people turn up, stay past the speeches and still talk about it in January. Here is what matters, in roughly the order you will need to deal with it.
Pick the date before you pick anything else
Thursdays and Fridays in the first three weeks of December are the most contested evenings of the year for London event spaces. If your team is flexible, a late November date or a January party avoids the scramble entirely and often gets you a better room. If it has to be December, fix the date with whoever signs it off first, then go looking. Venues will usually hold a date for a short time while you decide, and a provisional hold is worth far more than a shortlist.
It is also worth asking the team. A two-question poll on preferred evenings and dietary needs costs nothing and settles arguments before they start.
Know what the budget covers, and what HMRC allows
Christmas party budgets tend to be set per head, and it pays to know how the taxman treats them. An annual staff function that is open to everyone can be exempt from tax for employees, provided the cost per head stays within a set limit. The detail, including what happens when you hold more than one event in a year, is set out in HMRC’s own guidance on annual parties and other social functions. Your finance team will thank you for checking it before the quote is signed rather than after.
Get people there, and home again
Location decides turnout more than anything on the menu. A venue close to a main rail hub, easy to reach for people commuting in from every direction, will always beat a beautiful room that needs two changes and a taxi home. Late licences matter too. A party with a hard stop at eleven tends to end with half the room checking train times from ten.
Think about the journey home as much as the journey in. Mainline stations with late services, Night Tube lines and a taxi rank nearby make it easier for people to relax, and easier for you to sleep that night.
Choose a room that does the work for you
A plain function room needs dressing, and dressing a room from scratch is where budgets disappear. A space with a character of its own needs far less. High ceilings, good lighting and some architecture to look at make a room feel like an occasion before a single bauble goes up.
Town Hall in King’s Cross is a good example of the second kind. It is a restored neo-classical civic building a few minutes’ walk from King’s Cross St Pancras, with interiors by Tom Dixon, and its main hall, Vision Hall, has 13-metre ceilings that give a long candlelit table or a dance floor plenty of room to breathe. If you are comparing corporate Christmas party venues in London, a room like that needs very little rebuilding for the night, which frees the budget for the things guests actually notice.
Whatever you shortlist, ask to see the space dressed for an evening event, not just in daylight photographs. The same room can look entirely different with the lights down.
Food, drink and the things people remember
People remember three things about a Christmas party: whether the food was hot, whether the queue at the bar was long, and whether there was anything to do besides stand and talk. Ask how many bar points there will be for your numbers, and whether dietary requirements are handled as proper dishes or as an afterthought. Venues with an in-house caterer tend to get this right, because the kitchen knows the room.
Entertainment does not have to be elaborate. A good DJ who reads the room does more than a headline act nobody asked for. If you are planning speeches or awards, keep them short, do them early, and make sure the sound and screens are run by the venue’s production team rather than a laptop and a borrowed speaker.
Plan for the people who are not drinking
A growing share of any team will not be drinking, for all sorts of reasons. A proper alcohol-free cocktail list, rather than orange juice and sparkling water, is a small thing that people notice. So is a corner away from the dance floor where people can hear each other talk.
Send the details early, then send them again
The last job is communication. Send the date as soon as it is fixed, the practical details a fortnight before, and a short reminder the day before with the address, start time, dress code and the best way home. It sounds obvious. It is also the step most often skipped, and the reason a surprising number of people end up at the wrong entrance.
Done well, the office Christmas party is one of the few evenings in the year when a whole team is in one room with nothing on the agenda. It is worth the September phone call.
