When does a gathering become too risky for you?

In a world where working from the office is a risk too far, but partying with your workmates is a necessary tonic, you'd be forgiven for wondering what's important any more.

There's a bit of method in the madness though.  And it goes along the lines of something many of us decide for ourselves.  That is, that enjoying yourself is a reward we are far less inclined to sacrifice than dutifully dragging ourselves into our place of work.

It has been determined that you can live with working from home, but you can't take another year without a christmas shindig.

In our new world of fluctuating pandemic risk, we make individual assessments about what we feel comfortable doing.

And as winter comes around and gatherings must mostly take place indoors, heightening the risk, we each assess the value exchange of every event we are invited to.  That is, does what I am going to gain from attending sufficiently outweigh the risk of me being there.  Many of us make a conditional assessment.

So where’s you head at when it comes to being in groups in indoor settings?

Do you think about personal get togethers and professional ones differently?

How do you evaluate the risk of attending relative to the reward you might get from the experience?

Only the other day, a contact of mine commented that they’d had a workshop cancelled due to participant concerns about covid risk, but that the pubs had been ‘full to the rafters’ at the weekend.

That's not to say those non attendees were all at the pub that weekend, but it does lead you to wonder who sits in which camps on the Venn diagram of mixing indoors.

Put frankly, who thinks a night at the pub with friends is something worth taking the risk for, but a networking event or business workshop isn’t?

What makes the pub appealing but makes us question the value of a professional gathering?

Seeing the people we care about, enjoying ourselves, letting our hair down, socialising, catching up on news.  They’re the reasons why seeing our nearest and dearest is important to us.  They’re the kind of get togethers that we are certain don’t lend themselves to Zoom or Teams virtual gatherings.

We know we’ll have a good time and by and large, feel like the experience was worth it.

Conversely we might question if we’ll get the leads, connections, relationships, insights from a professional get together.  We’ll see virtual attendance as a good risk hedge against the value, or lack of, we might get from going along.

And there are certainly cases where the argument for virtual attendance based on likely return on investment is a strong one.

Elsewhere, as humans who value physical interaction in our personal lives, we might naturally ask ourselves what in person get togethers for work need to promise us in order to expect the positive value exchange our social events give us.

If we apply the principles from our social lives - enjoyment, strong relationships, interesting ‘news’, positive experiences, VALUE - as the basis upon which we build our professional get togethers we’ve a greater chance that people will make the risk based decision to attend.

What are we trying to achieve by getting together and importantly what is the value I will provide to my attendees?  How do i give some certainty to that being delivered based on understanding their own objectives, needs and ambitions?  How do I make sure they enjoy the experience, benefit from the relationships they form or strengthen, and come away with information they are grateful to be in possession of?

It is no longer enough to work on a sense of obligation, duty or fomo.  Nor is it compelling enough to just focus on the aesthetics of the experience.  We need to speak to each individual’s sense of what is positive value exchange, and provide a professional experience every bit as a compelling as a simple night socialising with friends.

People's attitudes have changed irreversibly and so each individual is evaluating the return on investment every time they step out of the door.  Is making this trip worth it?

We have to make our in-person, professional get togethers irrefutably compelling.