The way we socialise in the office has fundamentally changed. The growing number of non-alcoholic events in London show that many people clearly crave a different way of spending time with their colleagues.
That’s why LABS took the decision to become the first coworking office to hold an alcohol-free Christmas Party, Festive AF, and it completely sold out.
This may surprise regular Standard readers and those who see coworking as famous for beer pong and bean bags. Of course, successful coworking offices have always been much more mindful and sophisticated than fruity beer and pleasant furniture, but we’ve stepped outside of our industry’s comfort zone by focusing on sober events. So far it has been a roaring success with our Christmas and Dry January events all being incredibly well-attended.
Around 15 million Brits claimed to have taken part in this year’s Dry January, and one in nine people say they want to cut down on the booze in 2025. I’m sure we won’t all keep to our New Years’ resolutions, but we can clearly see a growing number of people are less interested in drinking regularly, so we must ensure that colleagues have time to make proper friendships away from their desks.
This matters when a fifth of young worker often or always feel lonely at work, rising to 32 percent for senior managers. Studies have consistently shown that loneliness at work is both bad for our mental health and makes us more likely to leave our company.
If we have strong bonds with our colleagues, we’re much more likely to want to commute to the office. The Microsoft Work Trend Index found that 74% of employees would work in person if they knew their work friends were also going to be there. Regular, well attended, work socials are the perfect way for people to form meaningful friendships.
We can encourage this by offering experiences that you would never have thought of doing at work and tapping into our natural human curiosity to try something new.
We recently had a packed-out room for an evening event on gut health and sleep optimisation benefits of mushrooms with nootropics. Last year we had a live drawing event where the central muse was a wolf, yes, an actual wolf, organised by Wild Life Drawing whose mission is to aid animal welfare and conservation and promote mindfulness.
We are not going completely teetotal - we still put on some events involving alcohol. It’s just our alcohol-free events are proving more popular. While the increase in the percentage of people that are teetotal has been higher among the Gen-Z cohort, our sober events are equally well-attended by older office workers too. This is because whether you like to drink or not, well curated sober events can appeal to everyone.
So whilst a few drinks at the local will always be a staple of many company cultures, alcohol-based activities no longer have a virtual monopoly on people’s interests. In 2025, work events must reflect that.
