Those who consider the fun of the Christmas season to be over all too quickly — a brief flourish before the perma-grump of January — should be reassured by the news that the future of work is, in fact, play. According to fastcompany.com, such is the “demand for art graduates” as a way of helping businesses to innovate that 40 per cent of McKinsey’s graduates have MBAs these days — down from 61 per cent 12 years ago. “Playfulness is an essential prerequisite for invention” in a globalised world, the website enthuses.

Philips, the electronics manufacturer, is particularly playful, employing, of all people, a fashion designer to consult on its new “Simplicity Advisory Board”. “What does a designer know about technology,” BusinessWeek (Dec 11) asks. “Not much, but that’s the point. To drive change, Philips reckoned that it needed a fresh perspective from creative types.”

Other firms were much more sombre. A study of almost 5,000 British employers on hrlook.com suggests that 89 per cent of bosses plan to ban Christmas parties this year and that 86 per cent have received complaints from employees following an incident.

In the light of a survey by Followus, a mobile phone tracking company, this isn’t so surprising. More than a quarter of respondents have said something to a colleague at a Christmas party that they later regretted. It also reveals that the fourth most frequently lost item at seasonal festivities — after phones, purses and wallets — is underwear.

PR executives are considering giving up on Christmas altogether. More than three quarters of those quizzed by PR Week (Dec 1) say that back-to-back entertaining affects their work and 53 per cent say that it damages their home lives. That is to be expected when a quarter admit to drinking a bottle of wine at each function.

According to CareerJournal.com, e-mail is also a medium open to too much fun. As well as “thinking twice — no three times” before “replying to all”, we should all avoid emoticons. “You are not a teenager,” the website intones.

The epitome of zero fun, however, is extreme workers, who Harvard Business Review (Dec) profile in a piece entitled “The Dangerous Allure of the 70-hour Week”. “We had to rearrange my grandmother’s funeral so he wouldn’t miss a meeting,” one wife says of her husband.

WHAT ELSE HAPPENED

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