As Christmas approaches, so does the prospect of festive work parties. For the extroverts among us, this is one of the perks of the job: a chance to watch colleagues behaving badly at the company’s expense – and an opportunity to climb the professional ladder, as long as you manage to keep a handle on your own behaviour.
But for introverts the annual bash is a source of dread. That’s about a third of us, according to estimates – and I’m among them. As an introvert, get-togethers and parties drain a lot of my mental energy.
The worry of who to talk to and the strain of maintaining conversation feels like harder work than I’ve done all year. In most cases I’ll need a day to recharge the so-called “social battery”.
“Parties are a disaster for introverts,” says Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at Manchester Business School, “because [as an introvert] you have to stimulate yourself to interact. The extroverts do it naturally, the introverts have to work hard to do it.”
There is of course the option of deciding not to attend. And there are more people planning to take this option this year than you might think. Only 24 per cent of workers plan on attending their workplace’s 2022 party, according to a survey by corporate gift provider Virgin Incentives. But would skipping it be career suicide?
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Last year our company’s Christmas party was delayed until May due to Covid complications, and for new employees it served as an opportunity to communicate with people they had only ever seen through a screen.
According to Corinne Mills, managing director of Personal Career Management, this, along with continued remote working for many, is one of the reasons why work parties this year are “even more important now than they used to be. This is one of the few times where you might actually get everybody together in the same place and it’s an opportunity to see your boss’s boss, and to have offline conversations than you might ordinarily do in a meeting.”
Tempting as it is to stay away, missing the party could mean you miss opportunities to get noticed by the people who matter, she says.
“There’s a problem that you could be invisible. That people don’t know you. So when that opportunity for promotion comes up, or somebody needs to work on something else, they don’t even think of you. You’re not in their mind because they’ve never met you,” she tells i.
Cooper says that following the disconnection that came with the Covid pandemic, there are purely social reasons to swallow your fears and turn up this year. It might actually be fun. “I think this year will be different in the sense that I think there’s going to be much less, I’m here because I’m obligated to be here and more, I’m here because you know what, I want to enjoy myself,” he says.
“This has been a shitty two years. The cost of living crisis, and we had the pandemic, we have all of that stuff. And I think just be yourself and then just enjoy it.”
He suggests that if you are an introvert you should try to avoid navigating the party solo and join forces with a friend or a close colleague who you like and embed yourself in conversation through them.
Many people misunderstand the term introvert, believing introverts to be totally socially avoidant. But while some introverts may be socially anxious or inhibited, many are quite sociable – they just prefer spending time in smaller groups, with people who are close to them.
Personally, I love socialising among people I am comfortable with, but getting to that stage takes longer it might for some people.
Contrary to what most people believe, most introverts actually like people. The same close attunement to people’s feeling that makes them feel awkward in crowds, and better at one-to-one interactions, often comes with a helping of empathy and compassion for their fellow humans.
But where extroverts draw their energy from mixing with lots of people and even – God forbid – meeting lots of new ones, introverts need to recharge by spending time alone.
That’s why socialising can exhaust them, says Dr Tara Quinn-Cirillo a chartered psychologist and fellow of the British Psychological Society. “Many introverts may like the idea of meeting with others and enjoying a social event,” she says. “It’s just that they may find that it requires a considerable amount of effort to attend and engage with others which can lead to overwhelm and emotional fatigue more easily than others.”
Most people have a mix of traits that belong to introverts and extroverts, and they are labelled as ambiverts. They “may like and enjoy socialising and large events while also being comfortable with solitary time and even value this quality time to engage in valued solitary activities,” says Dr Quinn-Cirillo.
Ambiverts make up 68 per cent of the population according to Barry Smith, director of the Laboratories of Human Psychophysiology at the University of Maryland.
In other words, anyone can find socialising difficult at times. So, there’s nothing else for it: I’ll brace myself and tune in to the extrovert part of my persona and roll up to round off the year with my colleagues. How bad can it be?
