Is Holiday Spirit Masking New Year Resignations?

It's December, which means your company is about to spend thousands on a holiday party while ignoring the fact that every one of your people have been wasting more than 3.8 hours per week to dysfunction since January.

Open bar. Ugly sweater contest. Maybe a gift exchange. A speech about "what a great year it's been" that everyone will politely applaud while mentally composing their LinkedIn job alerts.

Here's what SKOR data tells us that your holiday party budget won't: Team dynamics aren’t built in ballrooms. It's built in Tuesday afternoon meetings where people either feel safe speaking up or they don't.

The Party Illusion

Companies love throwing parties because parties feel like culture. They're visible. They're expensive. They generate Instagram content. Leadership can point to them as "proof" we care about our people.

But culture isn't soft. It's data.

And the data shows that teams with low Cohesion scores—meaning weak interpersonal bonds and trust—don't suddenly become high-performing because you rented out a brewery for the night. If anything, forced fun highlights the gaps. Nothing says "we don't actually know each other" like standing in awkward circles making small talk with people you've Zoomed with for 11 months.

What Actually Moves the Needle

SKOR measures what matters: Cohesion, Clarity, and Courage.

Cohesion isn't about whether people like each other enough to share appetizers. It's whether they trust each other enough to disagree productively, to admit mistakes, to ask for help without fearing judgment.

Clarity isn't a toast about "our mission." It's whether every person on your team could articulate what success looks like for their role this quarter and how it connects to what everyone else is doing.

Courage isn't a motivational speech. It's whether people feel psychologically safe enough to surface problems before they become disasters—whether they believe speaking up will be rewarded or punished.

Your holiday party budget? It addresses exactly zero of these.

The Transparency Gap No One Mentions

Here's the thing leadership doesn't want to admit: Holiday parties are often guilt spending.

We know engagement has been rough. We know the Q3 all-hands didn't land. We know people are burned out from the reorganization that nobody explained properly. So we throw a party, cross our fingers, and hope everyone forgets the year was messy.

SKOR data consistently shows that teams with high Clarity scores—where goals, roles, and expectations are actually transparent—don't need performance theater. They need real feedback, real alignment, and real investment in the structures that make work sustainable.

You can't Clarity-wash dysfunction with an open bar.

What December Should Actually Be About

Instead of pretending eggnog fixes everything, use December to measure what's real:

• Run a pulse check on Cohesion. Do your teams actually trust each other, or are they just polite strangers who share a Slack workspace?

• Audit your Clarity gaps. Can everyone on your team explain what "success" looks like for Q1? If not, that's your January crisis waiting to happen.

• Measure Courage. When was the last time someone on your team surfaced a problem before it became a fire drill? If you can't remember, you have a psychological safety issue, not a morale issue.

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SKOR's data reveals what engagement surveys hide, the difference between teams that function and teams that just... exist.

The Real Gift

Don't get me wrong—throw the party. People deserve to celebrate. But don't confuse celebration with transformation.

The real gift you can give your team in December isn't a gift card or a DJ. It's the gift of actually knowing where they stand. Of measuring what's real instead of what's comfortable. Of addressing dysfunction instead of decorating around it.

Because come January, the decorations come down. And if your team's foundation is built on ping pong tables and pizza parties instead of Cohesion, Clarity, and Courage, you're not building culture.

You're just hoping no one notices the cracks until Q2.

Want to know what your teams actually need heading into the new year? SKOR measures the 3 C's that drive real performance—not the feel-good metrics that look great in slide decks but tell you nothing about whether your teams can actually execute. 

See how your teams actually score.

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