Company events
Photos at a company party: the rules are different
Summer party, anniversary, Christmas dinner: what is charming at a wedding is delicate at work. Four points to settle beforehand.
At a wedding an album is a gift. At a company party it is a procedure. The difference is not the technology, it is the relationship between the people involved: wedding guests do not depend on each other, colleagues and managers do.
That does not make it hard, but it shifts four points you should settle beforehand.
1. Voluntary has to mean voluntary
"Let's get a picture of the team" is an instruction at a work event, not a request, and whoever would rather not rarely says so out loud. It helps to turn it around: say once, at the start, that photos are being taken and shared, and where to say something if you would rather not be in them. One sentence, cleared with HR beforehand, saves every conversation afterwards.
It also helps not to set photo tasks that push someone into the frame. Our leaderboard is off by default. At a company party that is not an accident, it is the right state.
2. Approval before publication
At private parties photo approval is decoration. At work it is the thing that carries the whole idea: new uploads only appear once somebody has released them. That is not censorship, it is a queue, and it avoids the one situation these albums fail on, the picture of a colleague at two in the morning doing the rounds on Monday.
In practice that needs somebody who looks twice during the evening. It is a job to hand out, not one that takes care of itself. Several people can share it: co-hosts have exactly your rights.
3. Whoever has the link gets in
At a wedding that is an advantage. At a company party it is a question. Two answers:
- An access code. The album additionally asks for a word that only exists in the room. A forwarded link alone is then not enough.
- Separate albums per site or department. Each with its own code and link. Sales does not automatically see production's pictures.
And the hardest limit is time anyway: when the runtime ends, the album is gone, not archived-but-reachable, deleted.
4. Purchasing and invoicing
Companies do not pay with an assistant's private card. That is why you get a proper invoice in the company's name, purchase on invoice by bank transfer is possible, and businesses in the EU with a valid VAT ID get a reverse-charge invoice.
What we cannot do
We cannot do your legal review. Whether your works council has a say, whether consent is required and what it has to look like depends on your company. Your data protection and HR people know that better than any guide on the internet. What we can supply is the tooling: approval, access codes, separate albums, deletion on request, a fixed end.
