Back in the day my company was transferring their development staff to Chicago due to entering a new market and the staff was terribly excited. So excited in fact that productivity suffered. Yet not every one of the developers were going to be transferred. Not everyone wanted to leave London nor was everyone invited. For those that were not invited, they could see the career opportunities would be rather limited in the future and so they all started to find new jobs.
The bad news was this was around Christmas time and some of the departments were having small Christmas parties at the “pub” during lunch. Coming back to work after being in a bar was not the most productive, but the real problem was the different developers were having leaving parties for all their coworkers once they found a job – also celebrated at the pub. The party would start about lunch time in a nearby pub. The culture in London is a bit more laid back about have a pint or two over the lunch break thus having a leaving party at lunchtime is also accepted. It only took a few weeks of the entire development department going to lunch and either not coming back or they coming back after having “a few too many”.
Thus the company’s official line from that point on was that leaving parties must be scheduled after 4pm1 It probably would have been more productive to transfer everyone and fire the rest over a month period than the fun yet not so productive six month period that it took to transfer all of us.
1 Darn those American kill-joys in management