What Should You Do?: When Holiday Decorations Turn Ugly

Last week, this series about what companies should do in thorny situations focused on a supermarket forklift operator who was arrested for allegedly violating local pornography laws outside of work. Click here to find out how the company handled the situation.

[dropshadowbox align=”none” effect=”lifted-both” width=”600px” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]For years, a company decorated entryways in its headquarters with holiday trimmings. While the adornments were Christmas-related, they were nonetheless fairly secular (like a Christmas tree)—which led some employees to complain that the decorations were too secular. Christmas was being stripped of Christ, they grumbled. Others protested that such Christmas décor ignored other faiths. What should the company do?[/dropshadowbox]

Check back next week to discover how the organization addressed this problem. In the meantime, please offer your opinions below.

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Update: What the company did.

For many years, Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze, and other eatery chains, celebrated the holidays with Christmas—or Christmas-like—decorations. After employees complained some years back, the company decided to survey all 1,200 workers in its headquarters about which religions and holidays people wanted to celebrate with decorations during the holiday season. The organization felt that rather than try to honor all faiths with something as nondescript as a tree and some garland, it would instead seek to be more inclusive by commemorating multiple religions.

As a result, employees took delight in taking part to create non-secular decorations. And just like that, the complaints came to an end. In total, Darden had twelve “celebrations” between November and February that year, from Indian to Jewish to Chinese to Vietnamese and beyond.

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