Some of us could have died that night or at least been seriously injured! But the HR folks at my then employer either didn't know or didn't care about our evening with the senior management of the company. I worked with an organization where the corporate culture encouraged that significant amounts of alcohol be consumed during lengthy dinners. Often these dinners were during industry trade shows but there always seemed to be a reason to tie-one-on! During the night in question, we met for drinks in a bar and followed up with dinner, during which I consumed more alcohol than I would normally drink in a whole year. The scary part of this is that we all drove back to our hotels. We were lucky, very lucky, that all of us reached our destinations without incident. We nursed pounding headaches the following day but that was the extent of our injuries. It didn't take me long to realize that this job was potentially hazardous to my health and wellbeing and I chose to move on. I don't blame the company because nobody forced me to drink or eat anything but things certainly could have turned very badly. Just consider if one of us had hit and killed a pedestrian or crashed and killed ourselves.

The law varies throughout the world but I suspect that the underlying principal to consider is to limit liability. If you ask your legal counsel if people should be allowed to drink alcohol while on company business, most would say not. Clearly, if nobody drinks then the risk of any problem caused by drinking excessively will be eliminated. So that's the safest thing to do: eliminate all drinking while on company time. But is that practical? Consuming alcohol is such an integral part of most forms of hospitality that there likely would be an outcry of discontent if such consumption were limited or eliminated.

There are various ways to attempt to limit alcohol consumption. I worked once for a fairly large manufacturing company that liked to have all-hands events. One of the most popular was a beer and bratwurst lunch. The way that the company attempted to limit alcohol consumption was to issue tickets that could be redeemed for beer. Each person was limited to just two. Did this work? Not really. What happened was that the folks who didn't drink beer gave their tickets to the people who did. From a legal perspective, the company had at least attempted to limit alcohol consumption to two beers. This was clearly a better situation than an open-bar but still more risky than the no alcohol alternative.

How does HR handle this where you work?