“You just wait, Laura. Just wait until Monday,” snaps Chris Yurwitz of Arlington Heights as Laura Horning of Syracuse, N.Y., soaks the back of his T-shirt in a water-balloon sneak-attack. When Horning is out of sight, Yurwitz smiles and says, “We’ve bonded.” He rejoins a volleyball game, wearing the wet T-shirt as a badge of honor.
As company picnics go, this one is age-specific. Missing are soccer moms and the sandbox set. Here, the 80-plus “kids” are 20-something summer interns, their mentors and the “new-hires” from the actuarial group of Hewitt Associates, an international management consulting firm based in Lincolnshire. Yurwitz is Horning’s mentor. The cappuccino generation far outnumbers its elders, a handful of longtime employees.
“I guess that makes us the `old-hires,’ ” says actuarial manager Monica Burmeister of Buffalo Grove, sitting at a picnic table with fellow old-hire manager Mark Schwehr of Wadsworth. Burmeister and Schwehr relax under the shaded pavilion at the Half Day Forest Preserve’s Pond Shelter A in Vernon Hills while the others work up a sweat playing volleyball and football.
“This is the second annual picnic, which the new-hires’ social committee planned for the interns and mentors. Next year the next group of new-hires will plan it,” Burmeister explains. “They assigned each work-group (Hewitt-speak for department) a food. My group got potato chips; that was easy.”
Each Hewitt work-group also hosts a summer outing for families, Schwehr adds. This picnic is limited to employees and their spouses or significant others, and it’s just one of many corporate functions in the picnic arena this year.
Summer is high time for company picnics, and suburban forest preserves are among the most popular destinations.
Although no one keeps tabs on numbers of company picnics (county permit issuers lump them with graduation parties, weddings, family reunions and other large get-togethers), Chicago area forest preserve officials speculate they are holding their own, if not increasing in number. This despite downsizing, corporate cost-cutting and our lawsuit-happy society.
The Lake County Forest Preserve issues 1,100 picnic permits a year from its administrative office at 2000 N. Milwaukee in Libertyville, beginning on its annual permit day (Oct. 18 in 1997). Superintendent of Rangers Roy Johnson reports, “People start lining up at 4 a.m. for the good spots. But rangers will sell permits on-site during the summer if a site isn’t taken.” Hewitt’s spot is one of the county’s 23 picnic groves with shelters in seven forest preserves.
Permits range in price from $35 for residents with groups of fewer than 70 people to $180 for non-residents with groups twice that size. Although the Hewitt picnic is potluck, picnickers who hire caterers or other vendors must obtain vendor permits for $30 to $120 each.
Although caterers and amenities (moonwalks, pony rides, dunk tanks) are standard for some company picnics now, Pam Paul, Chicago-based special-events planner and president of Eventive Inc., says many companies are going retro. The been-there-done-that, hamburgers-and-horseshoes wingding is hip again.
“In the ’80s, companies spent more, had more theme picnics and tried to one-up last year’s party,” Paul says. “Now they are more cost-conscious and focusing on the old-fashioned picnic with whole-family games. The employees are so busy, and their companies demand so much from them that the picnics are a chance to relax. They choose games like volleyball, softball, horseshoes, where employees can make them as competitive as they want.”
For the Hewitt group, new-hire Heidi Andorfer of Grayslake says the company gave her social committee $500 to create the picnic. They secured a permit from the Lake County Forest Preserve in April, then made six trips to the grocery in the last few days to buy hamburgers, hot dogs, condiments, paper goods, ice, pop, beer and wine. “I think we made it,” she says, referring to her budget. “But I haven’t added up all the receipts yet.”
Their greatest snafu, Andorfer says, was a missing-in-action bag of condiments. At the last minute, one of the social committee members had to run back to the store for ketchup and mustard.
The picnic is only part of the new-hires’ efforts to make the interns feel at home, Andorfer adds. Bunking for the summer at Lake Forest College, they are juniors and seniors from Drake University in Des Moines, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
“We also had a party for them at my house in May,” Andorfer says. “In August we’ll plan a trip to a comedy club or maybe Second City. We thought about taking them to Great America, but they’ve all been there already.”
The picnic is an antidote to the actuarial group’s busy season, when they crunch last year’s year-end numbers that their corporate clients submitted to them in March and April. “Hewitt treats us well, but we work hard,” Yurwitz says. “Plus, (the new-hires) are studying for our actuarial exams.”
The actuarial group is chummy, say these Hewitt associates (Hewitt-speak for employees), bound by the public’s inability to define an actuary. For the clueless, Horning’s T-shirt, from her University of Michigan actuary club, explains: “You know you’re an actuary if a pizza delivery isn’t late; it’s deferred.”
“We’re not actors, and we have nothing to do with mortuaries,” says Jody Jordahl of Buffalo Grove. “Yes, we’re numbers people, and we’re good in math. But we don’t just add up numbers all day. We meet with clients to analyze their employee-benefits programs and interpret laws. Our people-skills and problem-solving skills are important.”
Surveying the picnic, Andorfer says Hewitt’s keep-it-simple picnic plan is a smash. Still, she vows to add some suggestions to the office “picnic file” for next year’s social committee. She notes which foods to assign next time. A cake disguised as a hamburger is a winner. The vegetable platter is a loser.
“I’ll tell next year’s committee to label the bags `recyclable’ or `garbage’ because everyone’s mixing them up,” Andorfer says. “They should bring a third volleyball net and more tape to hold down the tablecloths. And they should buy more beer, less wine.” Otherwise, she says, the social committee’s projections are right on. Sure enough, these people are good in math.
5 GALLONS OF KETCHUP?
Exactly how much food does a group consume at a company picnic? Richard Plunkett of Chicago-based Plunkett Catering Inc., which serves 400 such crowds a year, knows off the top of his head.
These are Plunkett’s numbers for a 70-degree day, which he calls “perfect eating weather.” If it’s cold and rainy or more than 80 degrees, he says, people eat less. If the temperature tops 90 degrees, he ups the number of drinks to 5,500.
This is what he packs for 500 people:
– 1,000 hot dogs and buns.
– 1,000 hamburgers and buns.
– 750 ears of corn.
– 50 pounds of baked beans.
– 200 pounds of cole slaw.
– 500 pounds of potato salad.
– 15 gallons of pickles.
– 4 gallons of pickle relish.
– 5 gallons of ketchup.
– 3 gallons of mustard.
– 100 sliced tomatoes.
– 50 sliced cucumbers.
– 75 sliced onions.
– 15 watermelons.
– 1,000 ice cream bars.
– 3,500 drinks.
– 1,000 paper plates.
– 4,000 paper napkins.
– 1,000 premoistened napkins.
– 1,000 each of plastic forks, spoons and knives.
– 15 55-gallon garbage bags.
– 500 pounds of charcoal.
