The Real Cost Of Workplace Drinking Culture

When a British Airways flight was cancelled because crew members had been too drunk on a stopover the night before, it made headlines. One stewardess reportedly threw up in the bar. A steward apparently collapsed and had to be carried to his room. Four crew members were suspended, and the entire flight crew were stood down, leading to the cancellation of the service. British Airways said it expects "the highest standards" of its crew and is investigating.

It's a story that makes for compelling reading, but for anyone working in HR, or running a business that depends on people showing up fit for work, it's not really a story about one wild night out. It's a story about workplace culture, and about what happens when a culture around drinking goes unexamined for too long.

I was asked to give a reaction for HR Magazine, and the response to that comment piece on LinkedIn has told me this struck a nerve. So I want to go further here: why incidents like this keep happening, what duty of care actually looks like in practice, and what HR teams can do, not to police people's private lives, but to protect their people and their business.

Why This Keeps Happening

In a huge number of workplaces, alcohol is still treated as a shortcut to connection. It’s seen as way of blowing off steam after a hard shift, breaking the ice with new colleagues, or bonding a team that's away from home together. On the surface, that looks harmless. Convivial, even.

But alcohol is not a neutral social lubricant. It's a harmful and addictive substance, and the way we've normalised it in professional settings means we rarely stop to question what we're actually asking of people when we build "having a few drinks" into the culture of a job.

Crew members away from home, on a lay-over, with colleagues they need to get along with, are in a particularly pressured version of this dynamic. There's no partner or family to go home to and dilute the evening. There's a group identity to maintain. And if the unspoken norm is that everyone goes to the bar and everyone drinks, then the person who doesn't feels the friction of standing out, not fitting in.

I hear this constantly in coaching sessions with clients who work in industries where socialising and drinking are fused together: sales, hospitality, aviation, professional services. They describe the same thing in different words: the fear of being the odd one out. The sense that saying no to a drink is somehow saying no to the team.

That pressure doesn't excuse what happened in this case. But it does explain it. And it points squarely at culture, not just individual choices, as the thing worth examining.

Tolerance, Dependency And Why "Just Have One" Isn't Simple Advice

One of the things that gets lost in stories like this is how differently alcohol affects different people, and how that has little or nothing to do with willpower or professionalism.

Some people have a naturally low tolerance and will be visibly affected after a couple of drinks, while colleagues with them seem completely unaffected. Others have, often without realising it, built up a dependency over months or years of "normal" social drinking, and once they start, stopping is genuinely difficult. It isn't a matter of choosing to have "just one".

This is why blanket, shame-based messaging around alcohol rarely works. Telling people to "know their limits" assumes limits are a fixed, knowable thing, when for a lot of people they're moving, unpredictable, or tied up with much bigger patterns the person themselves may not have named yet.

Good HR practice has to hold two things at once: clear expectations of professional conduct, and genuine understanding that some employees may be dealing with something more complex than a lapse in judgement on one night out.

Duty Of Care Isn't Just A Policy Document

Employers have a duty of care towards their people, and in the context of alcohol, that duty of care cuts in two directions.

The first is protecting employees from a culture that normalises or even quietly encourages excessive drinking. If team socials are always centred around alcohol, if leaders are known to be enthusiastic drinkers and it's treated as part of "letting your hair down", if there's no comfortable way to opt out, then the organisation has built pressure into its culture without ever writing a policy that says so.

The second is protecting employees who may already be struggling. Someone who is dependent on alcohol doesn't stop being dependent the moment they clock in. If a workplace's only response to an alcohol-related incident is discipline, it misses the chance to actually help the person. And if that help is not available, the organisation risks losing a skilled, experienced employee altogether, and may also be risking serious reputational damage if something goes wrong as a result of an employee’s drinking.

Good HR teams take this seriously long before an incident happens. That means:

• Educating staff on the risks of alcohol, both the short-term risks (impaired judgement, safety, reputational damage) and the long-term risks (dependency, chronic health conditions, the slow creep of "normal" drinking into something harder to control).
• Building policies that protect against incidents, not as a box-ticking exercise, but ones that are actually communicated, understood, and applied consistently, including for roles where downtime away from home is part of the job.
• Making support genuinely accessible and confidential. Anyone worried about their own drinking should be able to get help without it automatically becoming a formal HR matter. If the only route to support is through a disciplinary process, most people will simply never take it.

Mental Health First Aiders have a vital role here, as a first, informal point of contact that doesn't carry the weight of a formal process. But they need proper training on alcohol specifically, not just general mental health awareness, because the signs of alcohol dependency can be easy to miss or easy to explain away, both by the person experiencing them and the people around them.

What Professional Standards Actually Look Like In Practice

There's a temptation, after a story like this, to respond with stricter rules: zero tolerance, blanket bans on drinking during work trips, harsher disciplinary consequences. I understand the instinct, but on its own, it doesn't fix the underlying culture, it just pushes the same pressures further underground.

Professional standards are better built through clarity and consistency than through fear. That means:

Clear, specific expectations, not vague appeals to "using good judgement". If there are hard lines, for example around fitness for duty within a certain number of hours of a shift, they need to be spelled out, communicated well before a trip, and applied the same way for everyone, regardless of seniority.

Leadership that models the standard. If senior staff are visibly the ones drinking heaviest on team trips, no policy document will override what people actually observe is being rewarded and tolerated.

A culture where opting out isn't a big deal. The single most protective thing an organisation can do is make it completely unremarkable for someone to have a soft drink, or none at all, on a night out with colleagues. That takes the pressure off both the person who doesn't want to drink and the person who's trying not to.

Proactive, not just reactive, conversations about alcohol. Most workplaces only talk about alcohol after something has gone wrong. Building it into wellbeing programmes, inductions, and leadership training, before there's an incident, changes the tone entirely. It stops being about catching people out, and starts being about supporting people to make choices that work for them and for the business.

Business Continuity: The Cost Beyond The Headline

The HR Magazine piece touched on this, but it deserves more space, because it's where the commercial case for taking this seriously really lands.

A cancelled flight isn't just a bad news story. It's disrupted passengers, compensation costs, reputational damage, and a crew roster thrown into disarray at short notice. Multiply an incident like this across an organisation with hundreds of overnight stays a month, and the operational exposure is significant.

This is where HR and operations need to be working from the same page, not treating alcohol-related risk as purely a conduct issue to be dealt with after the fact. A few practical steps:

• Build resilience into scheduling, particularly for roles where overnight stays or team travel are routine. That might mean standby cover, or simply not scheduling so tightly that one person's absence cascades into a cancelled service.
• Have a fast, well-understood escalation process. When something does go wrong, managers on the ground need to know exactly who to call and what the process is, rather than improvising under pressure at 11pm in a hotel bar.
• Review the data, not just the incidents. If sickness, near-misses or disciplinary cases are clustering around specific routes, teams or types of trip, that's a pattern worth investigating, not a coincidence to be managed case by case.
• Treat this as a genuine risk category, alongside fatigue, mental health and safety, rather than a one-off HR headache. Organisations that build alcohol awareness into their risk frameworks are far better placed to prevent the next incident, rather than just respond to it.

Where This Leaves Us

Stories like the BA one will keep happening as long as workplace cultures quietly encourage drinking and then act shocked when it goes wrong. The answer isn't shame, and it isn't zero-tolerance policies dressed up as a solution. It's building workplaces where people can be honest about their relationship with alcohol, where support is genuinely accessible, and where not drinking is never the thing that makes someone stand out.

That's better for the people involved. And, as this story shows very clearly, it's better for business continuity too.

Tabbin Almond is the author of Bottling Up Trouble: How Alcohol Is Harming Your Business and What to Do About It. She works with organisations to build healthier relationships with alcohol at work, through leadership consulting, staff education and confidential coaching support.