For decades, after-work drinking has been a longstanding workplace custom. But times have changed, as have employees and the way they socialize — and if getting a little tipsy around your boss ever seemed like risky business, just wait till you hear about what’s replaced the traditional happy hour…
The newest corporate bonding activities involve needles, sledgehammers, and colleagues getting physical.
While that makes these work-sanctioned activities sound way less appropriate than they are, it’s all still true.
Mixing business with pleasure, rage, and everything else
With fewer people imbibing these days, many companies are swapping traditional happy hours for a range of unique team-building activities that meet employees where they’re at.
For stressed-out workers looking to blow off steam (a lot of us — shout out low worker morale and “hardcore” work cultures), that might mean smashing shit to bits, per Business Insider.
- At The Ragery, an NYC rage room, where corporate bookings jumped more than 2x between January 2025 and 2026, workers can collaboratively destroy rooms set up to look like offices.
- Corporate events now dominate business at Bury the Hatchet, a national ax-throwing chain, where teams might pin a photo of loathed work software to a target and chuck an ax at it repeatedly to decompress before reconvening for a meeting.
Other, less-violent physical activities are also helping wellness-focused coworkers connect and unwind in more mindful ways.
- Fitness studios like Barry’s and F45 have reported upticks in corporate bookings, while bathhouses have become breeding grounds for cold-plunge productivity-talk, steamy investor meetings, and half-naked networking. (Hard pass.)
Another trend that’s crept its way into the workplace?
- Looksmaxxing, which is taking the form of corporate botox parties, particularly in image-driven industries like PR and real estate — because nothing brings a team together like a bunch of smooth foreheads.
Nudity, lethal weapons, and medical procedures?
The modern happy hour is taking place in settings somehow less professional than a pub, and might even sound a bit like HR-complaint fodder.
But for office workers whose days are often sedentary and computer-bound — especially younger experience-driven, wellness-oriented ones — these offbeat activities provide healthier and more engaging ways to connect and destress offline compared to downing beers in a bar.
(Though, understandably, some of them might be less inclusive.)
Just hope that not getting botox isn’t what makes you a bad culture fit when applying to your next job.
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