As the holidays are drawing nearer, thoughts of gathering your community, your friends, and your colleagues come to mind. However, if you have a remote team, how do you host a holiday party for them without breaking the bank and flying everyone in? Here are a couple of ideas to infuse the holiday spirit of giving, gratitude, and joy into your remote team. We’ve transformed some of our holiday favorites into experiences that teams can have on video-chat from all corners of the world.
Host a virtual holiday party
Who says you have to be in the same building (or city, or even country) to have a holiday party together? Just pick a time and have a holiday party themed videochat. What you do is entirely up to you and your company culture. Here are some ideas that we’ve re-mixed to accomodate virtual teams to get you started:
Have an ugly Christmas sweater contest
Share stories about each other’s holiday traditions
Unwrap presents: these can be presents given by the team’s manager, a secret Santa present, or a white elephant present exchange (see below for more explanation on how to adapt these gift-giving traditions for a remote team)
Toast each other for a job well done
Watch a holiday movie together through screensharing
Hang out together in VR
Eat Christmas cookies and drink egg nog together
Talk about aspirations for the new year and gratitudes for the current year
Play a game together: Heads Up, Charades!, and Headbang are all fun games where one player starts the game and holds their phone up to their forehead while others try to get them to guess the secret word, phrase, song or celebrity. You can easily play these games while on videochat. We’ve also heard of teams playing board games (one player has the physical game in front of them and everyone else tells them how to move their pieces), playing multiplayer games together online, or adapting their favorite party game to be played on videochat (there’s no better way to get to know someone than a good round of cards against humanity or apples to apples)
Sing Christmas carols together
Have a virtual dance party
Have a fun theme with costumes
Take your company photo: have team members all dressed up in a theme, based on an idea, or posing in a specific way and take your company photo on videochat.
Introduce your coworkers to your family (both human and fur)
Have a Holiday Interpret-off: create a list of strange phrases for players to show their best interpretations of them. Perhaps you ask for submissions of taglines for fictional startups, or for motivational poster saying, or for 90’s boyband song lyrics. Then players must either construct something out of common household materials or act out a scene to convince everyone else that they have the best interpretation of each phrase.
Have a holiday scavenger hunt: create a list of holiday-related items and give players a specific amount of time to gather photos, selfies, and the items themselves. Share the loot with the group during a videochat holiday party
Share childhood holiday photos: bonus points for making this into a competitive guessing game as coworkers try to guess whose photo it is.
Gratitudes and props: We know that gratitudes and props should be given all year round, but why not take advantage of the fact that the year is wrapping up and give out your company’s 2019 Annual MVP award, your company’s 2019 Best New Hire award, your company’s 2019 Best Team Cheerleader, and your company’s 2019 Greatest Mentor/Manager awards? You can even make it feel fancy and important by requesting formal wear, having custom-engraved awards created, and speaking into a microphone with inspirational music in the background.
Have a company-inspired competition: This can range from a quiz-off about company history to a video-submission of the best interpretation of the company’s values to the best rendition of the company song. The competition should be judged live by impartial judges and awards can be either shipped to the winners or given digitally (gift card codes).
Giving back: The holiday season is a great reminder of what great privilege we have and how we should all try to give back. There are many volunteer activities that can be performed and then sent in. Pick one of them (whether it be to make a toiletries kit or knitting scarves for the homeless, making a get well card for children in hospitals, or sending letters to cancer patients), and send the supplies to each staff member, and then you can all do them together.
Our company, Patchwork Adventures, host remote team-building and team-bonding games that are part escape room, part murder mystery. All played on video-chat, it’s a great way to have a fun shared experience for remote teams for the holidays. Contact us at hello@patchworkadventures.com for more information and to schedule your holiday party with us.
Team holiday party on videochat: playing Patchwork Adventures
Special Cases
If you have some employees at HQ and some remote, and want to host a party or gathering with the team at HQ, there’s ways to incorporate the remote team members as well. One way to incorporate the remote workers in your holiday party is to have a videochat open for them to join and chat and mingle with the holiday party-goers
For introverted teams: instead of doing one big party, you might want to consider encouraging everyone to have a one-on-one holiday chat. Pay for some fancy coffee or hot chocolate, and pair everyone up for a nice quiet no-work-talk kinda videochat.
For teams who have to go out and DO something, perhaps pick an activity that’s available in all locations (maybe ice-skating, rock climbing, a nice dinner, an escape room or seeing a fun show) and send everyone a gift certificate to do that. Everyone must take at least 3 photos of them doing the activity and share it with the group during a videochat.
Gift-giving
Gift-giving is a huge part of the tradition of the holidays and you don’t have to give up this tradition just because your team members are living far away from each other. Here are a couple of ideas of how to do presents with your remote team:
Virtual Secret Santa:
Secret Santa is an age-old corporate holiday party tradition where everyone’s names are mixed up in a bag and each person picks a random name to be their Secret Santa. Your goal is to find a present for that person that they will love. A Virtual Secret Santa is just as fun and The Secret Santa assignment can be outsourced to something like Elfster. Then everyone just has to fill out the forms, buy their person a present, and ship it to them in time for your holiday party!
White Elephant:
White Elephant present exchanges are a bit of competition, a bit of gag-gifting, and a lot of fun. The problem with the white elephant exchange on a videochat is the fact that you can’t physically transfer the presents to the recipients (at least not until teleportation is invented). What you can do is have someone have a master board (maybe a corkboard or board with stickies) and use that to replicate the present stealing and transferring process. After the game is played, just send each gift-bringer the name and address of the person who ended up with their present. White elephants are always fun, sometimes silly and always ends up with some laughs along the way. Bonus points if you have a videochat after the new years where everyone has to show off their new presents and what they ended up doing with them.
Bonus gift-giving tip for managers:
There’s so many things you can get your direct reports as a thank you and happy holidays present. Here are some of our suggestions:
Cash is pretty much always appreciated.
If you feel cash is too impersonal, send them a gift card to something they would enjoy (restaurant, store, spa weekend, experience).
Invest in their personal development: some companies already do this, but if yours doesn't, what about giving your team members a budget of a couple hundred dollars that they can spend on personal development? Anything from taking an online (or offline) class to going to a conference to getting a coach/mentor. It’s a great gift that shows that you want to invest in their career growth.
A box of fancy chocolates or another indulgence that they would never buy themselves is always a great gift.
Custom engraved or screen-printed company swag is always fun and adds to the team camaraderie. We’ve seen picnic blankets, S’well water bottles, stickers, T-shirts, hoodies, backpacks, laptop camera covers, pop-sockets, etc, etc. You don’t have to go boring: pick a funny moment or a silly quote, or a stupid gif, or design a word cloud from your company’s random chat channel.
Send everyone an award medal or trophy with a card about why they are an invaluable and wonderful part of your team (with specific details and examples) or maybe present one of these awards per week to a member of your team during a meeting: research has shown that appreciation and recognition to be very important in employee engagement.
Now it’s your turn
These are just some of our ideas on how to take the traditional holiday spirit and infuse it into a remote team. We hope that we’ve inspired you to transform and re-imagine holiday traditions for your company.
Let us know about your remote team holiday traditions at hello at patchworkadventures.com