Re-mixing the Holidays: How to celebrate the holidays as a remote team

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

Why go Remote?

REMOTE WORK. TELECOMMUTING. VIRTUAL TEAMS. DIGITAL NOMAD. DISTRIBUTED TEAMS.

However you want to call it, here at Gr8er Good Games, we’re big fans of that kind of work lifestyle and here’s our take on why we love it, and also some tips on how to avoid the pitfalls that might befall your remote team and why you might not want to go remote.

Flexibility

In a survey by Unify, 43% of people would rather have more flexibility in their work than get a raise in their salary and nearly ⅓ of respondents said that they would change employers if offered flexible work elsewhere. Remote work is the ultimate in flexibility. Each worker has control of their time. If you need to pick up your child from school, or throw that load of laundry in, go for it. There might be some set meetings, but for the most part, your manager isn’t going to be breathing down your neck and checking that you are putting in the hours. We think that this leads to better teams since managers must trust their staff members, and individual employees feel like they have more autonomy and control over their time.

Pitfall 1: Too little work

“But I can’t trust that my employees will be spending the time to do their work!” We realize that remote work isn’t for everyone, nor is it for every team. But we postulate that if you have employees who you can’t trust to work from home, they are probably not getting much done at work in the office right now. You have to hire the right people for remote work, those who thrive in less micromanagement and who default to action and over-communicating. And once you hire them, you have to onboard and train them into the systems and processes that you have in place to make sure that your remote team works (more on this later). They also need to have a great environment to work: whether it be a coworking space, their favorite cafe or a home office that’s well equipped. We’ve heard of companies that pay for their employee’s home office furniture so that they can have a nice desk and office chair to work from home.

Pitfall 2: Too much work

Reports on remote work have shown that remote workers sometimes suffer from not being able to separate life from work, and therefore, overworking and burning out. This comes down to the culture that you’ve established. If everyone answers emails at 4 am, and it’s ok to text team members on Saturday morning for minor issues, then yes, your remote team will have trouble putting down their electronic devices and separating life from work. But if you onboard your team and make sure to establish a culture of having breaks for life, then you can help prevent this. This might include having slack channels to talk about what people did on the weekends or after work, it might include not getting back to that coworker until a reasonable time. Every time you respond to an email, text, or ping, you are training that person that you expect them (and yourself) to be working at that hour or that day.

Diversity

There’s plenty of research that supports the fact that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams. This includes having a diversity of experiences, backgrounds, gender, and ethnicity. There’s a couple of ways that having a distributed workforce leads to more diversity in hiring:

1: Diversity in location: By it’s very nature, distributed work means that employees are not located in the same area. This leads to a diversity the environment in which people live and a diversity of experiences. Having diverse perspectives from urban, suburban, and rural locations means that your employees can view your company’s product from these perspectives and understand how people in various locations might utilize it.

2: Diversity in culture: Similar to above, having a wide diversity of cultural experiences and viewpoints can improve your team.

3: Diversity in lifestyle: Flexible and distributed work is vital for hiring a diverse workforce. With the ability to work from home, employees can shape their work around their lives, rather than trying to bend their lives around their work schedules. This will help single parents (or any parents for that matter) be able to attend their children’s events. It will allow caretakers to go to doctors appointments. It will help support those with invisible diseases, who might not be able to work a full 8 hours straight, but need to break the day up into several 2 hour chunks.

We’re not saying that it’s easy to have a diverse team: yes, it might be much easier for a homogeneous team to get along and understand each other, since they have a shared experience and understanding of the world. There will be more tension, as people struggle to understand each other and build consensus. There might be some alienation as everyone comes in with different group norms and even vocabulary for speaking about these group norms. We’re saying that this diversity is worth it. Diverse teams are more innovative, more methodical, and better at making decisions.

Saves time

The average American worker lives about 26 minutes away from their workplace. That might not seem so much, but if you multiply that by 5 days a week and 50 work-weeks every year, then the average worker spends 216 hours every year commuting, that’s over 9 days! Say you have a company with 40 employees, that amounts to 8,666 hours (or 361 days) that your employees could be spending doing other things. Whether it be to spend that time on more work or to start a hobby or to just relax at home watching TV, don’t you think that your employees would be happier with control over that time?

Saves money

Remote workers mean that companies don’t have to lease out large office spaces, with cubicles or desks. You don’t need to cater lunch, or to have coffee stocked up to the rafters. You don’t need to pay for a parking lot, security guard, and custodial personnel. This doesn’t mean that you can’t gather together if you want or need to. There’s plenty of spaces that you can rent by the hour, day or week on Peerspace, Breather, or Airbnb. And it doesn’t mean that everyone has to work from their home. Perhaps you have a co-working space membership or a small office that those who choose to can come to.

Remote work saves money for both the employer and the employee

Saves money: Remote work not only saves money for the companies, but it also saves money for the remote staff member. They save money on gas, car maintenance, and parking. According to a report by Flexjobs, this can amount to more than $4,000 saved annually for the employee.

Hire from anywhere in the world

Better hires: Think about it, how much better do you think your hires will be if you can pick and choose from literally everyone in the world, as opposed to the maybe a million people in the greater metropolitan area of your offices. Your recruitment field just widened by a couple of thousand times. You might also be able to lower your salary costs, or at the least, be able to hire higher caliber employees who might live far away at the same salary level of someone much less experienced or committed nearby.

So why not go remote?

Although we extol the benefits of going remote, there are reasons, some legit and some not, to not have a remote-based company. Here are some of them:

If you have a site-specific business: Obviously, if you’re running retail or manufacturing, you can’t really have a remote business. Most of the remote businesses that we’ve been talking to are software or information-based businesses. Although, even in a site-specific business, you might have teams that can be remote, such as marketing and finance.

If you can’t trust your staff members: We think that if you can’t trust your team to do the work that they need to do without you looming over their desks, then they probably shouldn't be on your team, or they might need a lot of re-training.

If you have staff members who wouldn’t thrive in a remote environment: Not everyone likes the idea of flexibility and autonomy. Some people thrive with more structure and feedback. Some people can’t work when they’re stuck by themselves and need others to bounce ideas with. Some people think remote work is isolating and want to have coworkers to have lunch with. And that’s ok, everyone needs a different environment to work. The thing to note is that if you have team members who might not thrive in a remote environment, don’t try to force it.

If you don’t want to put in the work to establish a remote work culture: We’re not going to sugar-coat it, remote work does take time and effort. You can’t just send out a memo on Friday saying “We’re an all remote company now! You don’t have to come in on Monday” and expect it to all work out. You need to fundamentally change the way that you work, the way that you interact with each other, the way that you communicate. You need to establish systems and processes that help remote workers stay connected. You need to check in with your staff members and make sure that everyone is on the same page. You need to think about team-building, team-bonding, and your remote company culture. You need to work at being remote.

Our founder, Shuai, loves geeking out about how to set up a remote work culture that works with all your staff members. Please feel free to reach out to her for advice/resources on remote work: hello at patchworkadventures.com.