The annual holiday party is a long-standing tradition for many companies to bring employees together and celebrate the accomplishments of the year. This year, employees have faced many challenges, particularly with the shift to remote work, and companies are looking for ways to keep their holiday festivities alive virtually. Many companies hosted virtual halloween celebrations for their teams and are looking at ways to keep the festivities going.
How are you planning on putting together a virtual holiday party that is fun and engaging? In this post, we discuss tips for incorporating team building activities to make your virtual team holiday party one to remember – helping you boost remote employee’s morale and build your company culture while everyone is working from home.
Boosting Remote Employee Morale
This year, your employees have been isolated at home, and many of them miss the daily interaction with co-workers. A virtual team holiday party is one way to celebrate and reward remote employees for their hard work during this challenging year. Ultimately a virtual holiday party can boost morale and help extend company culture to remote teams. The overall goal should focus on hosting a virtual team holiday party that is fun and engaging.
Before the Party
Just like holiday parties in the past, you want to be organized and festive from the outset. Here are a few pre-party planning tips:
- Decide where you’ll host the virtual party, most companies choose the platform they use to host meetings.
- Create a festive invitation. You can either mail these or send them out by email. Whichever way you choose, sending an official invitation instead of a calendar request goes a long way in creating a sense of occasion.
- Let your team know what’s going to happen at the party so they can get excited about it. Choose a few activities so you can keep everyone engaged. The rest of this post provides you with ideas for these team-building activities.
- Decide on a dress code. It might be casual, festive holiday sweaters, or you might decide it’s dressy.
Now let’s discuss 5 ideas for team-building activities to have at your virtual team party.
Holiday Team-Building Activities for Your Virtual Holiday Party
Virtual Photo Booth Week
Celebrate the holiday season with a photo booth week leading up to your virtual holiday party. This is a great holiday team-building activity to get everyone excited for your party.
Set 15 minutes on the calendar each day for your team to log in to your video platform of choice wearing festive attire. Take a group screenshot each day of the week and be sure to share these photos each day on your team chat. At the end of the week, you have a photo album that you can share during the virtual holiday party.
Gingerbread Activity
Consider purchasing pre-packaged gingerbread houses and sending those out to your team before the virtual holiday party. Then, during the party, everyone can build a house together as a holiday team building activity. When they are finished, everyone should submit a photo of their house and the team can vote on a winner to win a prize, such as meal credits!
Online Holiday Bingo
Bingo is always a fun game and a festive game can make for a great holiday team-building activity to be played at your virtual holiday party. For the Bingo boards, you can search online for holiday-themed boards. Be sure and email out the “boards” in advance so your team has them and announce a prize for the winner to get the whole team eager to participate!
Virtual Happy Hour
Another holiday team-building activity is a virtual happy hour! You can set aside 15 minutes for teams to break out in smaller breakout rooms to have a virtual happy hour. For most organizations, having the whole team in one meeting makes it harder for individual team members to engage with one another. Smaller groups enable every team member to contribute to the conversation. You can mix it up so employees can connect with co-workers they might not regularly collaborate with.
Plan the Food
A virtual holiday party wouldn’t be complete without a meal. Food is a huge part of any holiday party and virtual celebrations should be no different. You can offer your remote team a meal credit so that they can order their favorite holiday food, straight to their home. As a nice team-building activity, they can then share a little bit about the dish they chose.
Meals are a great way to reward your team and make the party really feel like a celebration. A meal for your virtual holiday party brings everyone together and shows your team you care and makes them feel appreciated.
Make Your Virtual Holiday Party Fun With a Grubhub Corporate Account
Once you’ve finalized the activities and food plan for your virtual holiday party, a Grubhub Corporate Account can help you make your party extra fun. We make it easy for you to extend meal credits to your employees to enjoy during your party.
Businesses across the country are leveraging a Grubhub Corporate Account as an efficient, cost-effective way to help celebrate the holiday season. Holiday parties are about fun, companionship, celebration, and always great food.
Interested in learning more about using a Grubhub Corporate Account to provide meals for your virtual holiday party and team building activities?
