The main thing is that everyone is letting loose and enjoying themselves. Send out a survey before the party and have your team list a few of their favorite things. The Star Wars nerd can get a Darth Vader ornament, the musician in HR can walk away with a guitar ornament, Rita in accounting can get a cat ornament since she has like 20 of them… you get the idea. Plus, consider this — ornaments can make you feel less bogged down and more nostalgic.
Christmas decorations evoke those strong feelings of childhood. Mini stockings are an easy gift to hand out to your employees at the office holiday party. Do you have a small team? Go all out with a nice gift card to a restaurant or for Amazon. Are you working in a huge office? Keep it simple with a few pieces of candy and maybe a couple small trinkets.
Legend has it that a poor man with three daughters had their socks hung by the fire to allow them to dry. Nicholas came and filled these stockings with gold and then disappeared. If St. Nick could be so generous, you should do the same with your employees! Go back to what the holidays are all about by finding a way to volunteer as a company instead of having a traditional holiday party at the office. Homeless shelters, Feed My Starving Children, Habitat for Humanity, and many other non-profits are always looking for helping hands, especially around Christmas time.
Not to mention, helping others improves health by strengthening the body, improving the mood, and reducing stress. Decorating gingerbread is a must around the holidays. Want to make it more fun and take the competition to the next level?
Give out a prize to the top gingerbread creation! There is a crazy amount of benefits to offering your employees a flexible schedule all the time, but this is especially true around the holidays. People have places to go, people to see, and gift shopping on their mind. They will love a little wiggle room, especially on the day of the office holiday party.
If you only have it in the budget to do one thing to celebrate, make it be this. Save those fruitcakes and gift cards as nothing is better than extra time to spend with the family!
Nobody wants to celebrate the holidays with juice in Styrofoam cups and pizza that tastes like cardboard. Hold a special celebration at a nearby brewery, banquet hall, or arcade! Take it a step further by letting your employees bring guests. It will make the whole affair a little more comfortable for everyone.
You can do a ton to increase that number by going out of the office, providing awesome food, and letting your employees bring a date. Now give them space to be themselves and save your judgments. This should be a time to have fun and shed the shell you wear to work every day. Alyssa is a promo expert with over four years of experience in the industry. More articles by Alyssa Mertes.
Have every guest bring a gift and then, one by one, let people open gifts from the pile while they steal from each other you can read the official Dirty Santa rules here or come up with your own.
Let guests know if the gifts have a spending limit and whether they should be silly, re-gifts, or legit presents someone would actually like. Before the party, wrap up a bunch of oddly-shaped objects and have guests try to stack them as high as they can without toppling the tower over, and whoever gets the most presents stacked wins.
Or, play it like Jenga where one person stacks at a time, and whoever knocks everything down loses. Give your guests five minutes to come up with as many holiday candle names as they can. Fill up a jar with candy or the tree with ornaments and have guests guess how many of the objects there are. Set up a holiday scavenger hunt for your party guests to play. Have them find 10 candy canes, six red ornaments, three Rudolph noses, and so on. Whoever finds all of the items first is the winner.
This is another classic party game but with a holiday twist. Fill a bowl up with different holiday-themed characters, movie names, songs, etc. Adults deserve to have a little fun during the holidays just as much as kids do, and these games are sure to add a little extra joy to your festivities.
So, turn on your favorite holiday tunes, pour up a drink of whatever makes you feel jolly, and invite your guests to join in your reindeer games. This can be played a few different ways: Each guest is told who they are when they enter, and they have to act like their character all night until someone correctly guesses who they are. Pro tip: If you really feel ambitious, compile a team carol songbook, CD, or YouTube channel afterwards.
Virtual holiday parties and adult beverages go hand and hand. You can share the holiday spirit by having drinks with your remote team members. A Virtual Holiday Party Happy Hour is an online meeting where teammates gather together on a Zoom call to enjoy a drink together. A fun twist on one of the most classic virtual holiday party ideas is to pick a Christmas cocktail like the ones on this list of drink ideas from Good Housekeeping, gather the ingredients, and make it as a team during the party.
Check out our list of virtual happy hour ideas for more inspiration. My favorite part of working in an actual office during Christmas is decking the halls or trimming a tree with my colleagues. While remote employees can cover desks in wrapping paper or trim the chair with garland, decorating alone is less fun.
Remote teams live and work in many cities, and Christmas may look different in each. While some team members build snowmen, others hang Christmas lights on palm trees. Plus, the whole team gets to travel for the holidays without any airport hassles or traffic! Remote teams are diverse teams. Many companies operate in multiple countries. Chances are, team members celebrate different holidays.
The logistics of office celebrations mean you cannot throw a party for every holiday, but online holiday parties offer more flexibility. For example, you can make virtual Hanukkah a main part of your event.
Celebrating a variety of holidays, as an alternative or in addition to Christmas, allows all team members to celebrate special occasions in the workplace and acknowledges and respects individuals. Plus, celebrating different holidays virtually means more parties to enjoy! Trying to cram your whole team into a photo booth at an office party will not end well.
Thanks to programs like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, remote teams group shots are much easier to coordinate. During your virtual holiday party, you can gather your team onto the screen for a video call, then use screenshots or a similar image capture feature to snap a photograph.
For maximum holiday photo booth fun, props are a must. You can either send your teammates printable photo booth props like these ones from Shutterfly , or ask your coworkers to bring an assortment of festive accessories to the call. If posing for a picture seems too tame for your team, then you can always up the excitement factor. Try turning the virtual holiday photo booth into a game by challenging your team to concoct the zaniest expressions, group poses and recreations of holiday movies.
Once you get your shot, you can turn the photo into a virtual card and send all your teammates a memento of your virtual holiday party. Virtual holiday party games are fun games, competitions and challenges you can play at a Zoom holiday party. These games tend be optimized for video calls, and generally have a holiday theme like Christmas carols or elves. These games are similar to video call games and may include Zoom games and Webex games.
From hiding a pickle on the Christmas tree to stuffing gifts in shoes to running away from the Krampus, some truly strange holiday traditions exist.
Chances are that your teammates might practice some unique personal holiday customs, too. Tradition or not? The game is a festive twist on Two Truths and a Lie that challenges team members to guess whether a colleague has revealed a fact or fiction. To play, each team member will share a quirky holiday tradition. The other players must guess if the tradition is real or fake. Online scavenger hunts are virtual holiday games worthy of any occasion. Teams scour the house and web for seasonal clues.
Winter holidays are especially fun times to play, since there are so many options for unique hints both online and offline. We made a holiday scavenger hunt that you can play with your remote team over Zoom, but you can feel free to make your own challenge from scratch! You can split the group into teams and turn the hunt into a race, or you can award points based on the originality and absurdity of the answers.
Here are more holiday themed scavenger hunt templates. Any online event can benefit from virtual team trivia, but trivia makes online holiday parties especially fun. To play, prepare your questions, split the group into teams, and quiz your crew on holiday knowledge. We created a list of starter questions to kickoff your online holiday trivia game. Download the PDF here: virtual holiday trivia questions. To play:. You can get creative in your questions by tapping into topics like the ghost of Christmas ads past, holidays around the world, or celebrations gone wrong.
Virtual holiday team trivia infuses your virtual party with a fun competitive edge and lets your teammates combine collective knowledge in a bid to earn yuletide bragging rights. Growing up, The Polar Express was my favorite Christmas story.
Chubby Elf is a similar game to Chubby Bunny. The rules require the storyteller to recite the plot to a classic Christmas story with a mouth full of marshmallows. Teammates will try to guess the story as quickly as possible.
The team or individual with the most points at the end of the game wins a holiday-themed prize, like a snow-globe, or maybe the rest of the marshmallows. There is a heated debate as to whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Since the events of the first two movies take place on Christmas Eve, technically you could consider the films a holiday franchise. The holiday special game turns other unconventional flicks into holiday movies by imagining additions.
The most entertaining or outlandish take wins the game. Example : Pirates of the Caribbean is actually a Christmas film. Since the setting is the tropics, you cannot tell it is winter. Of course, you can play this game during a variety of online holiday parties, not just Christmas. Name that tune is a game where players race to identify a specific melody, and is one of our favorite virtual holiday game ideas. You can give the classic game a modern and festive twist by playing during your virtual holiday party.
To play, ask teammates to either hum the tune or mute the microphone and sing the song. The other players must listen carefully or read lips to pinpoint the holiday carol. Around the holidays, Gingerbread Wars is one of our most popular events. Though assembling a team gingerbread house remotely may prove to be a struggle, your distributed team can still indulge in the holiday spirit with a cookie decorating contest. To host a cookie decorating contest during your online holiday party, you will need to mail supplies to your teammates about a week ahead of time.
You can find gingerbread person or house kits for cheap online, or you can always assemble your own kits with frosting packs and homemade cookies. Local bakeries sometimes sell cookie decorating kits around the holidays, too. Once your online party begins, you and the team can decorate the goodies together and compare results. Or, you can allow teammates to decorate cookies independently and upload results to a shared photo album or social media group. Then, vote via poll function and announce winners during your video call.
There are certain words we only hear around the holidays, yet we tend to hear these words in rapid succession come December. You can use these seasonal buzzwords in Zoom holiday games.
To play, ask every holiday party attendee to select a term such as the examples below. Participants must take a drink upon hearing the word. If your guests do not want to drink, then you can assign a different command for the word.
Holiday buzzwords is an especially fun game to play while listening to carols or watching holiday films. Silent night charades puts a seasonal spin on the classic party game. This holiday challenge is one of several free virtual holiday party games that can spice up your remote gathering.
Traditional charades rules apply; turn-takers cannot talk or type! Other team members must guess the holiday scenario. Silent Night Charades challenges players to name that tune without actually hearing the tune. To play, you will message the name of a carol to the turn-taker, and that player will act out the names or stories of popular holiday songs so that teammates can guess the title. This online holiday game helps your team learn to read body language, which is an especially useful skill when your team communicates frequently via video calls.
Naughty children and adults alike love snooping for presents and trying to guess the gift based on the size and shape of the package. You can harness this innate curiosity and enjoy one of our favorite fun virtual holiday party activities. Before your party, ask each teammate to wrap and photograph an object.
Each player should take several pictures, with a little bit of wrapping paper removed each time. Other guests will try to guess the item before all the paper is gone.
Teammates can ask questions and give hints to try to solve the mystery. Your team can also use video clips to include elements like sound that provide additional clues. Pictionary is a game where one player draws a picture of a word and the other players try to guess the word before the first player finishes the drawing.
Most Likely To… is a game of seasonal superlatives that asks remote coworkers to consider which teammate is most likely to perform in specific ways during the holidays. You can keep track of all the round winners and name the most-mentioned employee as the king or queen of Christmas.
You do not need to ask Santa for the perfect virtual holiday party or online Christmas party. Instead, you can plan your own event with the ideas on this list. Virtual company holiday parties offer a great opportunity for employees to reflect on the past year and get excited for the year to come.
Plan an online holiday party over Zoom, and make sure your remote employees do not get left out of the fun! Next, check out our list of ideas for virtual New Years Eve and this list of virtual team building activities.
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