Holiday Party Ideas for Distributed Teams

Image credit: https://www.pexels.com/@olyakobruseva

At the beginning of autumn, I reached out to my network on LinkedIn to see what everyone had planned for end-of-year celebrations with their distributed teams. Though my post received several likes, it had zero responses. Crickets.

A lot of people have no idea how to celebrate the holiday season with their teams when people don’t work together in the same office—and they feel especially lost this year, when keeping physical distance due to COVID-19 has become the best practice for all.

After you’ve worked in a distributed structure for a while—we switched a few years back at FrogDog—finding shared-team experiences that don’t require physical proximity becomes a lot easier, and the events themselves feel a lot more natural.

But all change takes a while to settle into a new norm, and most of the world hasn’t gotten there yet.

In hopes to help this holiday season, I’ll build on my previous post about teambuilding activities for distributed workforces by writing up a few super-special ideas that would work for end-of-year team festivities. (And I’ll keep adding more, so watch this space!)

• While you can find live and recorded cooking classes galore on-line, a few companies have developed programs wherein they send the raw ingredients to each participant’s home and then give a live cooking class via videoconference with the group. (This saves assigning everyone the chore of gathering the items on a shopping list sent in advance.) I’ve heard good things about the Dumpling Dudez program, as one option.

• We’ve sent out gift boxes of craft materials (as simple as Crayons and a packet of construction paper) to every member of the FrogDog team and then held a video meeting during which we all created a holiday decoration for our home offices. We shared what we created on the video meeting and then kept our personal decorations on our office walls—visible in the video background of other meetings—for the rest of the season. Add treats or lunch delivered to each team member’s home and you have a real celebration.

• Consider a holiday-themed game party with your team. Have lunch or treats delivered to each person’s work location, start with an ice-breaker game of “two truths and a lie,” and then use the videoconference platform’s whiteboard to play holiday-themed Pictionary or games of hangman. Or create a card-game tournament (with prizes!) for a day, afternoon, or even a series of sessions suited to different schedules. Trickster Cards has several card games from which to choose and fun interactive features for players.

• The good ol’ traditional happy hour works, too. Send each member of your team a nice bottle of champagne or wine and a box of fine chocolates or other delicacies and have them toast each other and share holiday well wishes during the video conference.

• Host a team Teleparty. Teleparty, formerly Netflix Party, now works on different browsers and with different streaming platforms, including Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+. With a Teleparty, everyone can watch a show together and chat about it in real time. Consider having dinner delivered to each person’s location and choosing a funny and family-friendly holiday program or film for the group. If you don’t know whether your full team has the right streaming-service subscriptions for the film you want to watch, a holiday gift of an annual subscription would make anyone happy (especially during COVID-19, with everyone stuck inside more often than usual).

• A holiday-themed book club—pick a light or even inspiring read, if you can—could give everyone something to gather around and discuss. Ensure everyone has enough time to read a book during the busy season, of course (and don’t forget that you need to buy them a copy and have it delivered well in advance). Sending everyone a treat or lunch for the discussion would make it feel more festive.

• Creative people and cultural institutions across the globe have created digital programming to maintain revenue streams during the COVID-19 crisis—something that will likely continue even after the crisis ends. Many of these guides will give their tours or talks to private groups, too. Further, if you know of a topic your team would like to have covered and don’t see a program already in place to cover it, I promise you that an expert (e.g., writer, professor, archivist, curator) would happily respond to a request for a presentation and Q&A via videoconference for your team. (Who loves their subject and doesn’t love to talk about it?) The options here truly run the gamut, and you can start with some of the offerings outlined by AirBNB Online Experiences, The Tour Guy, London Walks, Virtual Trips, and Walks. (I’ve tried tours from all of the companies on this list and loved them.)

Don't forget you can combine and mix and match these ideas, too.

What will work best for your team will depend on your team—after all, no one group of people comes together in the same way as any other group of people, and team dynamics matter. However, this long list should have something to suit nearly every team.

And whatever you decide to do for the holidays with your distributed workforce, I’d love to hear about it!

P.S.—If you’ve realized that the distributed workforce setup may turn into a more permanent structure than you’d expected at the outset of COVID-19, or if you’ve decided to shift toward a work-from-wherever structure for other reasons, I’ve created a repository page of posts about my experience moving my company, FrogDog, from a traditional in-office structure to a distributed workforce, including what I learned during the tradition and the best practices we’ve developed over time. You can find my distributed-workforce repository here.