As the year ends, you must find a way to thank your hardworking team. Whether 2021 was a year of prosperity or challenges, everybody tried their best. The holiday season provides you with the opportunity to create fun memories with your staff, both in-house and offshore.
If you’re currently working with your team remotely, a virtual Christmas party is a great way for your employees to come together and build rapport. This activity helps maintain strong connections between coworkers despite the physical distance. It’s also a great way to wrap up the year and start a new one merrily.
You can easily hold these online celebrations via video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Webex, Skype, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. But, what exactly should you do to keep your team entertained? Check out our virtual Christmas party ideas below!
9 Fun Activities for Your Virtual Office Christmas Party
To make sure your staff has an enjoyable and memorable virtual office Christmas party, pick activities that are well-thought-out and engaging. Here are some games and ideas you can try out:
- Virtual Secret Santa
A Christmas tradition, Secret Santa or Monito Monita is a gift-exchange activity you can also do online. Days before the party, your team picks a name at random and gives a gift to their chosen person. You can draw names online, as well, using a gift exchange generator. Participants can also list their wishlist to guide their secret Santa on what to give them.
A few days before the party, the participants should send out their gifts to the respective recipients and wait until the event to open them. If that’s not possible due to your team working in different countries, they can send each other virtual gifts like online subscriptions or gift cards.
- Virtual Scavenger Hunt
This activity is a virtual holiday version of the game Bring Me. You have a list of items your employees must hunt around their house and show their coworkers. The first person to bring back something gets the point, and if they share a story about that item, they get another point.
Here are some scavenger hunt prompts to get you started:
- Favorite gift of all time
- Christmas stuffed animal
- Christmas stocking
- Pet dressed up in Christmas clothes
- Send Holiday Gift Boxes
Maintain your offshore team’s job satisfaction by sending them a box full of holiday goodies. If you only have a handful of staff, you can personalize their presents or assemble the swag bag yourself. Alternatively, a pre-made Christmas gift basket will do just fine.
Here are a few suggestions on what you can include in the package:
- Noche Buena grocery items (spaghetti ingredients, queso de bola, Christmas ham)
- Hot cocoa mix and mug
- Stationery and office supplies
- Snacks
- Holiday-themed Costume Party
The holiday spirit may be difficult to show when you only have a tiny Zoom square to fill up with decor. Ask your team to dress up in seasonal garb to boost the party’s holiday spirit! You can even turn the activity into a contest by awarding the best employee in costume.
Your employees can dress up with something as simple as Santa hats or as elaborate as the Grinch and even change their Zoom background to a more festive one.
- Holiday-themed Trivia Night
A holiday trivia showdown can easily captivate your Christmas party attendants. Divide your team into small groups. Then, ask each group’s representatives holiday trivia questions. It can be about Christmas history, movies, traditions, or songs. You can section the questions based on difficulty. The group with the most accumulated points wins!
- Name That Christmas Tune
The Christmas season is a holiday that comes with a special soundtrack. You can create upbeat holiday playlists for everyone to enjoy or turn them into a game. Play a random Christmas tune during the party and have your employees guess the song’s title. You can play this game using Spotify or YouTube.
- Holiday Movie Pictionary
In Pictionary, one player draws a picture from the word given. Then, their groupmates have to guess the word. To add some yuletide spirit to the game, you can list Christmas movies or anything holiday-related as the category. You can play this game over online drawing game platforms like Drawize or Skribbl.
- Christmas Cookie Decorating Party
Creating and decorating gingerbread houses may be a task too complicated to hold over a virtual office Christmas party. Don’t fret; you can always go for something easier and smaller, like decorating Christmas cookies. For this activity, send out basic cookie decorating kits to your team beforehand so that everybody can participate.
- Holiday Bingo
Virtual bingo allows employees to interact because they have to find the person who fits the descriptions. Distribute virtual bingo cards to your team and provide some time for them to collaborate and play the game.
Some sample holiday bingo items can be:
- Someone wearing a Santa hat
- Someone wearing a Christmas sweater
- Someone who has spent Christmas in another country
- Someone who has performed in a nativity play
Spice Up Your Virtual Christmas Party
Hosting a virtual office holiday party is a great way to reconnect employees and reward them for all the hard work they’ve rendered for the year. Party activities can be as low-key or all-out as you want them to be, as long as your team is having a fun time.
You don’t have to limit this during the holidays, too; there are a lot of employee engagements you can hold all year round. You can host other seasonal parties, like Halloween or summer, to help maintain strong company relationships, or even during any normal day in a month to boost camaraderie.
Organizing virtual parties, let alone managing your remote staff, isn’t always easy. If you need assistance in managing remote and offshore teams, Manila Recruitment is here for you with our top-notch offshore staff solutions. Get in touch with us today to learn more!
