An important part of management is creating a company culture, and celebrations are a big part of that. How you choose to acknowledge or not acknowledge major holidays sends a message to your employees. When you take the time to celebrate with them, you show that you see them as more than just employees; you see them as people. If you’re ready to grow your company culture, here are our ideas for creating holiday traditions that last.
Why Are Workplace Holidays Important for Your Business?
Workplace holidays may seem like a waste of productive time, but the fact is that celebrating as a company is a valuable investment towards greater productivity. Holidays can become busy times for many companies, which means employees are working harder than ever. Instead of pushing the clock further, take time to reap these rewards in the times you need it most:
- Employee Enrichment: Work can become monotonous when genuine human connection is left out of the equation. Traditions are a great way to bring your employees together to really enrich their work experience with real company bonding.
- Company Loyalty: A workplace with friends is a workplace you’ll give you’re all for. Bonding with coworkers helps increase employee retention and make your business an important part of your employees’ lives.
- Teamwork: As employees spend more time together in a relaxed environment, they bond and understand each other better. This improves teamwork and builds empathy between coworkers.
- A Healthier Work Environment: All work and no play is the perfect storm for creating burnout. When employees are allowed to relax and connect with your business in a meaningful way, it reduces stress in the workplace.
- Show Appreciation: Your employees work hard to make your business thrive, so it’s important that they know you appreciate what they do.
How to Be Inclusive With Your Traditions
If you want to be inclusive to your employees, the first and most important step is to get to know them. What holidays do they celebrate? What activities are they interested in? Do they have any allergies? While you’re creating holiday traditions, make sure to seek input from all of your employees to learn what will be best for them.
Once you know more about your employees, you can customize your traditions to fit. For example, if you have a large number of Hindus working with you, maybe they’d like a Diwali celebration! For winter holidays, you can encourage employees to celebrate their respective holidays by putting their own traditional twists to your activities. Remember, your employees are not obligated to celebrate for the company, the company is celebrating for them.
Ideas for Office and Small Business Traditions
Whether you’re working in a small flower shop or a large corporate office building, these ideas are made to help any business celebrate in style. Learn how to start holiday traditions for your business with these popular celebration ideas.
- Decorating Contests: Allow employees to personalize their desk space, and allow teams to compete for the ultimate themed decorations. You can also give your employees time to go all out with paper mâché, painted cardboard, and more.
- Hosting Trick-Or-Treating: Whether it’s for just employees or your customers, you can bring a lot of joy into the workplace by letting children come and trick-or-treat in your business.
- Visits From Santa: Another favorite for families, hosting a visit from Santa or other holiday celebrities brings joy to your employees and their families. Don’t have a lot of employees with kids? Have the employees run the Santa visit themselves and invite customers to bring their families!
- White Elephant: Give employees a five dollar allowance to buy gifts they can swap in a white elephant party. This encourages conversation along with the joy of giving and receiving gifts.
- Potluck: Let your employees share their culinary skills with a potluck! This allows the secret chefs to flex their skills, and employees who prefer to stay out of the kitchen can bring store-bought goods like dinner rolls, salads, drinks, and other staples.
- Fireworks: Any holiday can be made better with a brilliant fireworks display. Coordinate with your city to host a fireworks show in a local park, or get tickets to an ongoing show for your employees and their guests.
- Holiday Parties: A good old-fashioned party is a great way to bring employees together. Host a party with food, drinks, games, movies, or whatever your employees want most in a company get-together.
- Charity Events: Nothing brings people together like helping others. Make a tradition of hosting a charity project every year, whether that’s a park cleanup, working in a soup kitchen, hosting a fundraiser, or whatever your community needs.
Ideas For Remote Work Traditions
Who said you have to meet in person to celebrate? With more companies joining the work from home movement, it’s more important than ever to find ways for your employees to bond through their virtual work environment. Here are a few ideas to help create your own holiday traditions for remote workers.
- Costume Contests: Employees can go all-out with their costumes when they’re doing it from the comfort of home! Host a spooky contest for Halloween, ugly sweater contests for Christmas, and silly hats for New Year.
- Recipe Sharing: You don’t have to gather in-person to connect with food. Employees can rock their cooking skills or their quick meal hacks for the holidays by swapping recipes or creating a company recipe book.
- Zoom Gathering With Filters: Have a virtual party where you can rock out with filters! Unlike your typical company meeting, this party will let employees flex their full personality with virtual games, breakoff chat rooms, and the silliest holiday filters they can find.
- Holiday Cards: Along with sending your holiday greeting cards to employees and their families, you can have employees join the fun by designing their own! Host a contest with categories like silliest card, best holiday theme, best message, best art, and more.
- Gift Packages: Do something nice for your employees by putting together holiday gift sets they’ll look forward to every year. With company swag like branded mugs, chocolate treats, cozy beanies, and more, gift packages can quickly become the highlight of the year. Need ideas? Check out our blog post featuring Best Holiday Gift Ideas.
- Holiday Pet Share: The best part of work from home life is the pets, so let your employees share! Create a holiday photo book featuring the pets, plants, and even favored stuffed desk buddies of your employees.
Traditions For Any Business
No matter what industry you’re in, or whether you work from home or in person, there are some universal ways to celebrate major holidays that any employee is sure to love.
- Holiday Bonus: Employees love nothing more than a little more money than expected in their banks during the holidays, so reward your hard-working teams with a holiday bonus to help fund their holiday cheer.
- Branded Gifts: A holiday pen, a company sweater, or a personalized ornament is a simple yet powerful way to show that you care. Show your employees you’re thinking of them during major holidays with a token of your appreciation branded with your company logo.
- Gift Cards: Send your employees a gift card to their favorite restaurant, to a local theater of their choice, or even to their favorite place to shop. This allows employees to pick a gift you know they’ll love and enjoy.
- Time Off: While celebrating together is great, we all know what employees want more than anything is time to celebrate with their friends and family. Give the gift of time to your employees with some holiday PTO that they can use for celebrating their way, with their loved ones.
From Halloween to Hannukah to Christmas to the Fourth of July, there are so many opportunities for businesses to celebrate with their employees. Creating holiday traditions is an important step toward growing your company culture, and your employees will appreciate the effort. Remember, whatever you choose, take your employees’ input on how and what you celebrate. When employees have a voice in creating company traditions, those traditions become richer and more meaningful to everyone.
