Besides companies and businesses who have remote workers, many people this year moved to online jobs or started working from home to maintain social distancing. With some not being able to meet their colleagues face-to-face for many months, it is crucial to create opportunities to stay connected with the team and maintain a positive relationship with them.

While you can maintain a constant connection to your team using Skype and Zoom, building personal relationships with them can be quite difficult to do remotely.

With the holidays fast approaching, here are some great ideas that you can try out to build some camaraderie with your remote team:

Have a Virtual Party

Even if you are not in the same location, you can always use video conferencing platforms like Zoom or Google Hangouts to hold a virtual Christmas party. You can invite everyone to join the video conference and just talk about everything and anything outside work. You can even tell them to prepare the food that they like and dress-up for a fun-themed online party.

Some party themes can be:

• White Christmas (everyone shall dress in white)
• Frozen (everyone should be dressed as a character from the movie Frozen)
• Santa’s Helpers (everyone could dress as elves, fairies, or reindeers while the boss can dress as Santa)

Start a Gift Exchange or Online Secret Santa

Online shopping has become a big deal this pandemic. With this in mind, it is very easy now to hold an online Secret Santa with your colleagues. This will give remote workers a chance to get to know each other and also enjoy the holidays.

Use apps like Elfster to sort out your Secret Santa’s names and wishlists. However, if your employees don’t want to join because of stress or lack of budget, don’t force them to do it. Otherwise, it could ruin the Christmas mood.

Begin a Holiday Channel

For remote teams, it can be difficult to remember that each one of our members has their own lives outside of work. Holidays are great opportunities to spend time with loved ones and people that you care about.

If you are the boss and you would like to show that you care about your employees this holiday season, you can celebrate it with them by simply creating a holiday channel where your employees can share their plans for the holidays and other related stories that would match the theme. You will be surprised by how much support this channel will have from your co-workers.

Hold Online Contests

There are a lot of online plug-ins and websites offering just about everything that you can do in this holiday season and one of these includes online contest sites. Why not use these contests to spice up your online holiday party? However, if that’s not your thing, you can always devise something like “The Best Home Office Decor” or “Best Holiday Jingle”. The choices for party games and contests are endless.

Share the Holiday Spirit with some Music

It is great to celebrate the holidays with music and you can brighten things up by sharing a playlist of your favourite hits with your colleagues. They can also edit the playlist to add their favourites songs and share it with everyone.

Conclusion

Although 2020 has been a very crazy year for most of us, there is no reason for us to not be thankful during this holiday season. This is the perfect time to show gratitude to our employees and colleagues for their hard work and to re-energize them for the upcoming year. A good and genuine office bonding, even if done online, will surely be appreciated and in return, employees will be more ready to do their best for the coming days ahead.

Doing last minute holiday planning? Don’t forget to check out these tips:
How to Behave at Your Office Christmas Party?
10 Best Christmas Gifts for Your Colleagues
How to Plan an Amazing Office Christmas Party?
Guest Post: The Christmas Gift Guide

Can’t get enough of MiddleMe? You can find me sharing my thoughts here as well: 
Instagram @kallymiddleme
Twitter  (MiddleMe_net)
FaceBook (MiddleMe.net)
LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/kallytay

Best things in life are meant to be shared, start spreading MiddleMe around, after all, sharing is caring.