Holiday Fun at the Workplace

Monday, November 28, 2022

Annalisa Mazza

Is your department looking for fun ways to get into the Holiday spirit? Here are some great ways to get your colleagues excited about the holiday season!

1.) Office Recipe Book: Ask colleagues to submit their favorite holiday food or drink recipes! Collectively put the recipes into a document or folder and share it out to the co-workers in an email! 

2.) Deck the Doors- Have your department deck their office doors or work areas out with holiday decorations! You can get student workers involved by having them vote on their favorites!

3.) Secret Colleague- Send out a request to your co-workers to see who would be interested in participating! Here are some of the basic rules:

• If you agree to be a part of the program you must participate in giving a gift, not just receiving a gift.
• Set a price limit for gifts.
• Have participants fill out a “favorites” form so their secret colleague has some ideas for gifts. Make sure to have a section on the form where they can put important notes about items they wish not to receive such as certain foods or drinks.
• Provide the group with a timeframe for them to purchase their gift.
• Designate a place for everyone to secretly drop off their gifts and then distribute the gifts to each person or you can leave it to each of the employees to find time to secretly drop off their gift to their selected co-worker.

You can even add to the fun by trying to have everyone guess who their secret colleague was after the program is over!

4.) Make A Holiday Wordle- Create a daily wordle for your colleagues to try and figure out! This can be just a fun activity for the office to participate in or you can make it a competition! If you wish to make it a competition you can have co-workers' email back their results from each wordle to earn points. You can set up the game by earning points based on completion or if you want to take it the next rank up you can give out extra points for things such as “first to complete and submit back in” or certain number of points based on how many attempts it took. To make your own wordle click here: https://mywordle.strivemath.com/ . Here are some words to get you started: Jolly, Holly, Berry, Gifts, Angel, Bells, Elves, Latke, Torah, Faith, Party, Unity, Umoja, Imani.

5.) Countdown to Break: Select a list of fun and simple activities for the last few weeks before break. Each day the admin will announce the daily countdown item; this can be anything from free coffee in a breakroom, a virtual holiday card that has a cute photo or a funny video, or whatever you think your department will enjoy! Since this time of year can be extra stressful, keep the activities simple, short, but fun!

6.) DIY Ornament Making- Using printable ornaments for free online, hand out paper ornaments to your colleagues for them to decorate. Choose a location in the office space for everyone to stick or hang their ornaments (breakroom door, office plant, welcome desk)!

I hope this inspired you to bring some holiday happiness to your workplace. If your department or office has some fun holiday traditions that you would like to share, make sure to email us at HealthierU@unl.edu so we can add to our list! Also, do not forget to share photos of the fun holiday celebrations that your department or office does with us by tagging us on social media at UNLHealthierU on Instagram, HealthierU UNL Employee Wellness on Facebook, or email us and we can share it on our pages for you!

References:

Robinson, A. " 44 Holiday Team Building Activites for Christmas Fun in 2022" Oct. 27, 2022. https://teambuilding.com/blog/holiday-team-building

Scavify. "20 AMAZINGLY Fun Holiday Team Building Activites for 2022". Dec. 03, 2022. https://www.scavify.com/blog/holiday-team-building-activities

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