Virtual Christmas Party Activities for Remote Teams
Due to COVID-19 you most likely will not host a big festive face-to-face Christmas party at your company. Now that everyone knows how to Zoom anyway, host a virtual one! Here're some ideas on how to host a great videocall X-Mas party for your team.
Teambuilding (not only for Christmas)
Use a google slide/miro board or another live whiteboard tool for those activities and make sure everyone sees the same slide/board.
Guess Who
Ask people to take a picture of something others wouldn’t expect to see around them and paste it in the slides. Then the others need to assign the pictures to the people.
Guess the Artist
Everyone paints a picture and uploads a photo of that to a google drive. One presents the pictures randomly, and the other ones need to guess the artist.
Gratitude Circle
Randomly paste your names and then share an appreciation with the person next to you.
Christmas Songs
Open a board where everyone posts a youtube link to her/his most awful Christmas song and play them.
The later the evening, the more you can shift that to a dance party, as Zapier does.
(Christmas) Games
- Pick a puzzle from https://jigsawpuzzles.io/ or https://www.rebuses.org/ and do it together in the team.
- You can also play board games online, find classic ones at https://tabletopia.com/ or play Monopoly together online.
- Play pantomime
- Scavenger hunt (there are also providers for that: https://drclue.com/)
Draw a Personal Map
Capture what you know about your colleagues in personal maps: https://management30.com/practice/personal-maps/
Two Truths and a Lie
Name three statements: two true ones and one lie. The others guess which one is not true—record points for right answers. Take turns.
More serious? Name two correct aspirations, business whishes, dreams. And one that's not.
Secret tip: Keyboard Racing
It's not only fun, but it also brings your team up to more speedy typing ;-)
https://keyboard-racing.com/
Watch a Christmas Movie together
There’s a chrome extension for Netflix that allows to stream a Netflix movie simultaneously and provide a chat and navigation controls. Alternative: Watch2Gether.
Things needing Preparation in Advance
Virtual Cocktail Making Class
The Corona crisis brought up a lot of providers for virtual classes like cooking, art crafting or cocktail making. Some provider will send you a package with all ingredients, so you are ready to join the live Christmas class.
Google for “online live cocktail class”.
Virtual Gift Exchange
Prepare pre-paid shipping labels with the addresses of all team members. Randomly assign them to others, so everyone gets a randomly assigned colleague (or use a gift exchange generator).
The task for everyone: find a gift, post and send it, so it arrives before the virtual party. Then unpack it one after the other during the video call and celebrate.
Christmas Cookies
Let every team member bake Christmas cookies and send them with your pre-paid labels to others. Then unpack at the party, and everyone needs to guess the baker.
Send Christmas Gifts
- Say thanks and send a Kudo-card
- (Realtime) Food delivery: order together online and take your zoom call on the phone to the door to greet each delivering pizza guy with the team
- Gift a gym membership. To fight that remote-work bellies.
- Vouchers to get people out: coffee show, grocery store, movies, massage, beauty shop. Advance it by having everyone to document what she is using the voucher for and post images.
- Subscription for meditation and mindfulness apps (my recommendation: tenpercenthappier from Dan Harris, Waking Up from Sam Harris or Headspace from Andy Puddicombe)
- House cleaning services
- Coworking place membership
- Outdoor experiences (like a boat trip, guided hiking, choose anything from Jochen Schweizer or MyDays)
Fully Hosted Christmas Parties
Too busy? There are plenty of providers for fully hosted parties, like teambuilding.com or evolve-events.com.
Or you choose a provider like withlocals, they offer a combination of a local guide experience in a community building virtual environment.
How will your virtual Christmas Party look like? Let me know in the comments.
