5 Holiday Team-Building Experiences Your Team Will Love

The holiday season can be busy, and it’s easy for team members to get overwhelmed with the heavy workload.

Team leaders need to make sure their team feels appreciated and supported.

The right holiday team-building experiences can provide a much-needed break to your team while improving their sense of belonging and connection.

Especially for remote or hybrid teams, it might seem challenging to find a holiday experience that works for everyone. In this article, we’ll share five options that are sure to be enjoyed by your entire team, whether they’re in the office or at home.

The Importance of Holiday Team-Building

With the stress of the holiday season, it’s easy to consider team-building a waste of time.

The reality is that the right team-building experience can improve your team’s productivity.

A recent study of 5,000 professionals found the following:

• 82% reported feeling lonely at work
• 49% report increased loneliness compared to pre-pandemic levels
• 40% attribute this loneliness to fewer interactions with coworkers

Thoughtful and inclusive virtual experiences can help your team reconnect during the holiday season and facilitate meaningful conversations between team members.

Intentional team-building can produce the following benefits:

• Increased productivity
• Higher levels of creativity
• Less burnout
• Increased job satisfaction

These events are an excellent way to boost morale since they give your team the opportunity to step away from work and enjoy meaningful experiences with coworkers.

What Is a Teamraderie Experience?

While team-building activities are often fun, they can feel pointless or like a waste of time—especially when your team is busy.

Nonetheless, the evidence shows that team-building is important.

To maximize the value of your team-building endeavors, it’s important to make them purposeful. Teamraderie’s experiences are the perfect solution.

Our experiences are:

• Live: These synchronous experiences will bring your team together from any location.
• Virtual: The virtual format makes them perfect for hybrid and remote teams—although every experience is intentionally designed to work well for in-person teams as well.
• Expert-led: Every experience is led by an expert in their field, anywhere from food and beverage experts to Olympic athletes.
• Interactive: Teamraderie’s experiences will keep your team engaged, ensuring everyone has a chance to participate.
• Research-backed: Every experience is designed based on existing research from sources such as Harvard, Stanford, and more.
• Outcome-oriented: These interactive workshops are purposefully designed to help improve an outcome, such as connection, inclusion, well-being, leadership skills, and more.

Below are five virtual holiday team-building experiences for your team to enjoy:

5 Holiday Team-Building Experiences

1. Share Food & Drink With Your Team

Research from the University of Chicago shows that eating together increases feelings of trust and cooperation. What better time to facilitate this sense of camaraderie among your team than the holidays?

For virtual and distributed teams, sharing food can be challenging. Teamraderie’s experience, Tartine & French Press, is an excellent way to enjoy the benefits of eating together with your team.

Receive a box of Tartine’s most famous baked items, a Coffee & Tea Press, and your choice of coffee or tea. A top barista will show you how to use your French Press and share the story of “America’s Most Influential Bakery.”

2. Host a Virtual Holiday Gift Exchange

The holidays are often associated with gifting. However, hosting a festive gift exchange can be tricky, particularly if your workforce works from home.

Teamraderie’s experience, Gift(ed), is a great way to show your team appreciation by facilitating a meaningful gift exchange.

This experience takes a unique approach to gift-giving—using a custom virtual game to identify each team member’s unique strengths and assign them “gifts.”

At the end of the experience, each team member is sent a gift related to their strengths.

3. Decorate Cookies as a Team

Decorating cookies is a timeless holiday tradition. In addition to being a fun activity, it’s an excellent way to connect with your teammates.

Teamraderie’s experience, Cookie Canvas, allows your team to enjoy an interactive cookie-decorating workshop together.

In this experience, a kit that includes cookies and icing is sent to each team member. A food and beverage expert leads your team through the process, teaching various decorating techniques and helping revitalize your team spirit.

4. Craft a Holiday Cocktail Together

Making cocktails together is another enjoyable way to spread holiday cheer.

If you’re searching for an interactive experience that brings your team together, Teamraderie’s mixology workshop, Shaken & Stirred, is an excellent option.

Your team will receive a kit with the necessary ingredients and will be led by a master mixologist in crafting three winter-themed holiday cocktails. This is another excellent way to connect with your team members through an enjoyable shared holiday experience.

5. Build Communication with LEGOs

Communication is incredibly important. Unfortunately, many teams struggle in this area.

Teamraderie’s experience, Brick by LEGO Brick, is designed to help your team improve communication together while participating in a shared interactive activity.

In this team experience, everyone will have to work together to complete a LEGO kit. Since nobody will have all the instructions, participants will have to depend on communication to complete their individual kits.

Considerations for Holiday Team-Building

If you’re hoping to provide your team with an opportunity to connect over the holiday season, there are several factors to consider.

To set yourself up for success, it’s important to take the following steps:

• Determine your goal: What’s the purpose of this team-building event? Is it to have fun? Bond with your team? Upskill? Consider your main goal as you move forward in the planning process.
• Choose a date and time: This may be easy if everyone is in the same location, but harder if people are across time zones. Check in with everyone to be sure you choose a date and time when everyone can attend.
• Find a virtual option: If you have team members who work remotely, choose an experience that works virtually.
• Choose a platform: Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Zoom are all great options. Make sure you provide your team with all the details ahead of time so they can make room in their schedules.

Even with these steps completed, it’s challenging to gather the necessary resources to set up a team-building event for your team.

For this reason, it’s important to make sure the team-building process is as easy and seamless as possible.

Let Us Take Care of the Planning for You!

If you’re struggling to plan your team-building event, don’t worry—you have options. One of them is to leave some of the planning to someone else.

Teamraderie will ensure that your team-building experience goes smoothly by hosting your experience for you so you can focus on celebrating the season together.

If this sounds like something that would benefit your team, check out our experiences to find the one that best meets your needs.

From kit-based holiday experiences to learning experiences that improve your team’s productivity and collaboration, we have a wide range of options to choose from.