Your company intranet is the ideal place to host your festive internal comms. Here are ten ideas on how to promote activity and engagement among your employees before signing off for the holidays.
After what could be classed as the strangest, most grueling year in living memory, most of us are looking forward to the holidays and a chance to decompress. Staff morale may be low, productivity down, and engagement dropping day by day. And with everyone working from home, the festive season feels different this year. So, how do you ensure your employees clock out for the year on a positive note?
This holiday time is the ideal opportunity to use internal comms to celebrate, reflect, and look ahead to a brighter new year. Even in the wind-down to a much-need break, this time of year is crucial for internal communicators to connect with staff. This is the point where you can move away from serious business matters and provide engaging communications that find light in even the darkest of times.
This is the time to start making the most of the festivities, utilizing your intranet or comms platform features to increase activity and address your business challenges.
With this in mind, here are ten festive ways you can inject some positive feeling into your comms to encourage, motivate, and inspire your employees for a better 2021.
1. Boost engagement with a Christmas competition
Simple competitions are a great way to get employees to your intranet. Without the usual in-office activities, there is still a huge array of options to get your employees engaged: a working-from-home desk decorating competition, a best dressed Christmas tree competition, a gingerbread house making competition – anything that the employee can take part in from the comfort of their own homes.
2. Deliver communications with an interactive advent calendar
After a year of highs and lows, it’s always a good idea to use your intranet for fun activities in December. Consider a virtual advent calendar of clues to incentivize everyone to seek out the information within the intranet in return for a prize, or use the twelve days of Christmas to deliver 25 key comms, pieces of content, or messages from members of the senior team. These can include encouraging vox pops from the leaders within your organization to gear employees up for a successful new year.
3. Share festive working from home photos
Create a gallery and let your employees add their images. This could be for the best and worst Christmas sweaters, Christmas home desk decorating competition, or even snaps of the most festive sights employees see out and about. These images can range from the sublime to the ridiculous and is a really effective way of bringing your employees people together when they’re apart.
4. Put your employees in the spotlight
It’s almost the end of year, and therefore the ideal time to highlight those who make your organization the success it is, and shed light on the unsung heroes who may otherwise fall under the radar.
Appeal to your line managers to nominate those staff members who go the extra mile, live your company values, do the behind-the-scenes work no-one normally hears about.
Share their employee recognition stories on your intranet or internal comms channels; get leadership or even your employees to vote for their top heroes. It gives those individuals valuable recognition and their peers an opportunity to say, ‘thank you.’
5. Give your intranet a festive theme
It’s only once a year, so why not change the theme of your intranet throughout the month of December. It’s kitsch, but there’s no harm in adding snow, Christmas trees, parcels, and holly to your homepage to get employees in the mood for the season.
It’s the perfect home for your festive internal comms and a nod to your employees that your organization is ready for the holidays and to be prepared for some surprises and treats along the way!
6. Host a festive pop quiz
Everyone loves a good pop quiz, so why not look back on the year with a fun twist? Get staff to join virtual teams and make an event out of it. Questions can be on absolutely anything: significant events, customer wins, funny moments, the name of the finance director’s new baby born in August. It will instill a collective sense of belonging and engagement and create a bit of friendly competition too!
7. Improve teamwork with a Christmas treasure hunt
With a host of features, it’s simple to set up a virtual Christmas treasure hunt on your company intranet, sending employees to specific areas of your site that you want them to visit. Create a competition amongst teams, possibly even send them to different team areas to find out about different projects or departments. The winners get a prize, whether that’s a virtual reward or the honor of appearing on the Christmas 2020 intranet winners board.
8) Share the highlights
Ensure staff leave for the holidays with a positive mindset. And while this year had some definite lows, it is worth sharing some memories of your company culture‘s positive parts and why the organization is a great one to work for in your festive internal comms.
Whether it was a team working closely together from their individual homes, the running commentaries on lockdown hit Tiger King, a reawakened love of baking, ask your staff to share their favorite moment or highlight of the year. Keep it light-hearted and fun, encouraging staff to share the funny and informal alongside the business-related bits.
9. Piggyback your employees’ festivities
Employees will often be undertaking their own festivities at home – whether that’s by decorating their desks, coming up with the best festive Zoom backgrounds, or holding a virtual departmental drinks. Why not ride on the festive internal comms they’re already putting out on social media by getting them to add a dedicated festive hashtag?
Adding an incentive – such as the best tagged holiday photo posted gets a bottle of something – will drive engagement and adoption up. Follow their efforts and retweet, repost, or share on your company social channels, or pop the best up on your intranet to share company-wide. It’s a quick and easy win to use ready-made content, engage your employees, and unite your organization.
10) Get together… virtually
Most of your workforce will not have seen each other since March, so it’s important to get together before signing off for the holidays. This is the perfect time for some leadership visibility and some encouraging motivating comms about the year that lies ahead.
If you want to get attendance up for the end of year town hall wrap-up, send some festive goodies to your workers. If there are important messages to get out or you simply want to ensure everyone hears from the boss before heading off on their holidays, it’s a small – but effective – motivator to get them to tune in.
