A Toast To Our Team
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to alter how we live our daily lives, it has also altered how our team celebrates the holiday season this year. While it could have been easy to focus on missing our annual holiday party, we instead challenged ourselves to think outside the box. We know that everyone has different interests — and decided to offer both a virtual holiday get-together as an opportunity to make new memories in a new kind of way, as well as an optional mailed secret holiday gift exchange. Just because our team had to alter plans for our typical holiday party, this was not going to hinder our holiday celebrations. As we’ve written before, celebration is one of our values that makes up the cultural foundation of our organization — and we believe in celebrating with gratitude and kindness.
This holiday season we put our thinking caps on to find a solution on how we could be together, apart. One opportunity to do this was a virtual holiday party where we featured a cocktail making class. We partnered with Bully Boy Distillers to offer this class for our team over Zoom. Each team member was shipped a bottle of Bully Boy American Straight Whiskey and a list of ingredients needed for each drink in their “Whiskey Business” themed class.
In our interactive cocktail making class, Bully Boy bartenders taught our team about how whiskey is made and aged, as well as the different types. We started with a whiskey tasting and then made two unique whiskey cocktails: the Berry Mintalow and the Sage Wisdom (We might have also listened to some Barry Mantalow). The fun went well into the evening and was almost like we were at a physical holiday party — just from the comfort of our own homes.
For those team members who could not make the cocktail class — or for anyone who wanted to spend more time hanging out with the team, we then offered a second get-together later in the month with a virtual gift exchange. Anyone who wanted to participate was anonymously assigned another team member to purchase a gift for that was $20 or less.
Again over Zoom, our team came together for a happy hour and gift opening. There was only one shipping mishap….and a few mislabelings — but that did not spoil anyone’s fun. There was lots of fun guessing and opening — with good cheer all around. We know we will look back on this year with a positive light as we always made the most out of what we can do with all the restrictions due to the coronavirus.
When planning our virtual holiday events this year, it was important to our company to be able to provide a shared experience to celebrate the holidays while staying safe. We know we accomplished this by the belly laughs and good camaraderie that came out of both events.
Our team has been incredibly resilient during these trying times we have experienced this year with restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic. We are very thankful to have the ability to have some fun as a team, stay connected, and celebrate the holiday season together safely from our homes. Happy Holidays to all!
