How to Survive Remote Holidays

Recommendations for managers and their employees on dealing with the festive season in times of the pandemic.

The holiday season is here — along with the second wave of the COVID-drama. As companies used to plan their corporate parties around this period, the quite peculiar situation of ubiquitous remote work makes these festive undertakings problematic. Indeed, why even throw a party if Zoom is not the most efficient tool neither for teambuilding nor for networking? And if the party is then forgone, isn’t it reasonable to cancel holidays for employees altogether because they are already at home anyway?

The dilemma is not an easy one but not an unsolvable one nonetheless. By using a bit of common sense — both when deciding on holiday plans and when organizing a company party — it is possible to spare the holidays from what the “Guardian” called “the worst of both worlds” — the work becomes more invasive and the leisure becomes less pure.

Above all else, employees deserve some time completely off-work, even if this work is remote. Apparently, especially if this work is remote as more than half of adults (60%) and over two thirds of young people (68%) said their mental health got worse during lockdown. To improve this quite dire statistics, managers should restrain themselves from bothering their employees during the holiday season. First of all, if the managers do not see their subordinates working, does not mean that they are not.

Second, and most importantly, employees are not obliged to be constantly involved in work affairs while on holidays. On the contrary, employees, in their turn, should learn to clearly distinguish between work and leisure time. To help with this task, there are special online calendars for teams that allow each team member to adjust the time when they are available and periods when they are not to be disturbed. Otherwise, families risk an ugly scenario when one of the relatives is non-stop discussing work-related issues simultaneously opening Christmas presents, while another is checking emails with the end-of-the-year reports during a family dinner conversation.

Finally, if someone indeed desires (or needs to due to force-majeure circumstances) to work during the festivities, this diligent employee would be better off following the two crucial rules pertaining to work during holiday season:

1. Whenever possible, it is advisable to try and download working files offline (from Google docs or other cloud platforms the company might be using). By doing so, employees avoid having constant Internet access, thus, digress less from their job task to pay attention to numerous holiday distractions on the Web, such as wishes, sales, funny well-timed memes, etc. Apart from obvious productivity benefits, this solution has an important positive effect of separating work and leisure because the faster an employee does their job, the more time they would whole-heartedly devote to having fun. And, as Publilius Syrus said in the 1st century BC, “To do two things at once is to do neither”.
2. Keeping food away from your home workplace is a sound strategy to avoid some unintended negative consequences, especially during the holiday season ripe with fatty and sugary snacks. First, after eating, people get the so-called “food fatigue”, thus any work employees do in that state is not of the best quality. Second, workers tend to not control how much they eat during work, especially if they are extremely concentrated on the task. As a result, employees overeat, with the Work-From-Home regime additionally contributing to the trend, when the path to the source of food is pretty well-known. Incidentally, WFH was connected with unexpected weight gain among remote employees.

However, corporate culture matters too — and this statement is statistically confirmed. To specify, one study found that 70% of professionals would refuse to work for a leading company if it meant having to put up with a bad company culture. These numbers suggest that the online holiday corporate party might still be desirable by the majority of workers, especially when the pandemic has allegedly damaged many companies’ sense of unity.

To properly organize such a party and make it a pleasant occurrence, not a painful burden, some simple ground rules are to be observed:

1. Start preparing for the holiday in advance. There is a saying that anticipation is better than the event itself. Remote corporate holiday might be just the case in point. A mere changing of the background in Zoom (or whatever software the team is using) to some convivial image would already bring the holiday feeling.
2. Exchange of gifts. At least, holiday cards, because they are cheap, not binding in any way, but are very pleasant to receive. This gesture would certainly come as a lovely surprise even for the most introverted person.
3. Create an agenda for a holiday party. Would it be a costume night? A team-building event? An online dancing extravaganza? Whatever it is, a manager should ensure that the team knows what to expect, thus could prepare accordingly, especially mentally.
4. Less is more, when it is the question of a number of people at an online holiday party. Namely, while offline corporate events are great for networking through talking to a large number of different people, remote working software was not designed for this particular purpose. Thus, having a holiday celebration just among members of one team, or creating separate breakup rooms (like in Zoom) would help to avoid the intensification of the usual online meeting problems, e.g. constant interruption of each other.
5. Probably, the most important thing — managers or any people in the position of power should neither force people to attend the company party, nor force the employees to stay longer. As was already mentioned, remote working is stressful enough, hence, additional mandatory job-related events are not what workers need right now. Conversely, only people who attend the corporate soiree voluntarily and leave it when they want would remember the event from the positive side.

Whatever your issue is right now — creating a company party event for several separate teams or simply finding out the availability of the workers during holiday season, TeamCalendar.ai is a great one-click solution to all of them. To experience this and other useful features of TeamCalendar.ai, request a demo.