Celebrating Hybrid Teams with Company Parties: A Guide for Team Leaders

Company parties are a great way for employees to meet their colleagues at different levels of the hierarchical ladder, recognize their peers’ accomplishments, and build strong work relationships. However, bringing your team together to celebrate can be difficult when your company uses hybrid schedules and team members divide their time between their homes and the office.

Neglecting to consider your remote team members when planning company parties can lower their morale and make them feel that their attendance is not valued compared to their peers who work in the office.

Hosting hybrid parties that keep your team engaged with remote-friendly activities will help your remote employees feel valued and ensure your celebration is fun and inclusive to all team members, whether they attend the celebration by coming to the office or by logging onto a videoconferencing call.

Why Have Company Parties?

Parties are a great way to reward employees for their hard work and contributions to your company. Celebrating milestones and accomplishments can increase employee engagement, show your employees that you appreciate them, and help you build a positive, inclusive work culture. 

Tips for Planning Successful Hybrid Company Parties

All successful office celebrations require careful organization, planning, and attention to detail. Regardless of whether your celebration is remote, in-office, or hybrid, your planning committee will need to consider the logistics of scheduling, catering, budgeting, choosing a location, and promoting the event.

Due to the limitations of joining a celebration remotely, hybrid parties require additional planning. Follow these tips to make your company’s next hybrid celebration a success.  

Determine Your Party’s Goals

When planning your company’s party, consider what you’d like the celebration to accomplish. Are you trying to build your team’s culture? Do you want to show appreciation for employees who have reached an important milestone? Do you want to encourage collaboration with team-building games? Determining your party’s goals will help you ensure that your event supports your company’s values and that your teams leave your celebration with something more valuable than the party favors. 

Prepare Your Virtual Activities in Advance

Anyone who’s had a video conference delayed or ruined by an unstable internet connection knows that technology can be unreliable and unpredictable, so it’s important to test your equipment and internet connection before your party begins.

If you plan to have your employees participate in virtual activities during your party, queue up the necessary websites in your browser and log into any accounts you will be using before the event so that you can start activities quickly and move from one activity to the next easily without having to spend time opening new browser tabs, navigating to the activities’ websites, and logging into your accounts.

Preparing your virtual activities before your party will save you time that can be better spent enjoying the party than struggling with your internet connection and browser.

Provide Food to In-Person and Virtual Employees

Working remotely shouldn’t prevent your team members from enjoying the food at your company party. Use meal delivery apps such as GrubHub, DoorDash, or Uber Eats to send your remote team members samples of the food that you’ve gotten catered for your party.

If your employees work outside the delivery range of the restaurant that catered your party, you can send them a virtual gift card for GrubHub, DoorDash, or Uber Eats so they can have a meal delivered from a restaurant that’s closer to their location.

Activity Ideas for Hybrid Company Parties

When planning your company party, it’s important to choose activities that your team members can participate in from the office or their homes. Try these remote-friendly activities to maintain employee engagement, encourage collaboration, and make meaningful memories with your hybrid team.

Virtual Gift Exchange

If you’re planning a hybrid company party during the holiday season, a virtual gift exchange is a great way to get your team into the holiday spirit and spread gratitude.

To organize a virtual gift exchange, start by having your employees randomly choose one of their peers using a name picker like Draw Names. Then, each employee should make a handmade gift for the team member that they selected and mail the gift to the recipient. 

If you’d prefer not to have your employees mail gifts to each other, you can use Slack to build a virtual gift exchange showcase. Have each employee take a picture of the gift they made, post the photo to your company’s Slack channel, and tag the team member that the gift is for. Your team members can take the gift exchange a step further by using HeyTaco to send their virtual tacos and messages of gratitude to their peers with a picture of their gift.

Team Trivia

Hosting a trivia game during your celebration encourages remote and in-office employees to work together to answer trivia questions. You can use a trivia game provider like Crowdpurr to create custom online trivia games and have your team members work in pairs to answer the trivia questions. Each pair can use direct messaging in Slack or Microsoft Teams to discuss their answers to the questions. At the end of the game, the team that answers the most questions correctly can celebrate with a remote-friendly reward.

Virtual Escape Room

If your team is fully remote, your employees might enjoy solving virtual escape rooms during your company parties. Virtual escape rooms are real escape rooms that your teams can solve from their homes. A guide shares a live video feed of the escape room with your team members so they can look around the rooms as if they were viewing them in person. Teams work together to gather clues and give the guide instructions that will help them escape the room.

Virtual escape rooms help your employees connect with each other and strengthen their cooperation, communication, and problem-solving skills.

Conclusion

Hybrid teams may be spread across different locations, but that doesn’t have to stop them from coming together to recognize each other’s hard work, celebrate each other’s accomplishments, and work toward common goals, especially if achieving those goals involves earning virtual tacos that they can redeem for HeyTaco rewards.

The next time your company wants to celebrate its accomplishments with a party, make sure everyone feels included by asking your team members for feedback during the planning process and adjusting your plans accordingly. Remember to include activities that all of your employees can participate in regardless of where they are when they join the party.