Founder in Eleven

Given the upcoming holiday season, this post will share thoughts from Technology Services Group’s (TSG) annual holiday/anniversary party. 

Planning a Year-End Event

The end of the year and holiday season is a great time for conducting a team building celebration. Our celebrations included employees and thier significant others (spouses or dates).  Some key considerations:

• Many other companies are also having holiday parties, so event spaces can be expensive and difficult to find.  Given the short time frame between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, the number of Saturday nights were extremely limited in terms of booking a party space.
• Given the short time frame, there may be conflicts with employee significant others and personal holiday parties.

Given the above potential issues with planning a holiday party, TSG conceived multiple creative ways of conducting holiday and year-end celebrations.

Holiday Office Party

In TSG’s move to our final office space, we were lucky to have a landlord with access to a great cafeteria which overlooked Chicago’s Daly Plaza.  Daly Plaza is located in downtown Chicago and, during the holiday season, sets up a Kris Kringle German-themed holiday shopping market.  At the time, the plaza would also include the official Chicago Christmas Tree, Hanukah Menorah, and other religious symbols.  Our landlord would let us clear out the cafeteria for a DJ and dance floor, and the view was very appropriate for the holiday season.  Our staff could also go upstairs to show their guests our new office space.  One year, I even dressed as Santa and a couple other senior managers played Mrs. Claus and two elves. We came to realize that holding the party in the company office space came with pros and cons:

• Unlike most offices, we were lucky to have the landlord’s cafeteria space with a good holiday view and space for eating, drinking, and dancing.
• For employees that come to work 3-5 days a week, commuting back to the office again on the weekend might be more of a nuisance to some.
• For offices that are embracing more remote work, the ability to use a small office (or virtual office) to host an event might be difficult.
• Planning and coordinating can get somewhat difficult, and there was a concern for getting complaints from our landlord, who had other businesses in the building that work on the weekend. For these reasons, we did eventually move away from the office party.

Anniversary Party

TSG was founded in mid-January of 1996.  The January anniversary date gave us the convenience to move the holiday party from December.  In January, we were able to avoid employee and guest conflicts as well as find better prices and availability for venues.  Some notes on the anniversary party:

• TSG held the event in late January, when Chicago is post-holiday and in the middle of winter doldrums. 
• Similar to our college recruiting bowling events, we would delegate the planning to a couple of 4-6 year employees.  Without setting a specific budget, we would look to the employees for suggestions based on their knowledge of our past activities while encouraging creativity in finding a unique event that both new and old employees would enjoy.
• The celebration would be a “dress up” event, as employees liked the once-a-year celebration with suits/dresses for a night out without going full black tie or formal attire.
• While alcohol was available, we would discourage shots and too much drinking without food before and after the event.  We would typically end the event at 11:00 with option to extend if the party was going strong and wasn’t getting out of hand.
• Event spaces were very creative and we avoided restaurants/hotels. The team often found spaces with a view that we could cater food and liquor.
• Every other anniversary party, we would coordinate a “senior managers dance.”  It was always a surprise for the employees, often very corny, but would typically be a good kickoff for giving some energy to the dance floor.

Chili Cook Off, Yankee Swap, and Movie Premier Day

While embracing the Anniversary party for the January event, the team still liked the idea of something holiday-focused that didn’t have the high cost or planning of a significant holiday event.  We ended up turning a December Thursday night into our annual Chili-Cook Off, Xmas Sweater, Yankee Swap, and sometimes Movie Premier day.  The day was just for employees, and included:

1. Chili-Cook Off – Those interested would bring in chili for a competition at lunch.  The judging was done based on taste, color, consistency and other factors and we would typically get eight or more employees to bring in chili.
2. Christmas Sweater – What started out informally, folks started wearing ugly Christmas sweaters during the festivities.  It soon became an optional tradition.
3. Yankee swap – Anyone interested would bring in a wrapped present, typically 25 dollars or less, to participate in the Yankee swap (also known as White Elephant).  Those participating would pick numbers to see who goes first. Number 1 would open the first gift.  Person number 2 could open a new gift, or steal  number 1’s gift.  If the gift was stolen, the  number 1 would get to open a new gift.  Person number 3, like 2, could steal either number 1’s  or 2’s  gift. This process would continue until everyone had a gift. After the last round, person number 1 had one last chance to swap their gift with any participant.  The Yankee Swap was a very popular event with 30+ employees participating every year.
4. Movie Premier – TSG was lucky to be located next to a mall with a small movie theater.  We would often rent out a theater for movie premiers (Star Wars, Avengers, etc.).  With all the holiday movies being out, it was easy to add a movie to the day if there was something employees wanted to see.  Based on the size of the theater, we would have employees bring significant others and provide food/drinks for the movie.

Summary

For TSG, having a Chili Cook-off/Yankee Swap holiday event combined with an anniversary party in January gave us two great team-building culture events, often better than the price of one in December during the peak of the holiday party season.