After everything you’ve been through this year, holiday team building for office morale may be the best gift you can give your staff!
COVID or the threat thereof. The many-headed hydra of hybrid—remote vs. on-site— work conflicts. School and day care closings. Home schooling or the lack thereof. Masking rules or the lack thereof. Vaccination mandates or the lack thereof. Astronomical food and gas prices. Quiet quitting. Loud, anguished cries from overwrought workers.
Hcamag.com relates: “A year after the world’s work-from-home experiment, professionals who are now back to working on site are reporting the negative effects their return to the office has had on their team spirit. In a recent Paychex survey, nearly two in five workers on average say they began experiencing low morale ever since they headed back to the worksite.”
And Gallup.com warns “As work and life are now more blended than ever, it is critical that organizations address and manage employee engagement… to reduce the odds of burnout, stress, worry, anxiety and depression.”
Holiday blues
With the holidays hard on our heels, singing the blues may feel a lot more natural than singing carols.
From Springhealth.com: “A Healthline survey took a look at holiday stress and found that over 60% of all respondents felt some stress during the holiday season. Broken down by demographics, 62% of baby boomers, 65% of Generation X, and 61% of millennials felt some level of stress during the season. The biggest stressor on respondents was finances.”
Team building for office morale
When what should be the most joyful time of the year becomes the most sorrowful, it’s time for a reboot. One of the best ways to reboot or re-engage employees who are stressed about holiday spending and other holiday woes is to flip the script on them. How? Charitable team building! Why? Because it focuses your mind and heart on people who are in direr straits than you are! Think of it as therapeutic misdirection!
Corporate social responsibility is a noble-sounding way for communities to demand that companies step up and be good neighbors, sometimes challenging them to give until it hurts. But with charitable team building, there’s no pain, just gain. You give until it heals. And in the process, disengaged employees reconnect. Colleagues become friends. Donors and recipients alike become better people. Think of it as…
…The kindness cure
Corporatewellnessmagazine.com reports that “The science of kindness has been widely studied, and it has been found that it can directly affect us on a physiological level. The secret is oxytocin, often touted as the ‘love hormone,’ which improves feelings of social connectedness and positive feelings when released. It also fires up the neural networks related to reward when we’re kind or see others experience kindness…. A recent experimental study found greater increases in positive emotion in participants who recalled an act of kindness intended to benefit another person than participants who recalled an act of kindness intended to benefit themselves….[so]while self-care is an effective form of improving one’s sense of well-being, concentrating on being kind to others can propel this.”
Families living in food deserts, lonely disabled veterans, homesick military personnel, students without basic school supplies. Charitable events heighten our awareness of national crises that are right on our doorstep—causes that deserve our attention and support.
Whether you donate a dinner to one hungry family or serve a whole community through your local soup kitchen or food bank—every morsel you give away will feed your own soul. That’s how holiday team building for office morale works: your kindness always comes back to you a thousand-fold.
Happy holidays!