A Secret Santa that Remote Teams Will Love

At Rising Team our whole company is focused on building meaningful connection and learning experiences for remote teams, so the pressure was high to hold an engaging holiday party for our own remote team. Luckily, we have some incredible colleagues who were up to the challenge.

Along with a private concert from Cello Joe, and a beat boxing lesson from Blake Brandes, the highlight of our virtual team party was our Secret Santa (or Secret Snowflake if you prefer). Unlike a typical Secret Santa focused on gift sharing, we ran an Appreciation Secret Santa with our team. Instead of a gift, each person on the the team is assigned another person to appreciate. Not only is this easier to manage with remote teams (no worrying about gifts arriving on time!) but it is also vastly more powerful. Plus, the research says that feeling valued and appreciated makes people more excited about their work, and less likely to quit.

Here's how to run an Appreciation Secret Santa:

1. Set up the pairings. You can use a tool like this great free tool on Github
2. Let everyone know when you'll be sharing the appreciations and for how long. For instance, on our team, we gave everyone about a week to prepare and person was assigned one teammate to appreciate for 1 minute during the party.
3. Encourage people to get creative. Some people reached out to others on the team to get ideas, and some even reached out to family members. Some people just talked, while others shared images, poems, etc. (In fact, we had two people who were randomly assigned to each other actually both make acrostic poems for the other person! Here are their poems:)

The best part of Appreciation Secret Santa is how it makes the team feel. Here are some of the things our team had to say about it:

"It made me feel seen. It was nice to know that even the little things I do are noticed and appreciated. It gave me the warm fuzzies."

"I loved it - there are lots of things we think and feel but never really get a chance to say. It was nice to get a more expansive view of everyone, and know that you're more than a face on zoom to them too."

"I've had fun at holiday parties before. But I've never left feeling so appreciated and comforted as I did after our holiday party.?I left feeling all warm and fuzzy inside!"

And although this works incredibly well for remote teams, it is also a big hit in person too. If you missed the window, you can try it next year. Or you can try out our "Cultivate Appreciation" Kit at Rising Team to get a full profile of the unique ways each person prefers to be appreciated and do an Appreciation Circle with your team.

Have you done any other unique takes on Secret Santa? Let me know in the comments.

Happy Holidays to all!