3 Ways to Create Meaningful Traditions at Work this Holiday

Chris Haston/NBC

While the awkward office holiday party looms large in our collective conscious, the holiday season is actually a great opportunity to create meaningful traditions to celebrate and express gratitude for your colleagues, clients, friends and family. In the midst of performance reviews, goal-setting sessions, and hustling to hit your year-end targets, we encourage you to set aside some time to acknowledge and appreciate your team. Here are 3 suggestions to create meaningful holiday traditions at work -they work at home just as well!

1. Positive Feedback

Giving feedback is hard and we don’t do it enough.  Providing inspiring and motivating feedback is rarer still, but the dividends positive feedback pays are significant.  If you’ve been a bit of a Grinch this year when it comes to providing acknowledgement, the holidays offer a wonderful chance for you to practice channeling your inner Cindy Lou Hoo.

Well designed positive feedback:

• Motivates
• Boosts confidence
• Calls out strengths and talent
• Encourages
• Appreciates
• Inspires

Best of all, positive feedback shows how much you care and makes the receiver feel really good. Isn’t that what this season is all about?

2. Collective Giving

Part the joy of the holidays is coming together to share experiences, deepen relationships and celebrate the successes of the past year. With cross-generational workforces creating greater demand for social consciousness and purpose at the office, starting a tradition to share a giving experience is a wonderful way to bring your team together.

One of the ways InspireCorps celebrates the holidays as a team is to identify and donate to organizations that are meaningful to us. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

3. Celebrate Together

Isn’t coming together to share success and accomplishment for the year coming to an end a most important part of the holiday season? We think so.

Bad office parties aside, the good news is that there are all kinds of creative and fun ways to celebrate together. With remote teams and increasing diversity in the workplace, the old model of the office work party is being replaced by new and novel ideas.

As you think about new ways to come together, think about what are meaningful and purpose-driven rituals that you and your employees or team can create and turn into meaningful traditions.

The holidays can be an opportunity to strengthen morale, enjoy a shared experience, deepen trust and connection, and embody diversity and inclusion.

We hope you will share with us the many innovative and fun ways you and your colleagues are celebrating the holidays- join us on Twitter and use the hashtag #InspiredHoliday