It’s the season to be jolly and cheerful. It’s the holiday season again! Your employees have worked hard during the year, and it’s important to keep up their spirits by making them feel appreciated. You want to create an atmosphere of fun and cheer, and yet ensure they’re being productive. Now, you don’t necessarily have to dress us as Santa Claus and give out presents or decorate a Christmas tree yourself, but it’ll work better for the business if you create the right atmosphere of business without losing the charm of the holiday season. A survey by Healthline suggested that 62% of employeesfind holiday season stressful. In this post, we share some ideas on how you can reduce employee holiday stress and keep up the productivity and employee morale.
- Introduce some festive plants to your office scenery
Numerous scientific studies have proven that having plants reduce stress, sickness, absence rates, and help in increasing productivity. They make the workspace look more attractive and they don’t require you to spend a lot of money. Plants are a great way to set the holiday mood at your workplace. Assign a budget to each team, and let them choose which plants they want to introduce to their workplace.
- Get competitive without losing the fun element
Introduce fun contests to celebrate the holiday season. Think of creative ideas to engage everyone with small efforts from their end. Here are some ideas:
- Office Secret Santa: It’s fun and requires the least effort from your end.
- Elf on the Shelf: Put the toy elf in a humorous position every day, and the team with the funniest pose wins.
- Ugly Sweater Contest: Whoever wears the ugliest sweater to office wins an award each day during the week.
- Guess the number of ornaments: Employees guess the number of ornaments on the Christmas tree and the one with the closest guess wins.
- Holiday Chronicles: Guests continue a story by adding a statement to the previous player’s storyline.
And so on… You can introduce a lot of fun games of your own, or also ask ideas for games from your employees. This will keep up the spirit of holidays and also help them stay stress-free.
- Use flexible schedules
Most employees plan their vacation around the similar time, especially in the holiday season. Your business might have to bear the brunt of employee absenteeism. In order to avoid conflicts, allow your employees to work on flexible working schedules, which are most suitable to them.
You can use intuitive scheduling software that help your employees in scheduling their work hours which are visible to others across your team. If certain tasks are dependent on some specific employees, you can configure the system to look for the common available time in their schedule, and then schedule those tasks accordingly. Coordinating events and synchronizing travel plans becomes easier with the ability of the software to sync employees’ calendar. The software also offers automated scheduling notifications via email and text to ensure employees don’t forget their work hours because they’re busy.
- Hire Seasonal Staff
Depending on your business, it’s possible to reduce stress by hiring additional seasonal staff members for your team. Seasonal employees can help you stay productive during the peak demand season. When looking for seasonal staff, prepare well in advance by predicting your requirements and creating targeted job descriptions. When working with temporary employees, clearly mention your work schedule and allow them to schedule their time-shifts using scheduling software. This will not only enable you to achieve your targets better but will also be cost-effective.
- Holiday Food
One of the key concerns of employees is staying healthy during the holiday season. During this time, it’s easy to gain some weight and develop more stress because of that. You can promote healthy food habits for your employees and reduce the stress of organizing a traditional office party by replacing it with a healthy potluck party. While normal potluck parties leave your employees feeling overstuffed and lazy, a healthy potluck party will help them stay fresh and will give them an energy boost along with motivation. Top up their efforts by contributing healthy baked snacks in their potluck. Your gifts can also be focused on communicating healthy habits and include healthy food items.
Another great way to complement the holiday healthy food efforts is to start a wellness challenge. A 30-day challenge will keep the teams motivated and help them stay encouraged to stay active outside of work hours, too.
We hope you have an amazing stress-free holiday season and you start your year with a healthy, motivated team.
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