If you run a business and have workers who come into the office every day, you probably want to make that experience fun for them if at all possible. You need those employees to work hard for you, but you also want to mix things up with theme days, parties, and other events they’ll enjoy. Since some employees work from home now, you need to incentivize office work if you can.
You can do that around the holidays. For instance, you might decide to do a 12 Days of Christmas event. You and your workers know that Christmas comes just once per year, but you can do a 12-day event that will hopefully get everyone feeling happy and joyful for much of December.
Ugly Sweater Day
You can do 12 Days of Christmas in all kinds of ways. If you need 12 Days of Christmas ideas for work, though, and you can’t come up with anything, Ugly Sweater Day is a great way to start.
Even those who don’t necessarily celebrate Christmas can still get in on the ugly sweater spirit. You can instruct your staff to find the ugliest Christmas or holiday-themed sweaters, and you can come up with some sort of silly prize for the winner.
Maybe you’ll give the winner a gift card or a gym membership. You might allow them to play DJ at the office’s Christmas party later that month.
You can hunt for ugly Christmas and holiday sweaters at Goodwill, the Salvation Army, Target, Walmart, or anywhere else that comes to mind. If you get a sweater at Goodwill, you probably won’t pay more than a few bucks for it, especially if you go there on a special discount day.
Hot Chocolate Bar
If you live and work in a part of the country where you get some serious winter weather, you should reward your employees when they brave the trek into work every day. They might show up at the office stamping the snow from their boots, and they’ll want some holiday cheer that another day of Christmas can provide.
You can do a hot chocolate bar as part of the 12 Days of Christmas celebration. You can get a catering company to do it, or you can probably set one up yourself without too much trouble.
You can get several different kinds of luxury hot chocolate. You can get marshmallows to put in there, and you can get some festive mugs with Santa, some reindeer, and similar themes on them.
You might even get some peppermint schnapps or other adult beverages to liven up the bar. If you do that, though, make sure to only distribute the liquor after business hours. If your employees start drinking too early in the day, they probably won’t exhibit much productivity from that point forward.
If you do alcohol-spiked hot chocolate, make sure no one drives afterward, either. You can call Ubers for people or make sure that they take public transportation home. Your responsibility as an employer matters.
Holiday Photo Booth Day
You can also find many companies that will lend you a photo booth. You can do Christmas Photo Booth Day as one of the 12 Days of Christmas at your company.
Just about every person has a smartphone now, and they all have cameras. A worker can always snap a shot of another employee or just about anything else. It’s novel to have physical photos, though, and you can get some of those with a photo booth.
You can get a bunch of Christmas-themed costumes and props and have them set up near the photo booth. You can tell the workers they can use any of those they want. They might dress up like Santa, elves, reindeer, or anything else holiday-related.
You can keep some of the best photos and display them on the bulletin board or on your company’s website for the rest of the year. Your employees should appreciate that and smile every time they look at the pictures.
Christmas Stocking Stuffer Day
You can do a Secret Santa type of thing as one of the 12 Days of Christmas at work. You can do Stocking Stuffer Day, where you assign each worker another employee and have them come up with small, funny gifts to fill up their stocking.
You can get comically large stockings, then tell your workers to try and find the best items they can fit in each of them. You can take some time at the end of that day to hand out the stockings and see what’s inside each one.
The workers might come up with Christmas items, but they can also put in all kinds of other gag gifts that they think might get a laugh. Your staff can get silly and fun with it, and everyone should have a nice time.
Other Ideas
You might come up with all kinds of other days to round out the 12 Days of Christmas at work. You can do a Give Back Day, where you go out into the community and help the less fortunate. It may not sound like quite as much fun as some of the other ideas we mentioned, but volunteering at a soup kitchen or cleaning up a public park helps the community in which you work.
You might rent a karaoke machine for one of the days. You can get your workers to sing Christmas-themed songs. You can all make cookies and bring them in, or you might decorate gingerbread houses. You can have a flannel day where everyone wears flannel.
You might also poll your workers to see if they have any additional 12 Days of Christmas ideas. You may select some of the best ones and include them. You want to ensure worker involvement, so they feel like they’re in on the process.
Hopefully, everyone enjoys this seasonal event, and you can do it year after year from this point forward.