10 Fun Thanksgiving Team Building Activities for Remote and in-person Offices
Thanksgiving embodies the spirit of togetherness and gratitude, which apply to the work environment. It’s also exciting to celebrate your teams and bond with them. We’ve put together ten fun Thanksgiving team-building activities for you. Read and thank us later!
1O team building activities for Thanksgiving
1. Meditation
The report shows that mindfulness meditation relieves back pain by 30% and lowers blood pressure by 80%. Employees who spend long hours in seats will find meditations useful for their back cramps. Meditation is a go-to exercise to decrease anxiety and tension if you want an activity that enables your team to connect mind and spirit—in this context. This spiritual synergy positively impacts team bonds and collaborative efforts at work.
2. Gratitude cards
Team members can design and disperse ‘thank you cards to one another, outlining what they are grateful for on the cards. It’s an efficient way to boost team morale in the workplace. Research shows that 63% of employees who gain recognition are more likely to stay at their jobs for extended periods. If you work in the people and culture department, this activity will help boost your employer’s branding efforts.
3. Munch and learn
As the name suggests, employees eat while they learn more about the company or other interesting notable events that occurred in the company’s History or American History. Similarly, it could be an activity that helps team members learn more about themselves. The satisfaction derived from eating and gaining new knowledge about the company improves their perceptions and connection to the company. Generally, when employees perceive that you’re promoting their development, they’ll be encouraged to do better.
4. Teamsgiving
Teams giving is an effective way to enable teams to bond over a great cause. You can dedicate some hours out of your work schedule to provide items for people in need. Thanksgiving is about appreciating and sharing love and kindness with loved ones, but we need to extend that act of kindness to people we do not know. One way we can contribute to healing the world is by catering to people who cannot meet their needs. As a corporate leader, you can organize teams to head out on different service projects—some teams can sing at a children’s hospital, while others can coordinate sanitation activities or provide supplies for the homeless,
5. Match the plate to its owner
The ‘match the plate to its owner’ activity is a great way to inject humor and liveliness into team members. The idea of the activity is to place an image of a meal on a plate and guess the team member that loves to eat that particular meal. The aim is to help team members pay attention to the tiny details that concern them. Some team members have dietary needs or preferences, and such detailed information may not be overt to the team. This activity would challenge team members’ ability to guess correctly and learn new information about themselves.
6. Thanksgiving recipe challenge
There are different ways to go about this challenge. However, we’re proposing an inter-team challenge where team members must write all the ingredients and procedures for preparing a thanksgiving dish within a limited time. The goal of the Thanksgiving recipe challenge is to improve the teams’ ability to communicate, remember the recipe, and agree on their outcome will be assessed.
7. Networking Spree
Is there any event that doesn’t involve networking? As social beings, teammates need to interact with each other to learn more about each other. Creating activities for team bonding without including a networking session doesn’t sound right. At the same time, you want your networking sessions to feel like something other than regular meetings. You can inject some fun by creating timed networking sessions where team members need to learn as much as they can about each other quickly.
8. Thanksgiving happy hour
Who doesn’t love a fun happy hour? If you’re looking for ways to refresh your company’s social engagements, consider exploring some creative happy hour promotions that can bring even more enthusiasm to these team-building moments. Team members can play games, crack jokes, and have drinks and snacks in person and virtually. Indeed, remote teams can partake in fun; team members can have virtual happy hours and organize fun games to engage every team member using engaging video solutions.
9. Team decor challenge
Engaging in team decoration activities is a great way to explore your team’s creativity. You can organize a Thanksgiving-themed team decoration challenge and provide rewards for teams with the most creative concepts. The team decor challenge still applies to you if you run a small company. All youR teams need is a white-label video solution that allows customizations from scratch. Team members can customize their meeting rooms to include interactive graphics like 3D designs. There is no limit to creativity!
10. Virtual cook-athron
A significant part of Thanksgiving is FOOD. Notice this is the second activity that’s food related. The essence of this activity is for team members to showcase their cooking skills. Team members can volunteer to represent their teams in a contest to determine the team with the shortest meal preparation time. Virtual cook-athrons are highly engaging and educative as team members learn how to prepare new dishes.
Conclusion
Finally, the ultimate question is, what are you grateful for? Not the rising price of turkey (definitely), as the US department of agriculture, has recorded about a 28% increase per pound. However, it would be best if you weren’t concerned, as there are many Thanksgiving work activities and dishes to explore—particularly the ones you haven’t tried before. Some of these thanksgiving slides help to give a warm introduction during your presentations. Ensure you make the most of this year’s Thanksgiving celebrations. Spread love and light in your workplace; it’s much needed. Ensure you take inspiration from the Thanksgiving team-building activities mentioned above to build stongs team bonds and create memorable experiences.
Just so you know, we are grateful for you—our community of readers. Happy Thanksgiving!
About the Author / Sara Emezi
