Discussion and Ideas for Employee Celebrations

I’m curious to know how these celebrations or engagement activities are usually planned from an employee perspective. How do you see employees being involved or given a chance to contribute ideas?

We also had this kind of situation before. What we did was get employee suggestions and then vote, especially as we have different ideas and people wanting to follow some trends. We also noticed it was a good opportunity to improve employee engagement by getting them involved.

Thanks Cristine, could you share some of the suggestions that you received, and you felt it worked best.

For virtual engagement, we usually keep it simple and inclusive rather than overloading people with long sessions.

For International Women’s Day, some activities that have worked well for teams include a short virtual panel with women from different roles sharing real career experiences. We also ask employees to nominate women who inspire them at work or in their personal lives and share those stories internally.

To include different kinds of mothers, teams sometimes run optional sessions like a lunch time talk on working parent realities, fertility journeys, adoption, or balancing caregiving for elderly parents. Others prefer lighter activities like virtual coffee chats, wellbeing sessions, or sending a small thank you voucher with a note acknowledging working mothers, single mums, carers, and those who support families in different ways.

We usually survey employees beforehand and let them vote on what they would actually enjoy. Engagement tends to be higher when people feel they had a say rather than something being imposed.

We usually keep virtual activities simple and inclusive—team quizzes, short recognition sessions, themed games, and sharing stories or achievements. For Women’s Day, a guest speaker or informal discussion around women’s experiences at work could work really well

This is not exactly based on the UK experience. But  back in Sri Lanka we used to organise guest speaker sessions with  experienced professionals on different topics specially around the annual International Womens day theme. Also you can do some fun activities like sharing happy moments with dispaying photos, get everyone to talk about their proud moments being a woman maybe with a game and virtual coffee. You can invite those who can play a music intruments and also do a sing along session.