Four Asana activities to boost connection during the holidays

This year, due to remote work and COVID-19, work holiday celebrations might look a little different than usual. Most companies can’t plan their traditional holiday party or organize holiday-themed in-person events. But just because you can’t connect in person doesn’t mean you can’t close the year with some team connection.

For tips, we turned to our Professional Services and Customer Success teams. These customer-facing teams are big on facilitating team building, creating connection, and celebrating success through the Asana Way of Change. They shared four Asana activities to help your team feel connected—with some Asana education sprinkled in.

Create an Asana kudos board

A kudos board is a place where you can share pictures, GIFs, appreciation, and thanks. At Asana, we like to create kudos boards for special occasions, like Asanaversaries, birthdays, or promotions. Traditionally, these boards might be physical things—but you can also create a virtual kudos board in Asana Boards View.

To create a kudos board in Asana, start a new project in Boards View. Share the project with team members and encourage them to add pictures, notes, GIFs, and appreciations. If you’re creating a kudos board to celebrate a specific team member, focus the appreciation on their accomplishments—but you can also create a kudos board to look back on 2020, celebrate team accomplishments, and prepare for the new year. Once it’s all filled out, here’s what it might look like:

💡Tip: If you’re creating a kudos board for a specific team member, keep the project private until you’re ready to share it.

Plan a virtual scavenger hunt

A virtual scavenger hunt can be a great way to challenge and engage your team. You can set up the virtual scavenger hunt in advance, and then share it during a team meeting or let your team tackle the scavenger hunt over the course of a week—depending on how challenging the hunt is.

To set it up, hide holiday-themed emojis in comments and task descriptions across several projects. Along with each emoji, include a link to an Asana Form that the team member can fill out once they find the emoji in order to “claim” the find. Then, at the end of the scavenger hunt, enter each form submission in a raffle, where the winner will receive some holiday-themed prizes.

💡Tip: If you want to make the scavenger hunt easy, put all of the projects in a Portfolio so your team knows where to look. Or, for a more challenging scavenger hunt, tell them the emojis might be scattered across any projects within a certain Asana Team.

Host a holiday-themed contest

A little friendly competition can be the highlight of the holiday season—but costume contests don’t quite land the same via Zoom.

Instead of hosting a contest over video, have team members take photos ahead of time and submit them to a dedicated project through an Asana Form. You can even create categories—like most festive holiday sweater, ugliest sweater, cutest couple’s costume, or best holiday pet. From there, everyone can vote by “liking” the pictures they think are best.

💡Tip: Once the submission and voting windows are closed, sort the project by “likes” to see the winner.

Stage an Asana race

If you’re ready to take the friendly competition up a notch, consider hosting a race during your next team meeting. Staging an Asana race also has the added benefit of helping new team members learn more about Asana in a fun, engaging way—which is a key element of the Asana Way of Change.

To stage an Asana race, create a checklist of things team members need to do. You can make this checklist as difficult or simple as possible, depending on your team’s familiarity with Asana. Some ideas include:

• Liking tasks, adding comments, and sending Appreciations

• Taking a screenshot of a celebration creature (hint: complete tasks and Milestones to see them fly across your screen)

• Covering your screen in pictures of cats and dogs—without leaving Asana (hint: Make sure “

  Extra Delight” is turned on, then try the shortcuts Tab + B or Tab + V)

• Creating a holiday-themed Rule like “when a task is completed, add a comment saying ‘Happy Holidays ❄⛄’”

• “Compose” a song in Timeline View (hint: create tasks with start and end dates and change the task title to song lyrics)

Time your team and encourage them to submit screenshots of their accomplishments as proof. The first person to finish all of the tasks wins!

Boosting connection and holiday spirit

Even though 2020 has been quite a year, you can still bring team spirit and holiday cheer to remote team members. And in the process, you’ll get to know Asana a little better, too. Try these four ideas, or share your own favorite Asana holiday activity in the comments!

For pre-built projects with these ideas and more, download our Asana Success Celebration Collection project template.