Gifts For Your 12-Year-Old-Self

What did you want for Christmas when you were 12?

A virtual holiday team-building activity

For many years, Psychometrics has celebrated the holiday season with two events, a formal dinner party and then a fun gift exchange at our office on Christmas Eve. These annual events provide opportunities to socialize and enjoy the company of others, celebrate successes, and share some laughs. However, like most organizations right now, Psychometrics Canada’s employees are mainly working from home.

This has led to a rethink about how we celebrate the holiday season as an organization.  We call it, Gifts for Your 12-Year-Old Self.  In keeping with our tradition of a gift exchange we reached out to Santa’s Anonymous – a local Edmonton organization that provides gifts for children in need between the ages of 1 – 12 years old.  Every year they struggle getting enough gift donations for the older children, and we thought we could do our bit to help them out – while also finding a way to celebrate as a team at Psychometrics.

Here is what we are going to do. Each employee at Psychometrics Canada is tasked with purchasing a gift for one of their colleagues. Drawn by random of course. The twist is that this gift should be something that the person would have enjoyed when they were 12. We will have a virtual meeting where each person will “give” their gift to their “12-year-old colleague”, and explain why they chose that present. It should be a fun afternoon of sharing what we have learned about each other. Then we will gather all the gifts and deliver them to the Santa’s Anonymous depot.

If you would like to run this virtual holiday team-building activity with your organization or team, download the instructions.

If you have other plans for celebrating the people and teams in your organization this year, we would love to hear about them. You can share your ideas with Camille at clabrie@psychometrics.com. We will compile a list of these ideas and distribute them on our blog.