6 Best Practices for Inclusive Holiday Celebrations in the Workplace

We have compiled the best suggestions from CEOs and managers on how you can celebrate the holidays in a business that is inclusive. There are various best practices to promote inclusive holiday celebrations at work, such as creating a collaborative holiday calendar or focusing on meal-sharing.

6 Recommended Practices for Inclusive Holiday Celebrations at Work

• Create a collaborative holiday calendar and provide only basic information about the holidays.
• Make participation optional and respect team members’ holiday customs as well
• The management would be the one leading an all-inclusive agenda.
• Use Decor To Encourage Diversity
• Create and Celebrate Company’s Own Holidays
• Center The Holiday More on Meal-Sharing

Through this method, you can have the staff mark their company’s holidays thus encouraging them to use it. A calendar reminder notification should be set so that everyone on the team knows when their special day is approaching. This can be great way for coworkers to get better understanding of each other and strengthen personal connections. Also, a holiday calendar is a good way of knowing your colleagues better, learning about other country’s holidays and boosting diversity in holiday celebration within an organisation.

Limit Yourself to the Holiday’s Generalities Only

No personality images or religious symbols but season colors only will facilitate inclusive holiday celebrations. For instance, you may add spring time pictures of flowers, pastel colors without any reference to religion or even Easter bunny. As we all know, every festive period can be highlighted in similar manner, however, it’s important for your workplace not to allow any depictions of myths, folklore or religious identification while retaining the seasonal hues.

Make Participation Free-Willing

Some businesses think that they must participate in everything so that employees do not feel left out, but inclusive holiday celebrations should aim at fostering an environment of friendliness where everyone will feel included. These occasions lose their importance when employees are compelled to come even if they do not enjoy themselves. It is important for your staff to know that these gatherings are only social and they won't be penalised by absenting themselves on such days.

During seemingly happy celebrations, some employees may look uncomfortable and feel forced to attend because of being afraid of what people will say or perhaps they could miss promotion opportunities. No matter how enthusiastic you are about the holiday events you have planned, it is important to respect everyone’s individual viewpoints and realise that not all feel comfortable taking part in religious festivities.

Equally Embrace Holiday Practices of Individuals’ Team Members

Embrace your colleagues’ season customs. This would be equally possible if a company leader can adapt and include the culture to improve the business’ success through understanding a way of identifying holidays that everyone is celebrating. This can be done by setting up a special holiday video conference. In order not to hold it on any particular day, you may have it early in the season. There can be an informal get-together with a roundtable where each member of the team will be asked their preferred way of spending their festive days.

Further, including information about diverse holidays and testing out knowledge about colleagues by predicting their resolutions for New Year can make games gain more insight on them too. Also, when sending holiday messages, instead of using  “Merry Christmas,” you would want to use “Seasons Greetings” instead.

Management should Steer an Inclusive Agenda

Incorporate non-mainstream holidays into your program as a leader, this is one best practice for inclusive holiday celebrations in workplaces. There should not be any expectation from employees to inform co-workers about their festivities and cultural festivals. Thus, don’t simply assume that employees do not value having their cultural traditions recognised at work just because they do not offer to share them with others. If you take the initiative, include other holidays in the fun, and let your staff know that it's vital to learn about and celebrate less well-known holidays, they might eventually become more involved in planning events. To your excitement and respect for it during times of workplace celebration, employees are free to express their culture and be fully themselves.

Decorate for Inclusion

Create opportunities through decoration for staff members so that they may express themselves using celebration activities based on different cultures around the world. Celebrate every culture available apart from traditional ones only, as well as being good for worker output because it make working enjoyable promoting teamwork within the company.

Create and Observe Holidays Specific to the Organisation

The only way to make an inclusive event at work is by inventing a holiday that the government does not recognise. It might just be another day at work. devoid of political, religious and historical issues. Nobody to inadvertently offend. Be careful not to include any contentious holiday details, avoiding food, language or aesthetics worries. The list goes on forever. Just several happy people from various backgrounds having fun together.

Make Meals the Centre of Attention During the Festivities

We don’t think about it, but actually celebrating inclusive holidays is quite easy. Many such holidays are connected with a particular meal or dish, and this is an excellent point for beginning if you wish to foster full workplace inclusion and make any given holiday enjoyable. Everybody has to eat and often holidays emphasise the best things in every culture. If you want to include everyone at a party, one of the ways entails provision of some delicious snacks accompanied by some basic facts about the festival itself. Ideally, this should be planned out and prepared by those who are most enthusiastic followers of that occasion. They can also slightly mention the customs associated with particular festivals as they serve food during them. 

There is no better way of uniting individuals than through food and storytelling.