Maybe a team has been working together for a few years, and you want to do something to recognize the milestone. Sometimes, you may be interested in getting everyone together to celebrate a Holiday, retirement or birthday. Regardless of the motivation, CourseHorse has a wide variety of different virtual team celebration ideas that will help you ensure that your employees and colleagues have a great time celebrating whatever it is you think is worth celebrating.
Benefits of Virtual Team Celebrations
Virtual team celebrations are a great way to make your employees and colleagues feel appreciated. Bringing the team together for a fun and laid-back event can help create a sense of camaraderie and togetherness that will help them work together on future projects. A celebration can also help them feel more appreciated for the work that they’ve been doing, which can increase job satisfaction and retention. These events can also demonstrate to your employees who you care about them and appreciate their work, which will further improve morale and potentially increase the team’s productivity and general workplace attitude. It will also show your employees who you value successes and accomplishments, which can encourage them to strive for more recognition in the future.
Plus, these events are just a fun way for team members to interact with each other and get to know one another outside of the context of the workplace. This can do wonders for team cohesion and is a great way to improve the overall mood of your office or virtual office space. Since these events are virtual, it is very easy for everyone to attend and participate, and CourseHorse is even available to help deal with the logistics of running the event (such as shipping packages of materials directly to your participants). This can make the process far easier and more efficient, which will give you and your team more energy to invest in the cause of the celebration.
There is no shortage of ideas for planning and organizing a virtual celebration for your team. These ideas range from fun games and activities to virtual wine and cheese-tasting events to online happy hours and everything in between. Read on to learn more about the various different options available through CourseHorse for organizing a celebration for your team.
Virtual Wine and Cheese Tasting Event
The wine and cheese tasting is a staple part of any number of high-class celebrations and a good way to give your team members a chance to unwind and socialize, even virtually. CourseHorse’s Virtual Wine and Cheese Tasting will add structure to the event and give participants a chance to better understand the finer details and nuances of the wine and cheese they are celebrating with. The event will be led by a professional instructor and sommelier who will provide attendees with a lesson on the history and process of cheese making and vinting, which will ideally give your attendees a great appreciation for the wine and cheese they are enjoying. Events like virtual wine and cheese tastings can be a great way to celebrate almost any accomplishment or milestone since they are casual and laid-back. Particularly in an online space, anyone can appreciate a good bottle of wine and a good block of cheese after a long project has been completed or a difficult part of the work cycle has come to a close.
One of the advantages of a virtual wine and cheese tasting event is that CourseHorse does all of the heavy lifting for you and will ship a package containing two fine kinds of cheese and two bottles of wine directly to your participants. CourseHorse partners with Murray Cheeses, one of NYC’s most well-established and respected cheesemongers, to ensure that the cheese and wine that your team receives are of the highest quality. Cheese and wine options are customizable with the assistance of CourseHorse, but the default package will include French Goat cheese and a Sharp Cheddar. In addition to the two cheeses, each package includes two bottles of wine (usually a French Sauvignon Blanc and an Argentinian Malbec, but alternatives can be coordinated with CourseHorse). This event is a great way to celebrate your team and their accomplishments in a laid-back and accessible way that every team member can enjoy.
Virtual Mixology Workshop
Like the wine and cheese tasting, going out for Happy Hour drinks is a time-honored way of celebrating your employees and rewarding them for their hard work and accomplishments. One way to translate this experience to the virtual space is in one of CourseHorse’s Virtual Mixology Workshop seminars. In these courses, participants will learn the art of making their own mixed drinks using bartending techniques that have been practiced for over a century. Participants in this course will learn the science behind mixology, and they will follow a trio of recipes for making their own mixed drinks, which they can then enjoy in celebration of their team’s accomplishments. Participants will also be able to modify the recipes to fit their own desires and taste preferences, and the skills they learn in this workshop can be used to make any number of other complex and delicious cocktails.
There are a range of different cocktail options available for you to choose from when booking the course. If you want to make things as easy as possible for your team, you can sign up for a materials-included workshop, in which all of the necessary non-perishable, non-alcoholic ingredients will be shipped directly to the participant's homes. The package will also include a gift certificate for participants to purchase the spirits and citruses they need to complete the cocktails. These drinks will vary from workshop to workshop (CourseHorse offers seasonal cocktail classes and special courses such as their Pride Month Mixology course), and in this program, attendees will learn how to make a classic Old Fashioned, a Mint Julep and a ginger lime margarita. These are simple, classic cocktails that you can enjoy in almost any context, and they are very easy to modify, meaning that you won’t need to do a lot of work to modify the specs of an Old Fashioned to meet your desires.
Virtual Sushi Making Workshop
If you are looking for a more elaborate celebration event, you can consider a home cooking workshop, which can mirror something like taking your employees out for a nice dinner to recognize their accomplishments. CourseHorse offers a wide range of different cooking workshops, including a Virtual Sushi Making Workshop that will see participants learning how to prepare hand rolls in their own kitchens. This is a more involved activity for your team to participate in, but it is also a practical way to enjoy a good, delicious meal in a virtual space, and many of your participants are likely to continue to use the skills they pick up in this workshop in their daily lives. Participants will receive guidance from a professional chef on preparing sushi rice, fileting fish and cutting vegetables, making sauces and rolling and cutting rolls. Then, once the workshop is over, everyone on your team will have a fresh plate of sushi to enjoy for dinner and celebrate as a collective.
The sushi-making workshop aims to take all of the hassles out of the process by providing participants with all of the ingredients they need to make the finished dish shipped right to their homes (minus any fish that you want to include in your rolls, but you’ll get a gift card to purchase that). One of the advantages of opting for a course like the Sushi Making Workshop is that the ingredients involved are relatively straightforward and easy to sub in and out. If some members of your team don’t eat fish, there is a wide range of vegetarian options to include in the rolls. Likewise, a salmon roll, a tuna roll and a saba roll all use the same basic preparation technique, so participants who opt for different kinds of fish won’t be at a loss during the event.Â
Virtual Trivia Night Event
Another common way to celebrate an accomplishment is with a relaxing evening hanging out and socializing in a setting like a bar trivia night. This provides a healthy mix of structure and competitive fun while still being laid back enough for everyone to socialize and enjoy one another's company. CourseHorse offers a way to bring this experience directly to your team members through their Virtual Trivia Night events. In these hour-long sessions, players will Zoom into a shared room and answer trivia questions as teams or as individuals, competing to see who amongst them has the most knowledge. The events are very customizable, but they are all run by experienced facilitators ready to help your team find their groove and get in the mood for an exciting and fun-filled trivia night. This kind of group activity can be a fun way to celebrate the end of a stressful project or to reward teams for their hard work since casual, fun, socializing activities are often a great way to build team morale and cohesion.
One of the advantages of a virtual trivia event is that there are many different options and styles of trivia to choose from. This allows you to customize your experience to meet the desires and wants of your team, which can be a great way to ensure that your team enjoys the celebration. General knowledge trivia is the default option, but you can opt for things like movie trivia, music trivia, or sports trivia if you want to aim for a specific knowledge niche. There are also trivia categories testing knowledge on important social issues such as Pride Month trivia, Black History Month trivia or Women’s History Month trivia. Beyond this, there are also various pop culture trivia options, including things as specific as Game of Thronestrivia, Seinfeldtrivia, or True Crime trivia. If none of the options advertised are what you are looking for, there are options available for customizing your own trivia night and working with CourseHorse’s team of trivia experts to build a personalized evening of trivia. With so many options to choose from, you are certain to find an event that meets your needs.
Virtual Escape Rooms
Like a virtual trivia event, a Virtual Escape Room is a great idea for a fun team-building event that can serve as a celebration of a team’s accomplishments or successes. These events are fun, guided competitions that will see teams of coworkers working together to solve puzzles, discover clues and unravel the mysteries of any given event. These events are overseen by experienced facilitators who will bring the event to life and work to keep participants engaged in the escape room's engrossing mystery and atmospheric events. Many companies are using escape rooms as a fun way to engage employees since not only are they social activities that many people enjoy, but they reward teamwork, lateral thinking and problem-solving skills, so these events double as a kind of skills development activity. Plus, if your team is engaged and find this kind of puzzle-solving enjoyable, they are just incredibly fun group activities that will help bring people together and help them socialize as a group.
CourseHorse offers a wide variety of different escape room mysteries to schedule for teams of up to 200. These events can be tailored or personalized to your teams, and several events have truncated versions that can be completed in less than an hour. If you are interested in a traditional murder virtual murder mystery, CourseHorse runs a Virtual Escape Room: Murder Mystery event that sees participants piecing together clues to solve a crime before the murder strikes again. If you feel like your team would enjoy a bit of nostalgia with their puzzles, CourseHorse offers an Escape the 90s and an Escape the 2000s event where participants will be rewarded for their knowledge of those two decades. There is a Sci-Fi themed The Final Frontier escape event, a horror-themed Monsters and Ghouls event and even themed events like a Marvel Avengers or Jumanji escape rooms. CourseHorse can even help customize the events to fit your team's needs and desires, making this an ideal way to bring teams together for an evening of fun, competitive puzzle-solving.
Virtual Charcuterie Board Party
CourseHorse’s Virtual Charcuterie Board Party brings together the traditional celebratory mingling of a social gathering with the training of a course like their virtual Mixology courses. In this event, participants will learn how to create and display their own charcuterie boards, including learning how to prepare the meats and cheeses and how to select wines with which to pair the tray. This kind of event makes for an ideal celebration because it encourages the kind of socializing of a work party, but it is still structured enough to keep people engaged in the virtual space. Plus, participants will end the event with a fully stacked charcuterie board that they can share with guests, family and friends, and they can put the practical skills they learned in the course to good use at other functions and celebrations.
The Virtual Charcuterie Board Party is a detailed workshop put on by an experienced artisan who will demonstrate and explain the proper techniques that go into creating a board. Making a board is about more than just piling meat and cheese onto a cutting board, and the instructor will help participants strike an ideal balance between including the kinds of meats and cheeses they like and creating a board that balances flavors, dips, jams, vegetables and proteins. Since meat and cheese are so vital for a good board, participants will need to provide their own ingredients, but CourseHorse offers a helpful shopping list to assist in the preparation, and the instructors have the experience and knowledge to help anyone make a board out of the ingredients available to them. This program can serve as a practical celebration of any number of accomplishments or successes and has the added benefit of teaching participants a skill that they can use whenever they have other reasons to celebrate.
End of Year Parties
At a certain point, the simple fact that a team has made it another year together and a company remains humming along is enough reason to celebrate. CourseHorse offers a wide range of different Holiday parties and events for your team to participate in and enjoy. In particular, CourseHorse offers various winter Holiday events for celebrating Christmas or New Year, including the very popular White Elephant Gift Exchange. These events will let participants wind down as the year is coming to a close and engage with their colleagues and coworkers for a bit of Holiday cheer. All of these events are overseen by CourseHorse facilitators, and most of them are perfect for groups of all sizes. Some events will include materials shipped directly to participants' homes, while others won’t require participants to bring anything to the event except themselves and their willingness to have fun and enjoy an end-of-year celebration.
There is a range of different events to choose from, each catering to different group sensibilities, preferences or desires. If you want to host a fun and engaging game for your participants, you can opt for CourseHorse’s Holiday Scavenger Hunt or their Holiday Office Party Virtual Escape Room. If you are thinking that an arts and crafts event would be more fun, there is a Virtual Holiday Ornament Workshop and an Ugly Sweater Making Party. Cooking-related events include a Holiday Cooking Baking Workshop, a Winter Mixology Workshop and a Cookie Decorating Workshop. All of these options provide the same level of support from CourseHorse and will ensure that your team can celebrate the end of the year and the start of the new one.
Virtual Comedy Shows
One of the appealing parts of a good celebration is that you aren’t being tasked with doing all that much. You have reason to celebrate, and nothing can help achieve that feeling more than a relaxing evening doing nothing. CourseHorse understands this and offers a few virtual team-building activities that ask your participants to attend the event and enjoy themselves. CourseHorse offers a range of Virtual Comedy Shows you can host for your teams. All participants will be given a Zoom link to the private showroom, and that’s it, CourseHorse and the performer will take care of the rest. This makes the event perfect for anyone hoping to do minimal extensive planning and wanting to have a celebratory evening event for their staff or team that does involve elaborate activities, games or materials.
CourseHorse offers various options for comedy performances and will work with organizers to ensure that the tone and style of the comedy, as well as the content, hits the perfect tenor for the event they want to put on. You’ll be able to talk directly to the comedian before the show and work together to make sure that the performance you get is the one you want. CourseHorse also regularly works with more than a few professional comedians, so there are a lot of performers whom you can book. This event is perfect for anyone looking for an easy, laid-back way to put on a show in celebration of your team’s hard work and success, giving them a chance to wind down and enjoy a shared virtual activity after a long day (or week) of work.Â
Halloween Parties
Christmas and New Year’s aren’t the only holidays worth celebrating, and CourseHorse offers a range of celebration and party options for workplaces looking to celebrate Halloween. A Halloween party can be a great way to unwind after a long week of work, and it happens right around the time of the year when the weather is starting to turn, and people could use a bit of relaxation and rest. These events can be restful social activities, like a Fall Mixology Workshop or a costume party, or they can be elaborate activities like CourseHorse’s Virtual Pumpkin Carving event. In this event, participants will spend an hour and a half preparing and carving Jack-o-Lanterns as they play Halloween-themed mini-games, answer trivia questions and listen to music. Masks and Halloween candy can be shipped to participants for a small fee, and this program offers a fun and creative way to get ready to celebrate Halloween (especially since everyone who participates will have a fancy pumpkin to decorate their homes).
Alternatively, CourseHorse offers a few different options for Halloween themed trivia events and two different Halloween Escape Rooms, a Haunted House and a Ghouls and Monsters event. These activities are perfect for groups looking for an organized, competitive Halloween event, and they are overseen by experienced facilitators who can bring the proper level of excitement and spookiness to your Halloween party. These events are great ways to unwind and enjoy some challenging and thought-provoking fun as teams work together to solve puzzles, answer trivia questions and resolve mysteries. All of these events can be tailored to the needs of your team, including options for scheduling different lengths of events or facilitating events for teams of up to 200. As with the pumpkin carving course
Virtual Paint and Sip Party
Sometimes, it pays to stick to the classics, and there are few more enjoyable and easy ways to celebrate than by doing something enjoyable with a group of friends over a few glasses of wine. In a Virtual Paint and Sip Party, your team members can get together (virtually) and celebrate their accomplishments by enjoying glasses of wine, chatting with one another and painting a beautiful image of your choosing. These events are incredibly easy to host and even easier to attend since all of the supplies and necessities will be mailed directly to participants. All your participants will need to do is show up and start painting, and since this is a very casual activity intended to give your employees a chance to wind down and celebrate, the painting isn’t even all that important.
CourseHorse runs fairly traditional paint and sip events, so before you book a session, you’ll be able to select from a collection of prefab canvases, or you can send your own photograph directly to CourseHorse. Then, that image will be stenciled onto the canvases that are sent to your employees. With this taken care of, the only thing that participants will need to do is paint inside the lines and add color and definition to the canvas. In addition, participants will be shipped paints (either watercolor or acrylic) and brushes, meaning they will have everything they need to start painting when they get their package. Finally, if you want to make things even less stressful, for a small fee, CourseHorse will also ship all of the participants a bottle of wine that they can enjoy as they are painting (or they can drink their own wine, beer or spirits, or nothing at all).