Online Holiday Party 2020 – A Community Healthcare Team’s Version

December 25, 2020Mubashshir ZakirCulture

Some Background on Swift…

Swift Health is a community-based health services company. We offer services such as occupational therapy and active rehab. Even before COVID-19, we have always been a “locally remote” team that worked across the lower mainland in B.C.

To start, I would like to thank our Social Coordinator and Occupational Therapist Mays Sleiman, as well as our Clinical Director Nushabah Zakir to help organize our Online Holiday Party.

Team culture, self-worth, autonomy, and a sense of community has always been important to us.

Team culture, self-worth, autonomy, and a sense of community has always been important to us. As a locally remote team, meeting in-person made building a team culture a lot easier. The Swift Team tries to have in-person meetups regularly and since Covid — the meetups had to move online. Our holiday parties have always been in-person, but now this also had to shift online too.

What are the challenges of an online holiday party

• How do we make it something to look forward to?
• How do we allow for 20+ participants to all be able to chat with one another?
• How do we make it feel like a company holiday party?

The Plan and Execution

Introductions

To start our Holiday party, everyone introduced themselves by using the ‘spotlight feature’ in Microsoft Teams. If the person was taking part in our gift exchange, they also opened their gift at this time. We allocated fifteen minutes for this and boy were we wrong. It actually took 45 minutes. For some of the team, their food had already arrived and for others, it was still arriving. So we decided to encourage the team to eat their food while it was still warm.

While in previous years we held an ugly sweater competition, this year we were not planning on doing one as we wanted our team to “dress up” — assuming everyone understood that to mean wear fancy clothes. Note to future self: be even more clear with our directions — don’t assume if you don’t need to. Some of us thought it meant to wear their best ugly Christmas sweater.

There was only one thing to do… we held an ugly sweater competition after dinner…

Awards

We announced our various award winners, including our two primary awards. Kinesiologist of the Year and Occupational Therapist of the Year.

…and the winners are…

Occupational Therapist of the Year
(click here to reveal)

Cherry Au
OT of the Year

Re: Cherry Au

Very knowledgeable in her field , patient , show 100% concern

Kamalvir

She is friendly, caring, on time, and has empathy

Ilse

Very knowledgeable in her field, patient, and  shows 100% concern

Kamalvir

I am speechless about Cherry. She always serves me like a family member and she does more than her responsibilities. She is one of the best OT’s.

Amanat

She is very helpful and is always checking up on me.

Raveen

She’s is so helpful and caring. She always makes me feel better about how I am doing physically and mentally. I know I can always count on her when I need support or recommendations.

Chandan

Cherry has been of wonderful support during my recovery. She’s very compatible and has provided great knowledge and direction.

Kristen

She is a very diligent, kind and dedicated. I would not have any other OT apart from Cherry!

Edith

She is so easy to talk to, genuine, caring and very proactive with getting everything done

Ashley

Kinesiologist of the Year
(click here to reveal)

Dominic Tang
Kinesiologist of the Year

Very knowledgeable, friendly and professional person.

Gaurav

Friendly, knowledgeable, caring

Rizwan

He is extremely professional and extremely caring and most of all PATIENT! I am so extremely grateful and fortunate to have been connected with both Dominic Tang AND Samuel the occupational therapist.

I have already recommended both of these outstanding therapist’s to some of my colleagues, and I don’t go out of my way to suggest anyone for anything. I just want to say your company is extremely fortunate to have him.

Grant

really nice and positive and personable, helped me learn proper stretches and exercises for my injuries

Katrina C.

Dominic was very friendly and informative. Explained each exercise clearly and what and how this would help in recovery. Also gave very easy to do at work exercises and stretches when feeling pain.

Gandeep

Very knowledgeable, friendly and professional person

Gaurav

Ahtesham

Friendly, knowledgeable, and caring

Rizwan

He is extremely professional and extremely caring and most of all PATIENT! I am so extremely grateful and fortunate to have been connected with both Dominic Tang. I have already recommended him to some of my colleagues, and I don’t go out of my way to suggest anyone for anything.

Grant

Surjit

really nice, positive and personable. Helped me learn proper stretches and exercises for my injuries

Katrina

Dominic was very friendly and informative. Explained each exercise clearly and what and how this would help in recovery. Also gave very easy to-do at work exercises and stretches when feeling pain.

Gandeep

Richard

Dinner

The plan was to use Microsoft Teams breakout rooms feature since this feature can manually or automatically split your team into smaller groups. This provides the feeling of being at a dinner table and it gives everyone a chance to speak. We also selected table leaders prior to the party, as we felt they could keep conversations going in case people felt shy.

The feature does not work for some versions of Microsoft Teams and for a few, we decided to use the main room as the "dinner table" instead. Since many of us already had dinner at this point, this did not last long. However, it was still important for people to connect with one another.

Ending the night

Our social coordinator and occupational therapist Mays Sleiman used My Free Bingo Cards to design a game for the team to play. The winner was Morgan Marshall, congratulations to her!

Pictures from the holiday party

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  Online Holiday Party 2020 – A Community Healthcare Team’s Version
  Team culture, self-worth, autonomy, and a sense of community has always been important to us. As a locally remote team, meeting in-person made building a team culture a lot easier. The Swift Team tries to have in-person meetups regularly and since Covid -- the meetups had to move online. Our holiday parties have always been in-person, but now this also had to shift online too. Learn how we had our online holiday party.