9 simple ideas to bring the holiday spirit to your intranet

It’s almost that time of the year again: Christmas and New Year are coming. 

While the holiday season is mostly about connecting with family, it’s a great time to connect with colleagues too.

Here are nine ways to use your intranet to boost company culture and communication during the most wonderful time of the year. And if you have other ideas but aren’t sure how to make them happen on your Involv intranet, feel free to contact us for help—we’re here to make it easy for you!

Let’s set the mood! Just like decorating your home or office, giving your intranet a festive makeover is a simple but effective way to spread some holiday cheer.

Change the background to holiday colors, add Christmas elements to your logo, update the main intranet banners with warm holiday greetings, or include a countdown widget to Christmas or New Year. Small touches like these can brighten up the intranet and lift everyone’s spirits.

Involv’s customizable design makes it easy to tweak your intranet for the holidays. You can even update your Involv mobile app with themes like falling leaves for autumn or snowflakes for winter—so your team feels the holiday spirit, no matter where they are.

The holiday season is all about fun, so why not bring some of that spirit to your intranet? A festive competition is a great way to boost employee engagement and increase intranet usage, driving higher adoption. 

Here are a few competition ideas: 

• A photo contest: pets in festive outfits, ugly Christmas jumpers, or holiday-themed baking, etc. You can easily create a photo gallery on the Involv intranet where everyone can view and engage through likes and comments, turning the contest into an interactive and lively event.

• A fun quiz about holiday traditions or whatever’s fun like interesting facts about colleagues (for example, ‘What’s the name of colleague X’s newborn baby?’). Create engaging quizzes easily through Microsoft Forms in Involv, accessible directly on your intranet.

• A virtual scavenger hunt. Hide symbols or icons related to various holidays across your intranet and have employees search for them.

• An idea box on how the company can best celebrate the holidays.

Using polls is another great way to make your intranet more interactive and engaging. It encourages employee participation and helps you learn more about employees. Particularly during Christmas time, you can get people more excited and engaged by asking them about Christmas-related topics.

With Involv’s built-in polling feature, you can quickly create these polls and share the results with everyone—making your intranet a more interactive and engaging space.

An advent calendar is a great way to build excitement as the holiday season approaches. Consider a virtual advent calendar and populate it with interesting company facts, pieces of useful information (healthy eating tips during the holidays, for example), or greetings from each team and department.

You could even turn it into a fun competition, where employees search the intranet for answers to daily questions to win a prize!

Photo galleries are a fantastic way to humanize the workplace and promote social interaction. By sharing personal, holiday-themed photos, employees can connect in new and meaningful ways. Consider creating a gallery on your intranet where everyone can share their festive working-from-home photos. It’s a fun way to get to know each other on another level.

This time of year also brings many team-building activities. Keep these moments alive by adding them to a dedicated photo gallery on your intranet.

Involv’s social features allow employees to like, comment, and engage with the photos, making the experience even more interactive.

Not everyone celebrates the same religious festivals, but everyone wraps up the year and looks forward. This makes it the perfect time to thank employees and recognize their contributions. You can also reflect on the year’s highs and lows and talk about the opportunities ahead.

When crafting your festive message, think about how to keep employees motivated and in high spirits. It’s important to tie your message to your broader strategic goals. And of course, share it on your intranet so you can reach all employees, wherever they are.

Involv’s omnichannel capabilities make it easy to share this message across all platforms, whether through the intranet, Teams, email newsletter, mobile app, or digital signage. This ensures that the message reaches everyone, especially remote employees or those in different time zones.

Video’s get more engagement than text, especially if they are fun. So how about making a light-hearted video to bring out the festivity and celebration? It’s a tremendous way to make your culture shine. 

Need some inspiration? Simply google “corporate holiday videos”. You will find plenty of ideas to get inspired. You only need a fun idea and a smartphone to get started. And tools like Canva, JibJab and Moovly are great to help you produce your videos fast and easily. 

Don’t stress about the video production. Instead, spend your time working on the content and on how to make it authentic and fun. 

With Involv’s video integration, you can seamlessly share videos on your company intranet, making them accessible from any device or location.

Create a dedicated space on your intranet where employees can reflect on the past year. This could be a blog, forum, or a series of internal posts where people share personal or professional highlights, growth stories, or simply send holiday greetings. It’s a great way to build connections and foster a sense of gratitude and inspiration.

Encourage managers and leaders to kick it off with their own reflections. This not only helps wrap up the year on a positive, reflective note but also sparks meaningful conversations and connections across teams.

With Involv, you can easily create different categories for your news or blog posts, helping to organize content based on topics. Additionally, Involv Content Subscription allows employees to personalize their experience by subscribing to the categories or topics that interest them most, creating a more engaging and customized intranet experience for everyone.

Music brings people together, so why not create a collaborative holiday playlist? Ask employees to submit their favorite holiday songs through an intranet poll, and compile them into a Spotify or YouTube playlist.

Once the playlist is ready, share it on the intranet for everyone to enjoy during the holidays. It’s a simple but effective way to connect employees through shared music tastes and spark conversations. You can stream it during virtual events, company meetings, or just let it play in the background as everyone works.

With Involv intranet, you can easily create polls to gather song suggestions and embed or share the final playlist right on your intranet homepage. This ensures the playlist is accessible to all employees, whether they’re in the office or working remotely.

With these nine ideas, you can easily bring some holiday cheer to your intranet. Some of them may be outside your comfort zone, but remember—great things never come from staying in the same place! Whatever you choose, plan ahead, get buy-in, and execute with enthusiasm.

Your intranet is a powerful tool for internal communication and engagement, and the holiday season is the perfect time to make the most of it.