Virtual holiday parties are integral for remote and distributed teams to connect, get to know one another, and celebrate your achievements. But they can often be boring and dry, just another meeting to get through before the end of the day. We here at Chocolate Noise are dedicated to creating a different kind of virtual event experience, one full of excitement, education, and enjoyment! Here are five ways we make this happen. (Spoiler alert: You get to eat chocolate.)
1. Send a Gift
Remote employees know their coworkers through the virtual world. Sure, gifs, memes, and email in-jokes are fun, but there’s nothing like the surprise of a real package in the mail. Especially a gift of chocolate.
Each guest to our virtual chocolate tastings receives our curated chocolate kit, with four types of chocolate, a tasting sheet, and more. We send chocolate all over the world and love when a client has international guests.
Plus we host virtual chocolate and beverage tastings as well as virtual chocolate and tea tastings. With those events, our guests get double the number of goodies in the mail.
We can’t tell you the number of times people have told us how excited they were to find this present in advance of their team-building activity.
2. Add an Emcee
Your team is probably pretty familiar with the sound of your voice. And you have a lovely voice, you really do! But it’s nice to mix it up with a new person to lead the event. An emcee will crack jokes, encourage participation, and set the mood for a joyous virtual holiday party.
Our chocolate sommeliers not only know everything you could ever wonder about chocolate but also act as a host, brightening the mood. And if your group is larger than 10 people, you get two delightful voices: a chocolate sommelier and a bonafide emcee. They work in tandem to guarantee your event is seamlessly fun.
Read more about our chocolate experts here.
3. Design an Activity
We’ve all been to many of those “virtual happy hours” where everyone just kind of blankly stares at the other squares on the screen. That’s the opposite of what we want to happen!
An activity keeps colleagues engaged with the activity itself as well as one another, which is exactly what creates important team-building moments. At Chocolate Noise, our activities center around — well, chocolate! After the icebreaker (see above), we spend time talking about how to taste chocolate like we do when we judge chocolate-tasting competitions (yes, they’re a thing!). We walk through each chocolate bar discussing flavor as well as telling the stories about the cocoa beans, the farmers, and the bean-to-bar maker.
Guests always have a lot of fun questions, which we encourage them to ask throughout so that it’s truly an interactive event.
And then we send everyone away with a drinking chocolate to enjoy later!
4. Include an Icebreaker
We know, we know: It’s so seventh grade. But even with coworkers who already know each other, it’s essential to break the ice, especially virtually.
When people come from other virtual meetings, running errands, or taking care of their family, they have other things on their mind. An icebreaker sets the intention that we’re going to party for the holidays with chocolate. Plus, we ask fun icebreaker questions like, what’s your first memory of chocolate, which our guests love to answer.
Sometimes you even get to know your colleagues in a whole new way!
5. Use Visual Aids
Especially over Zoom and other virtual platforms, it can get super boring to look at one talking head for an entire hour. (Or several, if a bunch of people are leading a meeting.)
That’s why graphics, illustrations, photographs, and more are such a big part of our virtual events at Chocolate Noise. We’ve designed all of them ourselves, and you’ll see not only images from our founder’s book but also photographs of cacao trees, cacao pods, farmers across the world, and endearing cartoons about chocolate making.
It’s all about bringing chocolate — and your holiday party — to life!