COVID-19 has left a large portion of us working from home, but even those who are delighted to ditch the morning commute are missing their team members and the social elements work-life brings.
Work socials are crucial for team building and maintaining relationships in the workplace. They inject a bit of fun and variety into a working week, and help keep your company culture alive and staff engaged and connected.
Unfortunately, many ‘at work’ activities have had to be put on hold due to government guidelines and social distancing rules. But that doesn’t mean these events should be completely forgotten about.
We surveyed over 1000 UK workers to ask them what their favourite new way of socialising with their colleagues was. You can see the campaign results here.
The results showed that Brits still enjoy the activities they did before lockdown, but with a new spin. Over a third favoured the digital version of the classic pub quiz (37.2%), by no means a new experience, but a comforting and enjoyable one.
Over 13% chose an online team dinner as their preferred activity, suggesting that general conversation is sorely missed. Even without the thrill of eating out, staff still want to chat with their colleagues over a meal. Escape Room (12.3%), Wine Tasting (11.9%) & Murder Mystery (10.5%) made up the top 5 most popular social activities
The least popular activities were those that didn’t open the floor for conversation between team members, such as cooking classes (9.1%) and zoo live streaming (5.6%). Although still classed as entertaining, it seems most of us are craving social interaction more than a new experience.
With these results, we bring you our new microsite that provides a breakdown of the most popular socially distanced work socials and how you can make them a success, including step-by-step guides on how to set them up, what you’ll need to budget for and links to useful resources.
See more information about how HR systems can help here.
Sue Lingard
Sue studied Personnel Management at the London School of Economics before taking on management roles in the travel, recruitment and finally HR software industry. She's particularly interested in how technologies enable HR teams - and the people they support - to work better together.