3 Ways CEOs Should Spend Their Q4 Budget

It’s officially the most wonderful time of the year: Holiday office party season!

We may not be able to host our usual end-of-year office parties, but that doesn’t mean CEOs can’t find creative new ways to end 2021 with a bang.

During a recent virtual meeting, someone referred to 2021 as “the year of no fun.” It got me thinking that workers across every industry and vertical need and deserve fun now more than ever. So rather than ending 2021 devoid of joy or celebration, it’s time for CEOs to step up and spend their end of year Q4 budgets on things that will actually make a positive impact in the lives of their employees. And though it might sound like a great gift idea, I have bad news: everybody at your company already has a wireless bluetooth speaker.

Fear not. No matter where your employees are working from—whether it’s from home, a new Airbnb every week, or the office (in shifts, of course)—there are still ways to keep your team engaged, powered up, and connected this holiday season.

You might not be able to get together, but you can come together for a little friendly competition and show your boss who’s boss.

So this year, it’s time to invest your end-of-year budget into games that will keep your team connected. PS5’s for everyone!

Just kidding. They’re already harder to find than Clorox wipes. Plus, at $500 a pop, you probably couldn’t use the “miscellaneous” line item to hide this kind of purchase from your CFO.

Here’s a better idea: Invest in company gift ideas like mobile games that mean business. 

At 1Huddle, our customers’ CEOs are consistently blown away by the impact we have on their organizations. Just last week, one CEO told us a story about the “life-changing” results our games had on one of his employees who we’ll call “Joe.”

Not long ago, Joe and his wife brought home a newborn baby. Around the same time, Joe’s company rolled out a new weekly contest, and each week the winner of the contest earned a cash prize.

Joe won three weeks in a row. He used some of his prize money to buy a stroller for his baby, and Joe later had the chance to talk directly to his CEO.

“This contest changed my life,” Joe told the CEO.

So this year, instead of an office party or company gift no one will use, invest in the gift that can change your employee’s lives and your company’s bottom line. Here are three fun ways to use 1Huddle’s mobile games to win 2021 through holiday team building activities:

1. TEAM-BUILDING & CONNECTIVITY

Help your team become more connected by launching a brand new contest!

The games Joe and his teammates played during their company contest covered a wide range of topics and workforce skill areas. 

Some games are serious, and others are more fun and jovial. 1Huddle’s brand new premium game marketplace – The Shop – has hundreds of games across 16 different skill areas. If you’re looking to fire up your workers and make sure every employee is caught up with your company’s policies and procedures heading into 2022, you might look for games in foundational categories like:

• Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
• Sexual Harassment
• Compliance
• Workplace Safety
• Company Values

1Huddle’s game marketplace also has hundreds of light-hearted games to strengthen the bond between teams. The same CEO who told us Joe’s story also mentioned that he had been struggling to build and maintain relationships with his team while everyone was working from home. We helped solve that problem by giving his company access to games specifically designed to connect (and reconnect) entire teams.

Here are some creative ways 1Huddle’s players have been using our platform to increase connectivity and collaboration:

Give everyone on the team a chance to build a game about their favorite holiday traditions.

Just because we can’t partake in our usual holiday traditions doesn’t mean we can’t reminisce about them.

With 1Huddle, it only takes minutes to create a game, so coming up with new virtual holiday team building activities for your workers is quick and easy. Managers can have every one of their workers submit a question about their favorite holiday traditions and set up a game where team members play to discover each other’s answers. Or, every employee could create their own game about their favorite holiday traditions and memories. Any game you can think up, you can create!

Challenge the entire company to a themed weekly contest.

Keep things fresh and fun with themed weekly contests.

We’re nine months into working from home, so the weeks can start to feel boring and monotonous. Shake things up by challenging your workers to a unique themed contest each week. You can even roll out new games every day to keep the competition fresh and give small daily or weekly prizes to the winners to keep your workers engaged and excited.

Managers can also choose a new team member to create the weekly game over their favorite hobbies. That way, you’ll get the perfect mix of games on things like pop culture, sports, the latest Netflix series, or anything else your team members are passionate about. The team member creating the game gets to choose how long their coworkers have to answer each question, how many points the questions are worth, and what constitutes a passing score. This is a really cool way to give every team member a chance to be a leader.

Weekly contests also help your team bond and get to know each other on a more personal level, while making employees feel especially valued by giving their colleagues the chance to learn more about their interests and passions.

Build games on each other.

There’s no better way to get to know your colleagues than by building games on each other.

Pair up team members and ask them to discover each other’s fun facts, unique experiences, and any other personal information they want to share. Then, turn the answers into games. You won’t believe how much you’ll learn about each other.

This is one of our favorite team activities at 1Huddle. Every new hire creates a game on themselves during their first week here, and we always have running ‘get to know you’ games with cool facts and background information that we break down by team. So we have a ‘Get to Know the Sales Team’ game, a ‘Get to Know the Marketing Team’ game and so on.

Even before the pandemic started, I have been a remote worker and these games helped me feel connected to every 1Huddle team member even though I’d never met most of them in person. Before my first day of work, I knew facts about my team like where they went to school, where their dream vacation destination is, and even the names of their pets. Building games on each other is the perfect way to stay connected and form personal relationships during a time when many workers are feeling disconnected from their colleagues.

2. ONBOARD NEW TEAM MEMBERS

Let’s face it—being new is hard.

Especially in 2020, when most new hires don’t have the opportunity to meet their coworkers in-person and learn alongside their colleagues in a shared space.Companies worldwide have adapted to both formal and informal new-hire procedures to overcome disconnection and rapid business changes. And as CEOs and business leaders, we have to work harder and be more intentional to help new employees succeed and feel included.

Plus, competition for business and consumer spending, which was already fierce before the pandemic, has ratcheted up even higher during COVID and shows no signs of subsiding. That means getting new employees ready to win on day one is essential.

1Huddle helps you do just that with games covering areas like:

• Pre-Learning
• First 90 Days Orientation
• Mandatory Onboarding Orientation, Workshops, and Training
• Company IT & Standard Operating Procedures
• Role-Specific Skills Training

By adding 1Huddle to your team’s onboarding process, you can save all of your manuals, videos, and modules in one place and make them available to new hires on their mobile devices so that they can onboard, train, and upskill any time, anywhere. We even have multi-level games that make it easy for teams to level up one game at a time.

We also give your leaders the dashboards, real-time reporting, and controls necessary to make sure employees are getting up to speed as quickly as possible. Our platform and content prepares the average new hire for work 59% faster than normal.

With 1Huddle, CEOs across the globe have been able to get new workers ready for work better and faster by giving their new hires the tools to immerse into the company culture more completely, settle into their roles faster, and make fewer mistakes.

3. ENGAGE AND DEVELOP YOUR TEAM (FROM ANYWHERE)

In 2020, we’re all familiar with meetings that could’ve been an email. And yes, those meetings could have been an email, but they should have been a game.

For companies that have the ability to work remotely, most meetings have been transformed into virtual video calls. But these meetings don’t work for the millions of workers who have taken on additional responsibilities to care for family members and juggle work and life responsibilities from their homes during the pandemic. We need to make virtual meetings and training more flexible. By breaking down these barriers, we can make workforce development accessible to every worker.

Because training never stops. Joe’s CEO—and every leader at 1Huddle’s customer companies—told us that they’re working harder than ever to keep their teams engaged and moving in the right direction together.

CEOS can keep your team up to speed and win this holiday season with games that:

• Communicate company updates
• Track engagement with and understanding of new product launches or projects
• Develop new skills to manage increased workloads
• Reinforce non-negotiable training and policies

For Joe’s managers, training on 1Huddle was easy. Building training games for the contest was quick and intuitive, and Joe and his teammates’ enthusiasm for playing and winning the contest made the learning fun. It gave the company something to rally around. It built the team.

Of course, the biggest benefit is that it impacted sales: The company is up 15% this year and, to quote the CEO, “all they use is 1Huddle.”

So the next time you have a Zoom meeting that could’ve been an email, make it a game instead.

This year, consider investing your Q4 budget in games with the ability to turn 2021 into the “Year of Fun.”

Ready to give your workers something to celebrate by gifting 1Huddle to your team? Get started on your holiday shopping here.

And don’t worry, your holiday office party will be a much bigger, better celebration next year!

If you’re ready to get started with 1Huddle today, email me to kick things off.

Happy Holidays,

Kirk Madsen