Our mission at INDEAL Cares is to is to support healthy workplace communities for employees within the commercial furniture industry in North America and in under-served communities globally.
In fact, according to the 2021 Steelcase Global Report, Changing Expectations and the Future of Work: Insights from the Pandemic to Create a Better Work Experience, the biggest challenge with the global pandemic forcing people to work from home has been isolation. This challenge was listed as the number one concern in all ten countries surveyed. We know that over the last year it’s been difficult to stay connected to colleagues, friends, and partners, in a new world of physical and social distancing.
So, in the spirit of bringing teams and individuals together for better health, INDEAL Cares has come up with some fun ways to encourage colleagues, co-workers and partners to connect in health – and for a good cause, while staying physically distanced.
Read on for some engaging, creative ways to bring your team together in health, that could work for any number of people, In any format, within all work environments including in-person, virtual, or hybrid.
50/50 Draw Fundraisers
You can organize a weekly, monthly, or quarterly 50/50 draw with a portion of proceeds being directed back to INDEAL Cares.
Encourage your social committee (or rotate between departments) to sell raffle tickets for a flat rate - or provide participants with an option to purchase multiple tickets for a discounted rate ($5 for 10, $2 for 3, etc.).
A 50/50 Draw Fundraiser works like a normal raffle, but instead of participants winning a prize, the cash proceeds are split between the winner, and the cause.
This event works best in person, but if you decide to run it via email or Microsoft Teams, that will work too!
All you would need is to ask people how many tickets they want.
Try Trivia!
Organize a fun themed trivia lunch-hour or brunch to start the day off right. Survey your team to see what specific topics would be best for trivia – here are a few good options.
This game is better when played in teams. To enter this friendly competition, each team member will pledge to donate a certain amount – and the winners get bragging rights! You can run this trivia at the office or through a virtual meeting platform
like Zoom or Microsoft Teams and
see how many of the questions can each person/group can answer.
Dress Down
– Or Up (!) – Days
Traditionally, Dress Down Friday was an opportunity for colleagues to donate a few dollars to a specific charity, for the chance to wear jeans
at work. After a year of working from home you could instead encourage your teams to host a Dress Up Day! Choose a color, or a theme like Spirit Week, where each day encourages a new fun theme.
Celebrate the fact that people can dress up and see each other again! Consider charging $5 for the day and/or $20 for a themed week! You could even incorporate fun, health-related themes - including dress as your favorite food, or activity. The real point here is to encourage your team to do something together that
is all about fun!
Bucket List Challenge
A bucket list is a list of things you want to do or experience within your lifetime. Naturally, each person’s bucket list says a lot about them - so, what better way to get to know your team members than by sharing their own bucket lists? And now that we’ve had a full year to think about all the things that we want to do after the COVID-19 pandemic is over, expect those lists to be long!
Each week you can ask one person
to share their bucket list ideas. You can specify the lengths of these lists and whether items already completed should be included.
Everyone listening can then spend a short amount of time discussing the bucket list— whether it’s comparing similarities or simply asking fun questions!
If a colleague decides to knock something off of their bucket list – you can celebrate by asking everyone on the team to donate a few dollars
to INDEAL Cares in honor of that accomplishment!
Walk-It
-Wednesdays
Pick a date, time, and either a specific place or a specific distance and challenge your team to walk. They could walk together during team meetings (either in-person or via Microsoft Teams or Zoom) or challenge themselves to walk after work over the course of a month.
Encourage people to track their own mileage and enter it into a team chart to see who has walked the farthest! You can also use this as a team building exercise by encouraging specific departments to compete against each other to see who can walk the longest or the farthest.
To enter this friendly competition, each team member will be required to donate a certain amount – you could even do a 50/50 type prize, where half of the funds are donated to INDEAL Cares, and the other half stay with the winning team.
Get Started
Today
If you’re ready to support INDEAL Cares, while also helping to bring your team together for a worthy cause, we have all of the resources you need. If you have other ideas,
or things that have worked for your organization, email us to let us know!