More events and engagement activities that helped our crew through COVID quarantining and working from home.

Our last post detailed Absolutely Refreshed, a two-month initiative we launched early in the COVID pandemic. Working from home was challenging for many; while Absolutely Refreshed eased the loneliness and isolation, we wanted to keep this sense of community going throughout the work from home experience.

So, in the three months that have elapsed since Absolutely Refreshed officially ended, we’ve been developing new virtual activities. Some of these were part of our Fun Fridays; others came from our employee clubs. But no matter when or where they came from, these have been great fun!

What Have We Been Doing Since Absolutely Refreshed?

Here are a few of the virtual activities that have lightened up our WFH time:

  1. Kitchen Tales – Cooking quickly became a popular lockdown activity, and for good reason! While some of our employees are accomplished home cooks, others were, shall we say, less accomplished. Getting together to share tips, recipes, successes, and funny stories was not only entertaining, it also helped those with less experience gain some useful (and tasty) skills!
  2. Talk and Win – Did your high school or business college offer an extemporaneous speaking challenge? Mine did – and it was boring. We livened the basic idea up by randomly choosing simple funny topics that participants had to speak about for a solid minute. Employees then voted on the best speaker. This challenge called for quick-wittedness and a healthy sense of humor, and it was a great break from all the COVID seriousness.
  3. The Art of Quilling – As we discussed in another post, we decided to try a virtual quilling workshop. It was conducted by one of our own employees and was open to the whole family (especially kids). This event gathered a lot more participation than we expected and produced some very colorful and attractive works.
  4. Quizzastic Friday – Group quizzes are so much fun and are always a real crowd pleaser. And, as it turns out, they’re quite easy to move to a virtual format! We used classic board games as the theme for Quizzastic Friday and really enjoyed a little friendly competition.
  5. Sudoku Challenge – Employees were given a Sudoku to solve. We got responses way faster than we imagined! But, given the number of data scientists and analytics experts at Absolutdata, maybe we shouldn’t have been so surprised at how good with numbers our teammates are ?   
  6. Digital Antakshari – If you’re not familiar with Antakshari, it’s a popular Indian singing game. Someone sings a verse or two from a well-known song; the next player or team has to pick a song that starts with the last letter of the last sung word. So, for example, if you sang “Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?”, the next player would have to find a song that starts with the letter ‘L’. In this twist, we had different themes for different rounds – guessing the singer when a tune was played, singing a song relevant to the image shown, guessing the movie that the song came from, singing the lyrics when the song tune is played, etc.
  7. IPL Fantasy League – The lockdown put a temporary halt to our regular ACL (Absolutdata Cricket League) tournament, but it couldn’t stop our cricket lovers. Instead, they came together for the IPL Fantasy league.

 

      

There’s one more popular in-person team activity that has translated remarkably well to the virtual world: yoga. In the next series post, we’ll share some of our experiences with moving Absolutdata’s Corporate Yoga program online. See you then!