Honoring cultural holidays and heritage months at work can be a meaningful way to help your team learn about history and culture, build connections across different life paths, and create a work environment where everyone feels seen, respected, and included.

But honoring cultural holidays at work doesn’t just mean putting up a themed poster or sending a quick email with a few fun facts. The most impactful celebrations invite employees to learn, participate, ask questions, and connect with the stories behind the holiday.

For instance, interactive cultural programs from Unexpected Virtual Tours & Training bring learning directly to your team with live experiences and games that make it easy for employees to participate together.

Whether you’re planning activities for a heritage month, recognizing a cultural holiday, or building a year-round workplace culture calendar, here are the best ways to celebrate with your team.

How to Celebrate Cultural Holidays at Work

Why Honor Cultural Holidays in the Workplace?

Recognizing cultural holidays at work can do more than mark an occasion on the calendar. Thoughtful workplace cultural celebrations can help your employees learn about different histories and traditions while creating opportunities for connection, empathy, collaboration, and belonging.

When your organization makes space for cultural learning, you can also support:

• Greater cultural awareness: Help your employees better understand and connect with people from different backgrounds, including colleagues, clients, and the communities you serve.
• Stronger connections: Create opportunities for employees to build empathy, strengthen relationships, and collaborate across different experiences and perspectives.
• Higher employee satisfaction and morale: Meaningful cultural celebrations can help your employees feel valued and connected to their workplace.
• Employee well-being and confidence: Creating an environment where people feel seen and respected can contribute to a stronger sense of belonging at work.
• Stronger communication skills: Learning about different cultural perspectives can help teams develop the communication and interpersonal skills needed to work effectively together.
• Recruitment and retention: A workplace that values cultural learning and inclusion can help organizations build a reputation as a top place to work while supporting employee recruitment and retention.

Cultural competence and cultural consciousness are at the heart of many of our top-rated workplace cultural experiences at Unexpected Virtual Tours and Training. Our live, interactive programs give teams an engaging way to learn about history and culture together, wherever you’re located.

Ready to make cultural holidays more meaningful at work? Read on for best practices, easy ways to recognize cultural holidays and heritage months, and ideas for engaging your team.

The Best Ways to Celebrate Cultural Holidays at Work

Bring Employees Together for an Interactive Cultural Experience

One of the best ways to honor a cultural holiday is to give employees an opportunity to experience its history and cultural significance together.

Instead of asking employees to read a long article or sit through a passive presentation, consider bringing in an expert facilitator or booking an interactive virtual experience. Your employees can learn through storytelling, discussion, questions, trivia, and activities that make the subject matter more memorable.

This type of programming is exactly what Unexpected Virtual Tours & Training specializes in. Our heritage month and workplace culture experiences combine knowledgeable facilitators, interactive storytelling, historical and cultural education, questions throughout the experience, and live-streaming from culturally significant locations. Our sessions are designed by historians and team-building experts, with core learning concepts intentionally incorporated into each experience.

For distributed or hybrid teams, virtual cultural experiences can be especially effective because everyone can participate from wherever they work.

Take a Virtual Trip to a Significant Cultural Location

• Washington, D.C. during Black History Month in Febraury
• Montgomery, Alabama while learning about Black resistance and the Civil Rights Movement
• San Francisco’s Chinatown during AANHPI Heritage Month in May
• New York City’s Stonewall National Monument during Pride Month in June
• Nashville, Tennessee while exploring the stories of women in American music during Women’s History Month in March
• Hampton, Virginia (where the first enslaved Africans landed in 1619 and where the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation was read in the South) while learning about the history of Juneteenth
• Los Angeles while exploring Hispanic and Latiné heritage, to see the famed Olvera Street and one of the oldest murals in the country by a Hispanic artist
• Ocmulgee Mounds National Historic Park while learning about Indigenous history and culture

Pair Learning With Trivia or Interactive Team Building

Learning doesn’t have to feel like a lecture. Adding interactive elements such as trivia, games, challenges, or creative activities can encourage your employees to participate while reinforcing what they’ve learned.

For example, our Black History Month experience combines storytelling, art, interactive trivia, and a live-streamed visit to historic Black neighborhoods. Our Black Innovation experience pairs live storytelling about Atlanta’s history of Black creativity and entrepreneurship with a historic Shark Tank-style challenge.
Other experiences incorporate music, pop culture, food-focused trivia, and other interactive elements.

The result is an experience that feels more like an engaging team event than a traditional training session.

Recognize the History Behind the Holiday

A cultural holiday is more meaningful when employees understand why it’s being celebrated or recognized. Rather than focusing exclusively on food, decorations, clothing, or other surface-level elements of a culture, give your employees context about the history, people, movements, and experiences connected to the occasion.

For example, our Juneteenth virtual experience explores the history of Emancipation along with the holiday’s significance and traditions. Our Pride Month: Origins program examines both the history of the movement and the role LGBTQIA+ people have played throughout American history. Our Indigenous and Native American heritage experience explores both historical and contemporary Indigenous communities and includes a leading Indigenous scholar who is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation.

This approach helps employees understand that cultural celebrations aren’t just about a single day or month; they’re connected to much larger stories.

Learn More: watch the short video below for tips on how to respectfully celebrate cultural holidays and heritage months without appropriating.

Create Space for Stories and Conversations

• What was something new you learned?
• What surprised you?
• How does this history connect to our world today?
• What questions do you still have?
• How might what you learned influence the way you work with others?

Let Employees Participate Without Putting Them on the Spot

• An optional educational event or team building experience
• Facilitated discussions
• A recommended book, podcast, or documentary
• Cultural history resources
• An opportunity to support a relevant community organization
• Virtual experiences that employees can attend together

Make Cultural Learning Part of Your Year-Round Calendar

One of the easiest mistakes organizations can make is treating cultural learning as something that happens only during a handful of designated occasions. Instead, build a workplace culture calendar that gives employees opportunities to learn and celebrate throughout the year.

Unexpected Virtual Tours & Training makes it easy to bring cultural learning into your workplace throughout the year with heritage and cultural experiences for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, Women’s History Month, AAPI Heritage Month, Juneteenth, Pride, Hispanic and Latiné Heritage Month, Veterans Day, Indigenous and Native American Heritage, and more.

Many of our experiences are also available year-round, giving teams the flexibility to learn and connect beyond specific holidays and heritage months. We also offer optional, add-on Treat Boxes with themed goodies shipped directly to your team members, creating a stronger shared experience and making the session more tangible and memorable.

Rather than treating cultural celebrations as one-off events, build an ongoing culture of learning with opportunities for your team to explore different histories, traditions, and perspectives throughout the year. Start planning with our heritage month calendar for work, then find a virtual experience that can bring your next cultural celebration to life.

Give Employees Something to Talk About Afterward

The best workplace cultural experiences don’t necessarily end when the event does. Keep the conversations going with a follow-up question in Slack or Teams, a short reflection survey, recommended resources, or a team discussion.

You could ask, “What’s one thing you learned during this session that you’ll remember?” Or, “What is one idea from our experience that you’d like to explore further?”

Cultural Holiday Ideas for the Workplace

Looking for specific occasions to incorporate into your workplace culture calendar? Here are a few of our favorite possibilities:

Martin Luther King Jr. Day (January)

Use Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January as an opportunity to explore Dr. King’s legacy, the history of the Civil Rights Movement, and the importance of community. Our MLK experience also highlights Coretta Scott King’s vital role in continuing her husband’s work.

Black History Month (February)

Go beyond a list of famous historical figures. Explore Black communities, innovation, resistance, creativity, and the continuing impact of Black history.

Unexpected Virtual Tours & Training offers several Black History Month experiences, including Black History Month, Black Meccas, and Good Trouble, as well as year-round Black Innovation programming.

Women’s History Month (March)

Make Women’s History Month more meaningful with an experience that brings history to life. Unexpected Virtual Tours & Training offers immersive, interactive programs that explore the stories, achievements, and challenges of women throughout history.

From She Innovates, featuring female inventors and innovators, to She Rocks!, exploring women who used music to create change, these engaging experiences give teams an opportunity to learn, connect, and celebrate together.

AAPI Heritage Month (May)

Help employees explore Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander history, culture, representation, and identity.

Our Being American experience includes a live-streamed visit to San Francisco’s Chinatown and interactive trivia focused on AAPI representation in movies. The American Dream session explores inspiring stories of Asian American and Pacific Islander women who fought for inclusion.

Juneteenth (June 19)

Juneteenth is an opportunity to learn about emancipation and the history surrounding this federal holiday. Unexpected Virtual Tours & Training offers three distinct Juneteenth experiences: Emancipation, Rise, and Celebration, each exploring different aspects of Black history, culture, and identity.

Pride Month (June)

Make Pride programming an opportunity to explore LGBTQIA+ history, innovation, and cultural contributions. Our Pride: Origins virtual team building experience explores LGBTQIA+ history, while Queer Science highlights LGBTQIA+ innovators in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Hispanic and Latiné Heritage Month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15)

Explore the diversity and evolution of Hispanic and Latiné identity and culture. The La Identidad session takes teams on a virtual trip to Los Angeles, while Somos Americanos uses music to explore artists, innovators, and cultural movements that have shaped the Americas.

Indigenous and Native American Heritage (October-November)

Use November as an opportunity to learn about Indigenous history and culture while recognizing that Indigenous communities are very much part of our present.

This virtual Indigenous and Native American history program brings learning to life through an interactive experience featuring live guides, Indigenous perspectives, and a live-streamed visit to Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park.

Veterans Day (November 11)

Explore the diverse experiences of people who have served in the armed forces and the history of military service. Our Veterans experience includes a live-streamed look at key military milestones around Washington, D.C.’s National Mall.

Make Cultural Holidays at Work More Meaningful With Unexpected Virtual Tours & Training

Planning cultural holiday activities for employees doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. For more than a decade, Unexpected Virtual Tours & Training has specialized in creating immersive workplace experiences that bring history and culture to life.

With friendly facilitators, interactive storytelling, live-streaming from historic and cultural locations, questions throughout each event, and experiences developed by historians and team-building experts, UVTT gives teams a way to learn together while actually enjoying the experience.

Unexpected Virtual Tours & Training has led more than 1,000 training sessions for 55,000+ employees and has worked with more than 500 clients, including some of the world’s leading companies.

Our programs are research-backed and supported by three published historians with a combined 50 years of research experience. More than 400 hours of research and development go into a one-hour event program. Additionally, Unexpected Virtual Tours & Training is also a certified minority and women-owned business.

And if you’re planning multiple cultural celebrations throughout the year, we offers a Heritage Month Team Building Subscription Package with more than 16 events to choose from, priority scheduling, free recording access, and a 15% discount for qualifying groups.

Ready to bring your workplace culture calendar to life?

Fill out the short form below, and a member of our team will be in touch to share more and answer your questions!