It’s a First Financial tradition to celebrate the end of the financial year.
In the past we’ve enjoyed cocktail parties in special venues surrounded by our wonderful team… but this year, with coronavirus restrictions enforced, we turned digital to make sure we still said “Cheers” to another successful year.
To make the event something special, we organised goodie packs for everyone. These included beverages and delicious antipasto snacks, plus some additional sweet treats to be used in our games. The hampers were home delivered by our Principals and were a huge surprise for our team members… the personal touch was really well received.
Katie Stevens, First Financial Office Manager, talks about this year’s celebration and how we made the most of our virtual party.
Minute to Win It
“Our end of financial year function is usually quite stylish… we hire a cocktail venue, we dress up and invite partners; it’s a great way to celebrate. Obviously we couldn’t do that this year… but we still wanted to do something that everyone would enjoy.
So this year we held a Zoom party and we arranged for an external organisation to host some fun activities for us.
The game session was based on an American game show called ‘Minute to Win It’.
We separated into teams and our first activity was to give ourselves team names… ‘COVIDIOTS’ was a great choice, ‘The not so slim shadies’ all wore sunglasses and the ‘Rattlesnakes’ all had musical shakers! Once our teams were arranged, we were given activities to perform within 60 seconds.
First we had to separate M&Ms into colours and put them into a jar with our non-dominant hand… a task that everyone completed with ease… but there were varying levels of skill when it came to the bottle flip. Plus, placing an Oreo on your forehead and manoeuvring it down to your mouth without using your hands or it falling off is definitely not easy!
‘The Lady Marmalades’ took out the winner’s title and bragging rights.”
Star of the Year
Part of our annual celebration is to also give out the Star of the Year award.
This is a peer-nominated award where we all vote for the person within the firm who we believe has lived our key trademarks.
This year we highlighted two new trademarks,
– to be positive and collaborative
– to show pride in performance.
Congratulations to Maddy Fernando from the Client Service team for receiving this year’s prestigious award and also to Rebecca Ruck, Adviser Assistant, for being runner up. Ben Rossi, Managing Director, delivered his speech still wearing his pink, star-shaped glasses, which simply encouraged even more smiles.
Even if we can’t be together in person, we can still have a great time, laughing and enjoying each other’s virtual company.
“It was nice to sit around and chat. Everyone was really engaged, keeping things light when we can’t socialise as normal. I haven’t seen some of the team for a long time so it was lovely to catch up and be able to see everyone’s faces.” Read more First Financial articles.
