Christmas at Dunelm

Linda Chan
Dunelm Technology
Published in
5 min readDec 21, 2022

At Dunelm, we embrace the festive spirit during this most magical time of the year. While working super hard to launch all the fabulous things needed before peak, we get up to all sorts, it’s always my busiest time of year and here’s why;

Dunelm Christmas 2022

Delivering Joy

We have run this campaign for a few years in Bush House London. Colleagues nominate local charities close to their heart that we might support. This year Jon Tarrant chose Family Action, which helps families experiencing poverty, disadvantage, and social isolation provide their children with a Christmas gift. To get involved, we simply had to take a tag representing a child from the tree, choose a present and return it under the tree in a gift bag. For those unable to make it into the office, we set up a link to collect donations to further boost our toy appeal. We raised £500 and brought many gifts. Seeing people come together to embrace the gift of giving is so inspiring!

Jon Tarrant, Krupa Patel, MEEEEEEEEE!

Time to party!

I absolutely love an opportunity to get dolled up, hangout and socialise with the Dunelm family. Our Christmas party is a real highlight; we sipped our bubbly, our cocktails and connected with those we don’t have the chance to see as often (in person, at least). I’ve not had many opportunities to wear heels post-pandemic and this certainly took its toll, halfway through the night I was sure everyone had noticed I got a lot shorter, but switching to my trusty pumps helped me dance the night away

“I Wanna Dance with Somebody - Whitney Houston”

Christmas Work Do

National Colleague Voice

Once a month, I have the opportunity to get together with colleagues from all over Dunelm, our CEO and other exec members to discuss topics of interest. This month we discussed the impact and importance of colleague safety with the cost of living crisis, crunch of Christmas, isolation, loneliness, long dark nights, wellbeing and seasonal affective disorders. This is a chance for us to “Voice” what’s on our minds from our different areas to champion change and make a difference where possible.

Delivery Shizzle

At Dunelm Head Office SSC in Leicester, as a Delivery team we donned our least itchy woolly Christmas jumpers. There was plenty of therapeutic fun to be had with festive crafting, hand painting and colouring wooden Christmas tree ornaments. Why therapeutic? It takes some serious concentration to stay within the lines!

Crafty Christmas

For a brief time, I was able to connect with my fellow delivery colleague on a 1:1 level, all we did was have a chat. We were served some tasty treats like panettone, mince pies and mulled wine to wash it down. Note: they even do vegan mince pies in many shops.

Delivery Chapter Peeps

Let’s get quizicle!

It has become a bit of a tradition within the delivery team that Priyesh Mistry will spoil us with a Christmas quiz. This year was no exception, with movie clips of “what happens next” and music clips “watch closely”.

There are only 2 golden rules

  • Judges’ decisions are final
  • No cheating, as you only cheat yourself

Wellbeing is super important to us here at Dunelm so the team hosted some sessions centred around mindfulness and how to handle stress.

The snowball effect

Everyone stood around in a circle, we were each given a “snowball”; soft, squishy with a weird quality that felt like snow minus the cold. Think festive stress ball! Starting with the first person we all had to throw the ball in turn to one another remembering who it was, completing once the last person had thrown it back to the 1st person again.

We were expected to remember the initial sequence and were asked to go a bit faster the 2nd time around. Later they introduced more snowballs until it became a snowball fight. Post a few rounds of the game we were asked what we had learnt.

  • It’s difficult to juggle many snowballs at once, especially if they are all being thrown at you and there is lots of context switching!
  • Who left the room? Often our minds wonder and we start to think about other things like what’s for lunch?!
  • We all juggle more than we can handle and sometimes we drop the ball.
  • Always try to focus on the task at hand and stay alert!

Stress is building

What is agile without a game of Lego, we split into mini teams and built models of our team stress. It was interesting how we all visualise and interpret stress differently.

Modelling stress
I can’t get no sleep

A bedroom, a sleepless person, who is constantly awake walking around. They have lost their head and their mind is constantly active.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeel be coming home for Christmas!
Using the ‘wheel of life’, we drew our own current stress, looking at this really brought to life what was going on for me at work. So how do we handle this? We moved into an open forum discussion about what colleagues should and shouldn’t do when you are stressed out.

Linda Chan’s Wheel of Stress

For me these are my simple asks

Shouldn’t

  • Try to come give me a hug
  • Offer to help me
  • Taking things off me that I am trying to work through or process

Should

  • Let me be angry and have a rant to get things off my chest
  • Sometimes you just need somebody to listen

We rarely check in with ourselves especially over the busy periods, we should pause and listen. Christmas for me means spending time with “my best friends” and being mindful of others.

Please reach out to share your experiences and leave a comment below.

Only another 4 more sleeps till Christmas…

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Published in Dunelm Technology

Tales about the great technology being used and the talented team behind it at Dunelm — the home of homes. Covering everything from high level whim-driven musings about technological trends right through to deep-dive technical discussions and personal projects.

Written by Linda Chan

Agile Angel | Delivery Person | Amateur Photographer | Travel to eat my way around the world!

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