"Marking holidays inclusively: the value under the festival"

Holidays are a test of whether a company actually means what it says about belonging, and most companies quietly fail it in one of two ways. Either they ignore the calendar entirely, treating every occasion as a day off and nothing more, which reads as cold and slightly hollow — a company that claims to care about its people and cannot be bothered to mark the moments that matter to them. Or they celebrate some traditions warmly and pass over others, which sends a message no one intends but everyone notices: whose culture is the default here, and whose is a guest.

There is a way through that avoids both, and it starts with being clear about what a workplace is actually marking when it marks a holiday. This matters more than it first appears, because how a company handles its calendar is one of the clearest signals it sends about who belongs — and belonging, as we will come to, is one of the eight dimensions that quietly decides who stays and who contributes. Getting the calendar right is not about the festivities. It is about whether everyone on the team can look at the year and see themselves in it.

Mark the value, not the belief

Under almost every occasion worth marking is a human value that does not belong to any one group. A festival of light is, underneath, about hope and renewal — the return of light to darkness, which is a human experience before it is any particular tradition's. A harvest festival is about gratitude and the reward of shared effort. A remembrance day is about honouring what came before. A new year is about beginning again, the universal human act of drawing a line and starting fresh. These values are the reason the occasions endure across centuries, and they are shared by people who hold very different beliefs about everything else.

A workplace is not a place of worship, and it does not need to take a position on anyone's theology to mark these values. It can mark the gratitude without the doctrine, the renewal without the ritual claim, the light without the specific belief. This is the key move, and it is worth being precise about it: the workplace marks the shared human value at the root of an occasion, not the particular belief system that occasion belongs to. Done well, this is not a watering-down or a stripping-out. It is finding the part of the occasion that everyone in the room can genuinely share, and gathering around that — which is often the richest part, the part that made the occasion matter in the first place, underneath the specifics that divide.

A day off is not the same as being seen

Many companies, trying to be fair, handle holidays through policy — a set of floating days people can take for whatever they observe, so no one has to use a personal day for their own tradition. This is genuinely good and worth doing; it removes a real inequity, where the majority's holidays are company holidays and everyone else has to spend their own leave. But it is worth being clear that a fair days-off policy and marking an occasion are two different things, and one does not substitute for the other. A floating holiday says "you may be absent for your occasion." Marking the occasion says "your occasion matters to us." Those are not the same message, and belonging responds to the second.

The gap shows up like this: a person can have a perfectly fair leave policy and still feel that their moments are invisible, because being allowed to take the day off privately is not the same as the company acknowledging the day at all. The majority's occasion gets a company event; theirs gets a line in a leave policy. Both are technically accommodated, but only one is seen. This does not mean the policy is wrong — it is necessary — it means the policy is the floor, not the ceiling. A company serious about belonging pairs the fair-leave floor with genuine acknowledgement of the shared values across the calendar, so that people are not only permitted their occasions but included in the year. The policy handles fairness; the marking handles belonging, and a team needs both.

Why this is not a lowest common denominator

The instinct is to hear "mark the shared value, not the belief" as reducing everything to a bland, generic celebration that means nothing to anyone. It is the opposite, when done well. The shared human values under these occasions — gratitude, renewal, hope, remembrance, new beginnings — are not thin. They are among the deepest things people feel, and they are deep precisely because they are shared. A genuine moment of collective gratitude is not a diluted version of a harvest festival; it is the emotional core of what a harvest festival always was, made accessible to everyone rather than only to those who hold the specific tradition.

The failure mode of "inclusive" celebration is when it becomes so cautious that it marks nothing real — a generic "winter celebration" with no genuine content, which people correctly experience as hollow. That is not what marking the shared value means. It means going deeper, to the real human experience under the occasion, and marking that with genuine feeling, rather than either marking the narrow tradition (which excludes) or marking nothing (which is cold). The distinction is between finding the real shared value and defaulting to a nervous blandness that shares nothing. The first is inclusive and rich; the second is inclusive and empty, and only the first actually builds anything.

Why this builds belonging rather than dividing

The reason this matters is belonging, which is one of the eight dimensions of a healthy team and one of the most sensitive. Belonging is damaged when someone looks at how their company celebrates and sees that their moments are invisible while others are marked — that the company throws itself into one tradition's festivities and does not even acknowledge theirs. It is equally damaged when someone is expected to participate in something that is not theirs while their own passes unnoticed, which quietly tells them that they are the guest and someone else is the host. Belonging is built, by contrast, when everyone can look at the year and see their moments acknowledged, and can join in others' celebrations without being made to feel like an outsider or a token.

Marking the shared value under each occasion does both at once. It lets a company acknowledge a wide range of traditions without ranking them or picking a default, and it gives everyone a genuine way in, because gratitude and renewal and remembrance are things a whole team can feel together regardless of what they believe. A person from any background can participate wholeheartedly in a moment of collective gratitude, because gratitude is theirs too — whereas they cannot wholeheartedly participate in a specific religious ritual that is not theirs, and should not be asked to. Marking the value includes; marking the belief, for a diverse team, inevitably excludes someone. The choice of what to mark is the choice of who belongs.

The default-and-guest problem

The quiet damage in most workplace holiday practice is the signal it sends about who is default. When a company marks one tradition's holidays elaborately and others not at all, it is not making a theological statement; it is making a belonging statement, and the statement is: this tradition is the norm here, and the others are exceptions we may or may not remember. No one decides this explicitly. It emerges from the majority's holidays being the ones that get marked because they are the ones most people share, which is understandable and which nonetheless tells everyone outside the majority exactly where they stand.

The people affected notice, even when nothing is said, because being the exception is something you feel. The employee whose most important occasion of the year passes without acknowledgement while the majority's is celebrated with a company event learns something about their place, and it is not that they belong equally. This is why "we just celebrate the holidays most of our people share" is not neutral, however reasonable it sounds — it makes the majority the default and everyone else the guest, and it does so precisely at the emotional moments when belonging is most felt. Marking the shared value under each occasion is how a company acknowledges a range of traditions without installing one as the default, which is the whole point: a team where no one is the guest.

The two mistakes even good intentions make

Two failures are common even among companies genuinely trying to do this well. The first is tokenism — marking an occasion with a poster and a themed lunch and nothing real, which people read instantly as a box being ticked. A token gesture toward a tradition can be worse than silence, because it signals that the company knows the occasion matters and chose to do the minimum, which reads as obligation rather than care. People can tell the difference between genuine acknowledgement and a checkbox, and the checkbox version of inclusion often deepens the sense of being an afterthought rather than easing it.

The second is asking employees from a given background to perform their culture for everyone else — to explain their tradition, cook the food, run the session, be the exhibit. This puts the burden of inclusion on the very people it is meant to include, turning a belonging gesture into unpaid labour and mild spectacle. The person asked to represent their whole culture at the company event did not sign up to be a cultural ambassador, and being made into one is othering, not including — it marks them as the different one whose difference is now on display. Both mistakes come from good intentions and both do more harm than doing nothing, because both, in different ways, tell people they are the exception rather than part of the whole. The alternative to both is to mark occasions the way you would mark anything that matters to a team: with genuine shared experience built around the value everyone can hold, run so that people feel included rather than catalogued, and without conscripting anyone to perform their identity.

Not every occasion is a celebration

A subtle mistake is treating every occasion as a party. Some of the most important dates on a team's calendar are not festive at all — days of remembrance, of mourning, of solemn reflection — and marking them with the cheer appropriate to a harvest festival misreads them badly. A remembrance day handled as an upbeat themed event is not inclusive; it is tone-deaf, and it can wound the very people it was meant to honour. The shared-value approach applies here too, but the value is different: the value under a day of remembrance is honouring what came before, or acknowledging loss, and marking it well means matching the register of the occasion, which is quiet and serious rather than celebratory.

This is part of why marking occasions well is a matter of genuine attention rather than a template. It requires understanding what each occasion actually is — what human value sits under it and what register that value calls for — rather than running every date through the same festive machinery. A company that marks its joyful occasions with genuine joy and its solemn ones with genuine gravity is signalling that it actually understands what these moments mean to people, which builds belonging. One that flattens everything into the same branded celebration signals the opposite: that it is performing acknowledgement rather than feeling it. The care is in matching the marking to the meaning, and the meaning is not always a celebration.

The calendar is a year-long signal

It helps to think of the whole calendar rather than individual occasions, because belonging is built or eroded by the pattern across the year, not by any single event. A person assessing whether they belong is, consciously or not, watching whether the year includes their moments or only others'. A company that marks a wide range of occasions through their shared values sends a year-long signal that everyone's moments have a place here. One that marks only the majority's sends the opposite signal, repeatedly, at every occasion it does and does not mark.

This is why inclusive holiday marking is not a series of isolated events but a stance the company takes toward its whole team across the whole year. It connects to how a company welcomes people in the first place — the belonging work of onboarding — and to how it recognises them day to day, the subject of employee appreciation that lands. All of it is the same underlying thing: whether people feel seen and included as they actually are. The calendar is just one of the most visible and most emotionally charged places that question gets answered, which is why getting it wrong is so costly and getting it right does so much.

The manager acknowledges the individual

Company-level marking sets the pattern, but a great deal of the belonging work happens one manager at a time, quietly. A manager who knows that an occasion matters to someone on their team, and simply acknowledges it to them — a genuine word, an awareness that this week is significant for them — does something no company-wide event can: it tells that specific person they are seen as an individual, not just accommodated as a category. This costs nothing and lands hard, because it is specific and personal, which is exactly what makes any acknowledgement felt rather than generic.

The reverse is also true and quietly damaging: a manager who is oblivious to what matters to their team members, who never notices that someone's important occasion has come and gone, teaches that person that their moments are invisible to the one person whose attention matters most day to day. So inclusive holiday marking is not only a company programme; it is also a habit of attention that managers either have or lack. The company can create the framework, but it is the manager's individual awareness that turns it into something a person actually feels — the same way appreciation lands hardest when it comes from someone whose view matters, not from a system. The framework and the personal acknowledgement work together, and neither substitutes for the other.

Belonging is the measure

The point of marking the calendar is not the marking. It is whether people feel more part of the team afterward, or less. That is a belonging question, and belonging can be read, like any of the eight dimensions. A company that marks holidays inclusively is not doing it for the photos or the internal-communications win. It is doing it because a team where everyone sees their moments acknowledged is a team where more people feel they belong — and belonging is one of the quiet dimensions that decides who stays and who contributes, as real in its effects as any harder-sounding metric.

And because belonging can be read, the effect of how a company marks its calendar can be measured rather than assumed. The question is not whether the event happened or how many attended, but whether people — especially the people outside the majority — feel more included and more part of the team than before. That is the only measure of holiday marking that means anything, and it is the one worth watching, because it distinguishes the company that is genuinely building belonging through its calendar from the one that is running events and hoping. A themed lunch that changed no one's sense of belonging was a lunch. A moment of genuine shared value that left more people feeling part of the team did the actual work.

A worked example

A company with a diverse workforce, wanting to be inclusive, decides to celebrate more holidays — adding festivities for several traditions to its calendar. The intentions are good and the result is mixed: some occasions get elaborate treatment and others a passing mention, a couple slide into tokenism with a poster and a themed snack, and at one event an employee is asked to explain their tradition to everyone, which they experience as being put on display. Belonging does not improve and in a few cases dips, because the company marked traditions rather than values, and in doing so recreated the very default-and-guest dynamic it was trying to solve, now with more occasions.

Approaching it through the shared value would have changed the whole design. Instead of celebrating each tradition as a separate exhibit — some well, some tokenistically, one by conscripting an employee — the company marks the genuine human values under the occasions: real moments of collective gratitude, renewal, remembrance, that everyone can share as themselves. No one is the host and no one the guest; no one is asked to perform their culture; the occasions become things the whole team feels together rather than things some of the team put on for the rest. The measurable result is belonging rising across the whole workforce, especially among the people who used to be the exception — which the tradition-by-tradition version, however well-meant, could never have produced, because it kept marking the beliefs that divide rather than the values that join.

Mark the value, include everyone in it

Companies get holidays wrong by ignoring them, which is cold, or by celebrating some and not others, which quietly ranks people. The way through is neither to erase the calendar nor to turn it into a competition of traditions, but to mark the genuine human value under each occasion — the gratitude, the renewal, the light, the remembrance — so that everyone can share in it as themselves, and no one is made the default or the guest.

Mark the value, include everyone in it, avoid the tokenism and the performance that even good intentions fall into, and think about the whole year rather than isolated events. Then read whether people actually feel more part of the team, because that — not the celebration itself — is the point. Done this way, the occasion does what it is supposed to do: it becomes a moment when a whole team, in all its difference, feels something together, and comes away a little more one team than before. That is worth far more than a themed lunch, and it is available to any company willing to mark the value rather than the belief.