20 Great Virtual Team Building Ideas For Remote Teams

Once the phrase is guessed or the time is up for player one, go ahead and switch player one. Pose a fun category to your team at the beginning of your meeting. For example, “Types of fruit.” Each team member has to state fruit, and no one can say the same answer. After the 5-minute presentation, get the other employees to answer the questions without knowing the questions. Take a picture of them planking and post it to your company chat. It brings organization and helps visually manage any project.

I love the idea of Donut Calls, I think it would be good to get your team back on track and bonded. A team activity that I believe would be energizing and exciting would be where your team gets together on Zoom, divide into two teams and have a charades competition against one another. Each player would have to use a household object or food item to describe the word. I’m a competitive person so something like a TikTok dance-off would be fun. Whoever can get the most likes for their TikTok video wins.

Organizations face the challenge of virtual team building and maintaining the company culture, despite their teams being scattered across the globe. Fostering a strong sense of team spirit and camaraderie is essential for employees to feel connected to their work, their colleagues, and their employer. Employees who work in an office together build relationships naturally through face-to-face interactions, meetings, lunches, and office events.

With what’s going on in the world today a good team-building activity could be an in-home scavenger hunt. Where you make a list of items normally found in any residential home. I think a virtual talent show would be a fun team activity. Each team member picks a category of either a musical performance or a monologue from a movie. They will have 24 hours to prepare their performance so they are comfortable with performing. When show time arrives each team member gathers in front of the computer with a bowl of popcorn ready for the show.

Hop into this interactive Zoom game show and work in teams to complete fun creative challenges such as “Tallest Tower,” “Compound pictures,” and “Zoom Scavenger Hunt”. When we came to the realization that quarantine was going to become a normal part of life in 2020, our Formstack Fun committee decided to put a unique spin on this unfortunate event. An ask was put out for employees to submit a 30 second video that represents what their quarantine life looks like. Come up with a wacky and silly theme for each day and encourage people to dress up within the theme. It’s a simple and quick activity that’s sure to start some funny conversations. It can also inspire some funny Zoom backgrounds and costumes.

Virtual Coffee Break

Have all the art materials and refreshments delivered to your door. It can be fun to have everyone take the same assessment, then come together as a group to discuss the findings. Our internal book club enjoyed guessing everyone’s Enneagram then having a discussion about each type and how each person fit (or didn’t!) into their given number. Whether you’ve been a remote worker for years or are just getting started, it can be difficult to figure out ways to have fun over video calls. This is a very fun game that can also involve the employees’ family members. It’s a very fun game which will spread laughter within the employees with all the funny stories.

You’ll need at least one of these tools for each of the activities shared here. Leaders who want to interact and engage with remote teams. This activity can be held in real time at the start of a weekly meeting, or asynchronously on Slack or Discord. The game continues for three rounds like this, with questions becoming deeper as you go.

It was a very good event and helped me achieve my goals with the team. The folks who helped set it up were responsive and easy to work with. I have already recommended it to my peers as a great way to get their teams working well together. With BetterUp, you can help create and nurture meaningful connections. All it takes is a little employee engagement magic with some help from virtual coaching. Head to our section above to see what sort of team-building games you can implement for your next activity.

The upside of hosting regular events is that if an employee cannot attend one outing, then there will be another opportunity to digitally congregate soon after. Just because your remote team cannot physically meet, it does not mean you should forgo structured and time-intensive team-building events. Virtual outings help teammates get to know each other and fight off the isolation and loneliness that comes with remote work.

• Without these reminders, morale can drop and team members can become disillusioned.
• I love the idea of the Nato Alphabet or as mentioned give it a more creative name.
• If you have the budget, send ahead a gift card so that people can order food or a treat to make the event special.
• They’ve combined their unique brand of fun within a slick video conferencing interface and a hilarious host to bring remote teammates into the fold.
• After the 5-minute presentation, get the other employees to answer the questions without knowing the questions.
• It keeps people engaged and it’s always fun and funny to do.

It is team-building because the people who are on your team are in it with you. You can vent about the tough moments and push each other to keep going. It is also competitive because there is a prize at the end for the people with the biggest transformation. In creased How to Hire a Remote Team productivity in daily life can lead to increased productivity at work and this kind of challenge has always pushed me to start paying more attention to my eating habits and daily workouts. A virtual team building activity could be introducing your team to your pets!

Set Up A Collaborative Playlist

These activities help develop a sense of community and can advance the goals of an organization that are separate from profit. Remote teams also have the ability to do so through online fundraising. If your team uses Slack, take a look at the Donut add-on, which helps remote employees get to know each other. Donut accomplishes camaraderie by randomly pairing workers for conversations, collaborations, and more. Another way to create a casual chat environment is within your organization’s collaboration tools. Create interest-specific Slack channels like #Netflix, #gamers, or #pets for people to bond over personal interests and to post photos.

As an example, the People Operations team at Lucid put together this bingo card to keep employees connected and occupied while sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Create a list of songs—they could be random or all relate to a theme, such as “boy bands” or “Disney songs”—and determine as a team whether each song is more of a bop, a jam, a banger, or a groove. These terms are not easily defined, so part of the process will be to determine what qualifies as a bop or a jam in the first place. Collaborative visual platforms like Lucidchart make it easier to work together so teams can communicate efficiently and creatively. This is a chance for co-workers to interact and learn more about each other, even if they’ve never gotten a chance to meet and work together in person. ’ guideline to ensure it’s all fun talk and getting to know one another, or you can let them use that time to talk through projects and collaborations, too.

Why Is Virtual Team Building Important?

That way, people feel like their hard doesn’t go unnoticed. Aside from that, games are always a fun way to bring teams closer together whether it’s competitive or cooperative. One person has a picture in front https://globalcloudteam.com/ of them while another member has to draw that same picture but only based off what the other person describes to them. At the end, they reveal the drawing and the original picture to see how close they got.

Research has proven that remote employees have weaker relationships with fellow colleagues than those who work in-house. And that isn’t so surprising when 65% of remote employees haven’t even had a group bonding session. When it comes to the tools you need for virtual team building, it’s all pretty simple.

Perfect for the start of an event, workshop, or a weekly team meeting. It is also a great way to establish team goals and values going forward. We love this team building activity because it is a quick and easy way to provide real insight into your employees and how their mind works.

Go Remote Game Experience

Nextiva provides teams with all the foundational tools they need to connect. Using just one robust online platform , you can deliver and manage reliable phone service to employees in multiple locations. Perfectly designed for the modern distributed workforce, Nextiva’s Voice over Internet Protocol technology allows people to make clear calls from any location using a computer or a phone.

Team building for virtual teams entails using digital platforms to help employees socialize, have fun, and develop their skills together no matter where they’re located. A) Good icebreaker questions are those that prompt a response from someone beyond “yes” or “no”. Try asking about a person’s preferences, their favorite option from a category, or something that gets them to share a personal anecdote. From intrinsic, external, and company-wide, virtual team building offers various levels of benefits. It enhances the communication, collaboration, relationship building, productivity, and morale of an organization.

Gather Around The Virtual Watercooler

Virtual team building is a fantastic way to boost empathy and cohesiveness to make online communication and collaboration easier. Giving team members the chance to gather and communicate in person with their virtual coworkers is a great way to build strong team chemistry and make team members feel a sense of community. This can leave virtual team members feeling left out, and can also make it difficult to see how different teams work and contribute to the company. At the beginning of the day, the first team member to clock in starts a video chat that any team member can join.

Online Fundraiser

“Implement more formalized remote team building strategies” . Creating a steady frequency of team buildingvirtual eventson a quarterly basis allows groups to have fun together and get re-focused as a team without sacrificing budget costs or work schedules. While virtual team building often takes place over Zoom, it still breaks up the monotony of meetings.

How Do You Make A Virtual Meeting Fun?

You can play these games over video conference calls, video games, or even games you play via email, Slack and other platforms. Since remote coworkers don’t have opportunities to randomly chit-chat at the water cooler, you have to be a little more deliberate in creating these virtual team building opportunities instead. Priority Experiences offers a comprehensive and unique set of virtual team building activities built around their collection of shippable experiences.

Virtual Pub Crawl

One approach around this is to inject some team building games for your remote team. The communication platform Slack utilizes channels to organize a company’s various segments – departments, offices, projects, teams – to improve engagement and collaboration. Establish non-work Slack channels for your remote teams to trade pet stories and pictures each week. These questions are good for new virtual teams that are just getting to socialize and mingle with one another. These answers are opinion and preference-based, meaning employees are less likely to feel judged on their responses in the ice breaker game.

The global pandemic has reshuffled the entire way we function, work culture included. CandyCrush that just require employees to own a smartphone or tablet and sign up. I am the CEO of teambuilding.com and owner of Museum Hack. I am obsessed with page speed, ultra-light living and Asimov non-fiction. Launch a compliment board on Trello or Miro, and ask teammates to contribute messages of praise or positivity. A “movie night” where participants watch the same movie together and chat about it on the channel.

Your team will cook up some popcorn chicken as the perfectly-paired snack. Get all the premium ingredients sent to your door before the event. Lindsay is the Content Marketing Manager at Formstack, splitting her time between creating blog content, writing reports, and hosting Formstack’s Practically Genius podcast. She’s a proud graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism (MIZ!) and loves connecting with others on LinkedIn. We had a very special host for the Kitchen Nightmares event.

Virtual team building activities can be as short as five minutes, or upwards of an hour or longer. However, your aim should be effectiveness in the event, rather than meeting any particular duration. Sometimes, short and sweet events can have a more positive impact than longer, drawn out events. One popular virtual team building activity of this type is Online Office Games. As the manager, check out the images and see if you realize any common themes or symbols.

Especially if you don’t get to physically see them at work every single day. It gives every team member a chance to personally connect with each other 1 on 1. You never know just how much you may have in common with someone until you actually take the time to get to know them. The idea of virtual really does take it to the next level and opens up so many business types sprawled across large areas to still have that connection. I think it would be super fun to incorporate a scavenger hunt somewhere in the day’s work.