Virtual Team Building Activities For Remote Teams

Getting to know each other, feeling comfortable talking and collaborating, and coming together over shared interests is crucial for creating highly-productive, unified teams. They can be thought provoking or simply infuse light-hearted fun into everyday tasks. Whatever you choose, make the activity something your team can rally behind and enjoy. Icebreakers are typically short, easy ways to get a conversation going. They are most useful when you need to spend the bulk of the meeting on work or when you have newbies on your team who may be uncomfortable with more intensive activities. Icebreakers can also be a creative way to add some excitement to the onboarding process.

Explore our resource center to find templates to help you get the job done, job interview tips, insights to tackle your biggest project management challenges, and so much more. Randomly pair everyone up for a minimum of 15 minutes to chat about whatever they want.Donut, a Slack-compatible app, is helpful facilitating this process. Rather than just asking an open-ended question about how the week went, invite everyone to share their most significant win and their biggest challenge. If you use a platform like Slack, you could ask team members change their profile pictures each week or month according to the new theme. Instead of looking for random objects around town, send everyone on a search for to find out information about each other.

Some video conferencing apps allow you to addInsta-style filterssuch as cat ears or whiskers, while others let you change your background. Zoom users, for example, cancustomize their backgrounds, so it looks like they’re joining the meeting from an exotic location. Some app extensions likeDonutrandomly pair together team members to have a «Donut date,» or an online meetup. The app will send the team members reminders and notifications to encourage them to get together.

Water cooler chatter typically takes place in brick-and-mortar workplaces. You can create the same with a digital place and time to meet for unstructured conversation. To get the conversation started, ask everyone to share a fun fact or answer a question. This can be a fun way to learn about each other without dedicating structured time for get-to-know-you chatter. If this ends up being fun and encourages conversation, consider making it a weekly or monthly game. In all cases, best practices include a mandatory digital communication platform where all employees can come together.

Move Employee Resource, Or Affinity, Groups Online

The person who submitted the photo can share background info on it if they want. Bring back a childhood favorite with a virtual show and tell. Each person chooses one item that’s important to them or represents them in some way. Team members take turns showing the item and telling everyone else about it. You can also limit it to something within arm’s reach or other guidelines to make it more interesting.

It’s an easy way to keep an eye for any potential staff retention problems and gives you useful data. This is exactly what it sounds like — everyone on your team gets up to $20 to pick out a gift for the person they are assigned at random. You’ll pick a day to have a virtual unboxing over Zoom, and everyone will open their presents on screen and guess who gave them the present. This is a fun way to get a bit more personal and think out of the box.

Virtual Jeopardy

Provide a few prompts and specific things for your team to hunt for. You could give your team a week to connect with everyone or make it a flash assignment with 24 hours on the clock. If you Remote Team have a small team where everyone knows each other or is familiar with each other’s work, start a praise train. As the leader, you start by complimenting someone for something specific.

Go through the whole group week by week and it gives a great insight into their team’s background especially if you are an international team. After every presentation, you can also add a Q and A section to allow the team to learn more about a city. Choose a weekly “question master” and have them come up with two creative questions to ask each of your team members. Have you always wanted to ask questions to your team but never had the opportunity to do so?

Virtual Celebrations

The right team games make a fun and interactive option for breaking up your remote employees’ regular routines. And it’s as simple as setting up and naming different channels based on one theme, such as funny memes, for example. This prevents your actual work chats from filling up with hundreds of cat videos.

Get all the premium ingredients sent to your door before the event. Springing forward now to 2022, remote work makes these crucial social interactions harder and less frequent – especially in the face of COVID-19. Lindsay is the Content Marketing Manager at Formstack, splitting her time between creating blog content, writing reports, and hosting Formstack’s Practically Genius podcast.

Decide on a debate topic, then break your team into two groups. Try to break the groups into people that normally do not work together daily. Every time one of your team members drinks a sip of water, have them post the water emoji 🚰.

The event includes 90 minutes of mini games and challenges that are designed to delight, bond, and sometimes tear apart your people. The entire experience is run by a professionally trained host to make sure everyone is participating and having fun. One of the quickest virtual team building activities you can play is Something in Common, which is a challenge that encourages your remote employees to learn more about each other. For this game, assign your people into small groups and then have each group identify the three most unique things they have in common. For example, a group might find a common love for Shakespeare’s Macbeth, experience with childhood violin lessons, and a disdain for fiery Cheetos.

Virtual Mixology Class

Be the person that always remembers and celebrates everyone’s birthday. Automate the management and education of your teams in Slack. Donut helps team members who’ve never met connect with one another. Since you won’t be able to plant items for people to physically find, your best bet is creating a list of subjective, goal-based items.

It’s an incredibly powerful way to foster unity among teams while aligning everyone more deeply to their shared core values. In this interactive hands-on culinary experience, an engaging master chef teaches your group how to prepare a delicious dish from scratch. This is the perfect blend of virtual learning, laughter and foodie fun. And enjoying your own creations as a team, topped with gourmet sauces you’ve also created yourselves? In this heartwarming event, your team will create and mail cards to first responders, healthcare heroes, seniors, veterans and other deserving recipients. It’s a powerful way to bond while sharing gratitude and encouragement.

Remote Team Building Apps & Ideas Your Team Wont Hate

The players will continue to guess until they get all of them right or until they run out of time, whichever happens first. In this team building activity, the team members take turns and share the top 5 things from their bucket list, thereby getting to know each other better. To play this popular guessing game, divide the team into groups of three. The team moderator has to personally text one member of each group, the word to be drawn. To draw, either the moderator can start the video call and share the screen with the Whiteboard, or the player who is drawing can share his/her screen and draw on paint.

• The announcer describes the image without saying what it is or providing any hints.
• Like in-person, you need to plan fun games and activities for your group.
• If you want to rekindle the bonds your team once shared, or you’re assembling a new virtual team for the post-pandemic world, we are here to help.
• “Workplace collaboration stats show that nearly all employees say that virtual team building games and activities have helped them build healthier relationships with their peers”.
• They get to test out these jokes in a laughter-filled competition.

We can either suggest playing this once a week, or you can use it now and then. Sometimes team building activities are silly and just are meant for a good laugh. The planking challenge went viral a few years ago, and why not do it within your office. These types of team building activities are https://globalcloudteam.com/ great because they’re simple and you can learn so much about another person through the photos they take. They also mean that quite literally anyone with a phone can join it. The last think you want is a team building, night with friends, or family get-togethers that’s boring or predictable.

The main goal of team building activities is to get to know your teammates better. An easy way to do this is by having them share personal stories with the team. Getting a better understanding of who your coworkers are outside of work is key to working better together. It is a good remote team building activity where your team will collaborate virtually to solve a deadly crime. It gives everyone the chance to join no matter where they are in the world. In order for team building to be continually effective, you need repetition.

Virtual Water Cooler

This lively virtual musical experience is a great way to bring people together through the power of song. You’ll create team harmony in more ways than one, while boosting confidence and celebrating the spirit of creativity. Prepare to enter a thrilling world of foreign espionage and secretive art heists. This immersive team building challenge requires clear communication, critical thinking and creative problem solving at every surprising turn.

This is one of our favorite virtual team building activities of the bunch. Employees who work in an office together build relationships naturally through face-to-face interactions, meetings, lunches, and office events. We recommend dedicating either the entire meeting to virtual team building activities, allocating 30 minutes at the end of your event, or following The 8% Rule. The 8% Rule states that 8% of the meeting, or about five minutes for every hour, should include fun virtual games and activities.

However, managing diversity in teams has been shown to form a greater team identity; which will reduce the negative impact of individual diversity. Typically, team members can be based in different countries or have other religions and cultures. Pin this to your company Slack channel for everyone to see, and this can help build your quarterly goals for the next year. Group all the ideas into topics, such as goals, achievements, office needs, etc. Have everyone post their ideas on the collaborative whiteboard.

Virtual team-building activities are remote activities designed to help physically distant coworkers in a fully remote business feel more like a team. Not only are the activities enjoyable, but also they have a deeper purpose of helping your employees learn more about one another and learn to work together. Because they’re virtual activities, everyone can participate no matter where they’re located.