- Most offices have gone digital under quarantine, and although unusual, team buildings can work online, too.
- Using tools like Skype and Zoom, team members can hang out, play games, and build relationships remotely.
- Even when team members are miles apart, they can still develop personal and professional relationships through virtual team building.
Taking team building online
Quite often, when you hear “team building,” your mind immediately jumps to beach or camping trips, and big company lunches. Under community quarantine, those and other similar activities are put on hold.
The work-from-home set up is convenient for some employees, but others may have a hard time adjusting. This sudden change of pace can lead to a burnout or even episodes of demotivation, which is why it’s important to set aside time for virtual get togethers to give employees the chance to loosen up. Making the effort to create fun office engagements can prevent droughts in productivity and raise team morale.
Aside from having a good time, team building activities for employees foster a friendly, cooperative environment. This makes it easier for team members to communicate, boosting their collaboration to be fast, efficient, and fruitful. A strong, capable team isn’t just a group of talented, hard-working people. It’s a group of talented, hard-working colleagues who jive well as a unit because they trust each other and share common goals.
From group games to casual sharing sessions, there are many ways to get team members involved. It’s important that they build strong connections amongst themselves, and that each person feels valued.
Virtual team building activities
One of the great things about virtual team building is that the only thing an employee needs is a well-functioning laptop with a stable internet connection, which almost all remote employees already have. Team members can get to know each other better and take their minds off work for a while through simple online activities.
Weekly Game Jar
This one is pretty straightforward, you and your team will be spoiled with choice. Game Jar is a weekly (or more often, if you prefer) social fun hour that brings the team together to play online games. Whether you’re working with five people, twenty or more, there’s a game out there for every team.
To get your Game Jar started, set a date and time for your game. You can take game suggestions from the team and have them vote for their favorite one. Small groups might enjoy playing a card game like Uno, which has an official app with a “Fun Room” option for three or more remote players, or maybe a bold Cards Against Humanity dupe. Be warned, though - the latter can get raunchy, and newcomers or older team members might prefer a more family-friendly game like Uno instead.
Aliens Have Landed!
Aliens Have Landed! That means it’s time to group yourselves into teams of three or four and get the creative juices flowing. In this game, teams will have to come up with a way to communicate with aliens who don’t speak any human language. They’ll need to explain the company to the aliens using only symbols and pictures.
Give the teams some time to discuss among themselves and figure out what symbols and pictures they’ll propose. Zoom has a “breakout” feature that allows specific people in the call to meet up in a separate “room” without the others seeing or hearing them. Use this to allow the teams to strategize. If you have software for the teams to draw the symbols, the better. That makes it easier for the teams to showcase their ideas and lessens mix-ups.
When the teams are finished, one representative from each team must upload the five images they all chose to represent the company. Pay close attention and note any common themes in the pictures that each team picked. These commonalities are a good indicator of the shared understanding team members have about the company and its vision.
Photo of Your Life
A picture paints a thousand words - which can save you a lot of time when learning about a team member’s passions and interests. In this simple but loaded activity, have each member choose one picture to share.
The picture should say something about their life. It could be a pet, a screengrab from their favorite movie, a snapshot of their kids, or a view from their place. It can also be a picture of a significant event in their lives, or them engaging in a hobby they love.
Go around the virtual room and have each employee share their photo and the story behind it. This is a fun way to start conversations, introduce newbies to the rest of the team, and even discover new things about long-time co-workers.
Two Truths and a Lie
Two Truths and a Lie is an old favorite at parties, and since it doesn’t require any materials or physical contact, it’s easily done online. It’s self-explanatory, each participant has to make three statements about themselves: two truths, and one lie. The goal of the other team members is to guess which of the three statements is a lie.
Two Truths and a Lie also encourages co-workers to pay close attention to detail and be attentive to each other’s personal stories. You may be surprised who (or how many) among your team causes the most confusion with their statements, and who really know each other outside the business of work.
Ten Common Things
This game calls for small teams, so divide up the group before getting started. For best results, assign teams randomly or group the ones who aren’t in the same department. The objective is for each team to find ten things that all members have in common.
These could be work-related things or anything random that just happens to apply to all of them. For example, their common factors could range from “We all have socks on today” to “We all work on the same floor” to “We’re all fans of F.R.I.E.N.D.S.”
Finding common ground, no matter the context. This creates bonds between co-workers and sparks discussion among them. Ten Common Things prompts them to think creatively, and at the same time, gives employees the opportunity to open up.
Guess the Artist
While it’s somewhat similar to Photo of Your Life, Guess the Artist is a game where each team member has to come up with a picture that’s relative to their lives. It could be a photo they personally took, a photo from the internet, or even an old photo they scanned.
It doesn’t have to have immense meaning, just a story they can share regarding the moment. Have them send their picture to you or upload it to an online whiteboard before the meeting. At the start of the game, have everyone put a comment or sticker on each picture with their guess of whom it belongs to.
Once the team has figured out which team member posted a photo, that team member has to come forward and tell a story about the photo. To make this game more personal, make sure that the conference call has a video feature. This will help everyone make the connection between the name, the face, and the story.
15-minute Coffee and Learn Sessions
This is an activity that started to gain popularity during house parties and reunions, as well as online meet-ups. It doesn’t have to be strictly within 15 minutes; this is just a suggestion for an ideal time limit to maintain everybody’s attention span.
You can make the sessions weekly so that everyone can get ready (and excited!) for each one. For each session, have one team member deliver a short presentation. It could be related to their job, or something outside of that, like their passion for mountain climbing or their interest toward an old conspiracy theory.
True to the name of the activity, there’s loads you can learn from these sessions. Amp up the fun by giving employees free rein on their individual presentations. While some might want to whip up some slides and share their screen for their turn, others might want to do a video as if they were a YouTuber going live to chat with their followers, complete with a themed outfit and props.
Bucket List Challenge
The Bucket List Challenge is a fun activity to do as a group and maybe even go back to from time to time as you achieve personal milestones. Begin by instructing everybody to write their own bucket lists. From the idiom “Kick the bucket,” which is a euphemism for passing away, “Bucket list” refers to a list of things you would like to experience or goals you would like to reach in your lifetime.
Once you’re all done writing, have each participant read their list aloud to the group. Those who have common or at least similar activities can make a plan to check the thing off of their bucket list together.
Another interesting springboard is bucket list items that some team members have already done. They can talk about the context of how they were able to do it and give tips or suggestions to those who still haven’t checked it off of their lists.
Flat Lay Your Desk
Anyone who has ever used Instagram knows what a “Flat lay” is. Plain and simple, it’s a top-view picture of some items placed on a surface in an artful way. For co-workers who don’t share a work space, it’s cool to see each other’s at-home set ups and what each other’s desks look like.
Techies might share specs and recommend new hardware to their teammates. Even if you aren’t terribly tech-savvy, it’s also nice to just see what mug or tumbler your co-workers take their coffee or tea in. Some team members might have plants, figurines, and other knick knacks on their desks that help them spark inspiration.
Seeing someone’s work space is seeing a small glimpse of their personality. In this game, team members don’t give away quite as much as they do in other icebreaker games, but they do get the opportunity to show a different side of themselves that their colleagues might not see during company meetings.
Revealing Quiz
Use Connecteam or a similar software to make trivia night more fun and more personal. Customizable polls and multiple choice questions can open up conversation topics and make bonding a snap for team members.
There are many ways to approach this. One is to have each team member send in a fact about themselves, then put the facts and the team members’ names into the template and have everybody try to match the person to the fact. You can also ask a random “Would you rather…?” question and see how your co-workers respond.
To change things up, you can have the questions center around trivia instead. When looking up or making up questions, be sure to consider your team’s demographic. This will help you decide what kind of questions to ask, and how much variety the question set should have. Topics you could include are pop culture, geography, music, history, and anything under the sun that at least a few team members are knowledgeable on.
Team building from home is still team building
Virtual team building may not be as grand or as extravagant as physical team buildings, but it still plays a vital role in creating and strengthening bonds within the company. Being under unique circumstances with the quarantine in place, it’s important to boost employee morale from time to time. Online team building is a small but significant way to do exactly that.
Working remotely is great in the sense that you avoid traffic and don’t always have to dress up. But it can also be disorienting and lonely for many people. Online team building can fill the gap of face-to-face communication at a time when it’s not advisable or practical. We can’t go out together and share meals or drinks, nor can we take trips out of town over the weekend. However, with the aid of technology, we can still work on our skills and our relationships.