How to Host Remote Team Building Activities.
Simple team building activities for remote employees that you can organise yourself.
Virtual coffee breaks
This activity tries to replicate the same outcome that a coffee break has in the workplace. It’s not about the coffee here, it’s about the socialising that happens. Of course spontaneous chats and interactions that happen in an office are more difficult to make happen in the remote world. Therefore, we have to organise the team to take breaks in their day to have a virtual coffee break. You can do this in groups to begin with and get people feeling more comfortable with the situation.
Not everyone wants to have a 1 on 1 straight away, but the better the team knows each other the easier it gets. Set a time and time limit, so people can enjoy the break and then get back to work. This does not need to be a daily occurrence – once a week may be enough for your team to connect through corporate team building activities online.
Random Questions.
Firstly, start off your team meeting with a different question each time. Prepare a list of random questions that your team need to answer. Examples being:
- What is your least favourite food?
- Name the one country you want to visit the most?
- If you could be any animal, what would you be?
- What is your most embarrassing nickname?
- Tell us something that still on your bucket list?
- Name your weirdest talent? The key here is to make the questions entertaining.
Accordingly, the answers you get will stimulate discussion and socialising in your team.
Fun facts about your culture.
Again this may be a starter at your team meeting. Ask everyone to prepare some interesting facts about where they’re from and their culture. Don’t worry if people think their facts are boring. Quite often the small differences in how people live are much more interesting to people not from that culture.
Pairing up for common working sessions.
Organise your team into pairs for regular working sessions will tighten bonds to form. There’s no better way really to build on and encourage bonding than by pairing people up to work together. Select the pairs, and then schedule it in the calendar at a time that works for everyone. It doesn’t need to be long. You just have to ask your team members to hop on a call, turn on their cameras and start working.
Post a goal.
In this corporate team building activity online, you help build up the team by focusing everyone on achieving their goals. Ask people to share their goals. This will build up accountability and the drive that’s needed to achieve them. At the next team meeting, let everyone know that the plan is to share their goals, both work related and personal. Ask everyone to come prepared. Make sure that you go first, so you can give an example of what everyone is expected to do. Everyone should take it in turns to do the same, explaining why they want to do it and how long they expect it to take.
Ultimately to make this really work, teams put their goals into a shared calendar, with an expected date of completion. At regular intervals, maybe every week, have a recap and see how everyone is doing.
Guess the owner.
This exercise is similar to the random facts. Apart from being great for team building, it’s also a lot of fun to do. It’s even more surprising when you think you know someone, but you find out something astounding. Ask your team members to prepare pictures from childhood, unknown facts about themselves, or some other quirky piece of information that the rest of the team won’t know about. Each member of your team then sends it to an organiser, which more likely than not will be you as the team manager. The facts then needs to collated into a presentation.
It doesn’t have to fancy, just one fact, picture, or piece of information per slide. The team then need to guess which fact belongs to whom. The objective here is to keep on improving the more personal relationships between your team members.
Movie marathon challenge.
Each team member suggests one movie that the others have to watch. You would then talk about it at the next team meeting. These corporate team building activities online can make you look deeper into each other’s personalities through our movie tastes.
You can find another 30 free online team building games in this article.