Remote Team Building Activities
Online and Virtual Team Building Activities
Working life has changed dramatically for most people recently. Many people are working from home or working with drastically reduced numbers in an office. A lot of people are not working at all. At this time it is even more important to make sure we communicate effectively with each other. This will in turn maintain and build bonds between team members. We also need to stay motivated and positive – checking in on everyone and ensuring that our mental health is ok.
There are many communication channels being utilised for remote work, such as zoom, Skype, text or phone calls – however these may not allow us to connect with all our team members. Personal connections and building and maintaining bonds between team members at this time will have positive effects on your team, including on their stress levels and productivity.
Fun team building activities for remote employees will result in happier more productive, more effective teams – therefore a stronger company and culture.
Finding the right team building activities for remote teams may be difficult. We have put together some innovative ways to continue to bring people together during these changing times, with some virtual team building activities fun. Online team building is a bit of light hearted fun to allow your team to connect, relieve stress and have a few laughs.
Check out some of our new Fun Team Building Activities for remote teams.
Remote Employee Team Building Activities
Team Building Activities for Virtual Meetings and Training
During these uncertain and challenging times why not look to something positive and schedule workshops or coaching for your staff. These can all be done remotely – either in small groups for workshops or one on one leadership coaching. Prepare your team now so when it is time to come out of this forced hibernation your team is ready to hit the ground running. We have a range of Remote team building workshops and also have a provider that is able to customise a workshop to meet your objectives. This range also includes one on one leadership coaching.
Building a team and a great culture is hard but virtual team building can be even more challenging. So check out our range of online team building workshops to assist with this.
Benefits of Team Building Activities for Virtual Teams
- Enhance Skills on Customer Service, and Presenting – including team building activities for virtual meetings
- Increase Motivation and Morale – advise the best ways to stay motivated when working at home – tips and techniques to stay on task and feel connected to your work mates.
- Increase productivity – learn how to best work remotely and online in this new virtual world.
- Improve Communication – learning about your own and others preferred communication styles and understand how to work with different people.
- Empower your leaders to support their remote teams. Coaching session can assist them through change and enable them to take the right action with insights & advice.
- Learn the essential steps to create a powerful and positive culture in your workplace.
Why you need Team Building Activities for Remote Employees
Remote Team Building
Team Building activities for remote teams is in some ways similar to team building at the office. People all want the same thing, regardless of where they work.
To have a collaborative team
A team that bonds
Assistance from others when needed
However these aspects of a team do not automatically happen. Teams require to be nurtured with good management, team building activities and regular support and feedback. All this can still be done with team building activities for remote employees
Normally you ensure that your office’s culture makes your team feel united. This is easier to develop when you are all in the same shared physical space. However, when working remotely companies can struggle if they do not put a lot of effort into making a strong culture. Therefore you need to be more intentional about team building activities for virtual teams . People working remotely can feel quite isolated when working from home. You may find that your teams work is up to scratch and on time meeting deadlines, but people are struggling to feel like they’re really part of a team.
Team Building Activities for Virtual Meetings
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. The spontaneous chats and interactions that happen in an office are a lot more difficult to make happen in the remote world. So, to make it happen we have to organise the team and give them the opportunity 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 connectRandom Questions
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, so that the answers you get stimulate discussion and socialising in your distributed team.Fun facts about your culture
Again this can be used as 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 can just be an hour too, 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 activity, 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. To make this really work, you need for your team to put their goals into a shared calendar, with an expected date of when it should be done. At regular intervals, maybe every week, have a recap and see how everyone is doing. This can be a bit stressful for some, so keep this in mind and don’t put too much pressure on more introverted team members.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 also even more surprising when you think you know someone, but you find out something super surprising. 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 who. 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 and then we have a talk about it at the next team meeting. This activity can make you look deeper into each other’s personalities and understand each other more through our movie tastes.Online Team Building
Team building is one of the cornerstones of a good remote working culture. The only way to do this is by identifying the specific and exact needs of the team and choosing the remote employee team building activities to suit your team. Also, don’t forget to check in with your team, their needs and struggles and respond accordingly.
Leading a group of people who are all located in different places isn’t an easy task, but remote team building activities will help make it simpler to achieve your goals and avoid all the common pitfalls you might run into.
Here’s an example of
how one digital agency put on their teambuilding conference
and hackathon.
We have written an in-depth article – Ultimate Guide to Team Building Activities for just that purpose. By the end of it you will be an expert and know all the advantages, disadvantages, common mistakes and what to do in order to organise an amazing Team Building Activity. We will share resources and our extensive knowledge and experience in organising corporate team building activities