What is virtual team building?
Times are changing during the Pandemic and a lot of employees work from their home offices now. Moreover, most of the organizations are now hire over Zoom and Skype, without even meeting in person.
Hence it can be pretty awkward when one joins a new company and team without even meeting in person ever.
But as a manager or HR person, there are things you can do to “glue” the team even if people are distributed across cities or the globe.
Virtual team building is the ongoing process of bringing remote teams together. These activities will help your team bonds by creating a collaborative environment and fun just like a in-office setup.
Virtual team bonding has been proven to increase employee motivation, efficiency and collaboration. It makes employees feel connected and valued, which in turn makes them more dedicated to their tasks and the organization in general.
Even though remote teams do not meet very often or may never meet it doesn’t mean they have to feel disconnected from one another! There are things you can do as amanager or entrepreneur.
Bit.AI reports that “97% of employees and executives believe lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project.” So here you go, “the distance” can affect the productivity and ultimately the performance of the company.
When remote workers feel lonely, isolated, or unsupported, a virtual team building activity can remind them they are not alone, but part of a team with people in the same situation like them.
Remote workers can somtimes feel their excitement slipping but a virtual team building activity can help them re-rlight their passion by exposing them to excited co-workers.
Also, when remote workers are craving more autonomy, a virtual team building activity can help them gain trust from their managers and peers.
Why is virtual team building important?
The physical distance of remote work can quickly turn into emotional distance which in turn, leads to isolation. And when your employees feel isolated, they won’t be comfortable working with the other team members and you might lose them.
Virtual team building efforts consist of several carefully designed strategies, games and activities that are meant to bring more human interaction to virtual work. It’ll help your team connect with each other – making them feel like they’re actually part of a community!
What do you (or your remote company) need virtual team buildings for?
In order to have a decent virtual team building experience, experts recommend the following “rules” during a virtual game so the experience is fun.
1. Designate a leader to facilitate the team building exercises, such as a project or team manager.
This way, there will be one person managing the time and activities and instructing the team members. They will also be responsible for maintaining cohesiveness in the exercises and events that take place.
2. Keep track of time during virtual games by setting time limits
Set a time limit for virtual team building missions. It’s important that each mate gives their attention when you gatheryour team for team building activities. This ensures that everyone is engaged and captivated. Additionally, you can’t let these games go on for too long as you’ll miss out on time to actually work!
3. Collaboration and screen-sharing tools
Considering that virtual face-to-face contact is essential to many of these activities and exercises, it’s important to get a tool that lets you screen share and visually collaborate with team members online. That way, everyone can be present and contribute to virtual meetings.
Icebreaker Activities For Remote Teams
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Why do you need icebreakers for remote teams?
- Virtual team building helps create an maintain a company culture and connect remote team members
- The meeting organizaer can use the icebreaker to do a an assessment of the meeting attendees in terms of vibe, strong and weak points
- For remote workers who feel isolated, virtual icebreakers can give them a sense of community
- Brainstorming is encouraged and great product or process ideas can come up
- Virtual icebreakers can help to relax and set meeting attendees at ease and members can get to know eachother in a more relaxed environemnt
- For remote teams, ice breakers still work and help to keep the spirits high and strengthen bonds between team members
1. Critical Thinking Virtual Icebreaker
This virtual icebreaker works best with an online team collaboration platform, such as trello.com or monday.com.
- Time: About 2 minutes per person
- How-to:
- Start your online meeting by posing this lateral thinking question from Udemy to the group: “If you were alone in a dark cabin, with only one match and a lamp, a fireplace, and a candle to choose from, which would you light first?”
- Give everyone 30 seconds to choose.
- Have everyone share their answer.
- Spend about one minute discussing the differences in your answers and what you each learned from one another.
2. Snapshot Virtual Icebreaker
- Source: Adapted from Conceptboard
- Time: About 5 minutes
- How-to:
- Ask everyone to use their phones to take a picture of something. The something could include…
- Pets
- Kids
- Desk space (Yes, even messy desk spaces)
- Weird objects from your house
- Outfit
- Closet
- Ask everyone to use their phones to take a picture of something. The something could include…
- Share your pictures via email, Slack, or your communication channel of choice.
- Spend a little time complimenting the pics or asking questions.
3. “Do You REALLY Know Your Team?” Virtual Icebreaker
THis virtual icebreaker idea comes from the the Let’s Roam software. It’s a short but fun activity you can do in 10 minutes.
- Source: Let’s Roam Virtual Team Builders (with fun games and built-in video conferencing)
- Time: About 10 minutes
- How-to:
- Before your next meeting, ask all your teammates to answer three “about me” questions. (i.e. If you could eat one food for the rest of your life what would it be?; What’s your favorite vacation spot?; If you were an animal, what would you be?; What’s your favorite movie?)
- At the meeting, share the answers and have your teammates try to pair the answers with the right person. Once everyone has guessed, reveal who gave what answer.
- If the results are interesting/surprising, have your teammates explain. It’ll get people laughing and learning more about each other.
Remote Team Building Activities And Games
1. Simulated problems
When you want your remote team to step up and brainstorm on a problem solving challenge, use this experiential team building activity.
First, create a tricky and challenging scenario related to your team’s role. For example, you need to enter a new market and you are looking at options
Ask them to build a strategy by answering questions like:
- What are the new markets the company can enter and why?
- How should you test the market?
- Marketing ideas to break into the new market?
These engaging activities help participants build their decision making skills to learn about thinking out of the box. This way, they can prepare for an unforeseen situation while maintaining cooperation to increase team effectiveness.
2. A look at the future
This is a short and interesting activity.
Send an article to the team and ask them to mark ten headlines that could be related to the company in the future.
Headlines like “World’s best place to work,” or “How this company created this innovative product” are good examples.
This helps you to understand each member’s goals and expectations from the company.
3. Two truths and a lie
Two truths and one lie is a classic icebreaker activity.
Each team member presents three statements about themselves: two truths and one that is false.
The team can then take turns to recognise what’s true and what the lie is.
After everyone has guessed, the speaker reveals their lie.
To make the game even more fun, add some healthy competition with a points system and record them for every member. The person with the most correct guesses will grab the win!
What prizes are you willing to offer?
4. Conference Call Trivia
- Objective: Getting everyone to know and understand each other
- Participants: 4 to 16 people
- Duration: 30 minutes
- Difficulty: Easy
- Materials: Trivia questions and an electronic device
5. Remote Lunch
- Objective: To get everyone caught up in a
- Participants: 1 to 10
- Duration: 30 to 45 minutes
- Difficulty: Easy
- Materials: None
We love this activity because its super chilled and just gets everyone relaxed and communicating, which is key in teams
6. Guess the emoji board
Who doesn’t love Emojis?
This is one of the shortest fun team building activities – making it great for quick breaks or post-meeting sessions.
Here’s how it works:
- Send a list of the players to all participants.
- Next, give them five minutes to guess each person’s five most used emojis.
- After the five minutes are done, reveal the correct answers to the participants.
The person to recognise the most correct emojis is declared the winner.
7. Pin The Map
- Objective: Team Bonding & Get To Know One Another
- Participants: 5 – 10
- Duration: 10 to 30 minutes
- Difficulty: Easy
Materials: Paper, pens & internet.
Surprisingly, there is an abundance of research to suggest that cultural diversity in teams can sometimes act as a barrier.
So, based on this we feel that it is really important to get everyone acquainted so that individual culture doesn’t inhibit team performance.
Instructions:
- Help everyone gain a better understanding of where everyone is located by creating an interactive map of the world.
- Start it off by asking everybody to demonstrate where they’re born and then ask them where they’re currently located by pinning a picture of themselves onto the map.
- As time goes by, you can color in even more of the map by asking your team questions like what their ideal holiday spot would be, the best place they’ve traveled to, or where their parents are from.
- This simple team building activity is a great way to break the ice and to help employees learn a lot about each other.
8. Online Quiz Virtual Icebreaker
Source: QuizBreaker
Time: About 5 minutes per person
- Each team member you invite to QuizBreaker can answer up to 100 curated icebreaker questions that have been carefully researched to elicit fun learnings and build trust in teams. Players can skip any question they don’t want to answer.
- Using the icebreaker answers from your team, QuizBreaker then generates unique ‘who said what’ quizzes for each member of your team. These are automatically sent out via email and can be scheduled to your desired timing, volume & frequency.
- Every new round of QuizBreaker brings your team closer together at the same time as facilitating a fun virtual team building experience. Their gamified web app celebrates each correct guess.
- For those teams who love a bit of competition, you can activate the Leaderboard feature to congratulate new winners each week.
9. Desert Island Movies
Each member of the team must pick the three movies or books that they would bring to a desert island. This is a very fun one, you’ll see…
10. Where are you joining us from?
At the start of your next team meeting, encourage team mebers to show off their home office or work from anywhere space to get the full picture of where your remote coworkers are working from.
11. Coffee showdown
Each team member can show off their favourite coffee mug and say what is their favourite coffee brand as well as their favourite coffee shop in the area.
12. Emoji check-in
Each team member should send 1 emoji that expresses how they feel that day for a quick, a cute icebreaker.
13. Sketch Sesh
Ask your remote team a prompt question that can be answered visually, have team members draw their answers, and have the other team members guess what they drew. Questions like “What’s your favourite actor” or “What is your spirit animal?” are perfect for this icebreaker.
14. Ten things in common
This icebreaker is supposed to have your remote team work together to determine 10 things that you all have in common. Starting with “we all like lattes” seems easy, but soon it can grow to become a fun challenge.
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Companies Offering Virtual(Remote)Team Building Activities and Games
Keeping your team motivated as a manager can be very challenging, we know. If you are thinking of starting these kinds of activities, then you are in the right place.
We’ve put together below some online companies and tools that will help you kick start your virtual team buildings with ease.
1. Let’s Roam
This company developed game-changing technologies to help organizations connect with their employees from anywhere in the world.
They combine a custom video conferencing interface with a big dose of fun to ensure that spirits are sky-high company-wide.
The price is on demand so you will have to contact the company for the virtual team buildings custom quotation
2. QuizBreaker
As the name says, Quizbreaker is a virtual team building icebreaker quiz that helps teams bond, no matter where they are.
Each player you invite can answer up to 100 curated icebreaker questions that have been carefully researched to elicit fun learnings and build trust in teams. Players can skip any question they don’t want to answer.
Companies like Google, Moz, Starbucks and Coca Cola are already using QuizBreaker.
3. The Offsite Co
Offsite does both company retreats as well as virtual retreats. The company says their average engagement rate on the virtual team buildings is at 91%.
They focus on designing a series of activations to help their clients reach engagement goals while employees are working remote.
Every event is customized based on your company culture.
This company take care of all of the game design, logistics and planning and even provide the most fun and professional facilitators we have encountered
The price is around 75$/employee/event.
4. Scavify
Nothing brings a team together like a scavenger hunt: the fun, the interaction, the problem solving, the friendly competition – it’s the perfect team builder. With Scavify, you no longer need to physically be together to bring all the elements of that perfect team builder together.
Through a mobile app and/or browser, individuals and teams can take part in a virtual scavenger hunt app that has them snapping photos, taking videos, answering questions, scanning QR codes, providing feedback and more from the luxury of their own home. Better yet, the app provides real-time interaction features like a leaderboard and photostream to keep remote teams connected during this time. The ability to leave the hunt open for a week (or longer) allows colleagues to compete on their own time when it works best for them.
5. Playingcards.io
- Free activity
- Time: Up to 60 minutes, depending on how many rounds you play
- Best for: Teams of 2 – 6
This platform and play a variety of card games synchronously with your team. Doing something as commonplace as playing cards with your remote team helps cultivate the sense of normalcy that makes distance disappear.
6. Trivia on House Party
- Free activity
- Time: Up to 60 minutes
- Best for: Teams of 2+
Probably one of my favourites. Jump on Houseparty, invite your team to join you, choose a trivia category, and start testing your common knowledge. The app provides immediate right-or-wrong feedback and shares results live, so everyone can stay pumped and in the game in real time.
