Meaningful interaction among teammates is crucial for every organisation. It strengthens their relationships, releases endorphins and supports personal wellbeing. But how can you bond with your colleagues if never actually meet in person?
With the emerging trend of work from home and co-working space global companies are adapting more virtual working culture. They generally have multiple teams working across borders.
The absence of direct in-person communication presents a huge challenge for remote teams. According to research 65%percent of the remote teams haven’t met before, which ultimately leads to poor connections and collaborations.
Hence, regular team socializing needs to be on priority for remote teams. It develops connections between remote colleagues, by building a sense of trust, inclusion and representation. And it has a big impact on organizations culture. Better understanding and collaboration in between colleagues leads to efficient and effective performance.
As a company that also works, strategies and plan events for remote teams, we, GetOut! Events, have come up with some pretty good solutions. Here are our favourite remote team building activities – whether you want to break the ice, start new conversations or simply enjoy quality time together as a virtual team.
Activities for Virtual teams
According to our client reviews and anecdotes we have found out that apart from the group video calls, coffee breaks and happy hours, structured events has greater impacts on teams. It gives everyone something to focus on, and people can get involved much easier. Here are a few of our best remote social ideas to-date!
Revealing quizzes: With the world going digitised there are multiple applications to play quizzes online. By just sharing a URL or game code, every remote member can be a part of the game. One recommendation is Kahoot! Such applications allows you ask various questions in ways like multiple choice or true /false.
This can be used to bring more familiarity in between the remote colleague and spark new conversations. Companies have tried the below categories of questions as a part of virtual events.
- Match the fact to the colleague (the more unusual/unexpected the better).
- Would you rather (but keep it related to work trouble).
- Themed trivia (e.g. based around a tradition, celebration, specialism).
- A picture of my day (match the photo to the colleague – this can get a bit abstract).
Virtual office fitness challenge: Motivating employees to have a balance between work and health should be part of every organisations. Few companies have already started to install gyms and swimming pools in their premises. However, remote companies can work in a similar way. Everyone can have a weekly workout goal to achieve and whomever performs the best wins a prize. Few companies also set ‘’best travel” targets. The one who travels the most or explores the most, wins the challenge.
Photography Contests: Photo contests are one of the best ways for businesses to drive corporate engagement and also increase social presence. It is a great way of uniting employees around a popular shared hobby, while also sharing insight about each other’s lives. It’s a simple and enjoyable means of visual self-expression, which you can theme around pretty much anything. The winner can be decided according to the certain criterias for the best pictures.
Such a unique exercise can produce unique results — and while not all of the photos, but few can be circulated on Shutterstock or Getty Images any time soon. The event might bring a lot of laughs and some impressive outside-the-box thinking.
Simple virtual games
A ton of very basic ice breaker games lend themselves really well if put into digital format. A few of them are mentioned below: include:
- Pictionary: We can use applications like Drawasaurus, other applications looks looks promising too!
- Charades: super simple – you just need to come to the video call with some good ideas!
- Draw the picture: a classic communication game – someone describes a picture; everyone draws what they hear; hilarity at disfigured sketches ensues.
Define your every week abstractly : To update the entire team about the progress of work and the changes in work culture every member can be asked to define it using an abstract picture. It can be anything. Be it a coffee mug or a dry paper. However it should be a form of expression. This can indirectly help the entire team to know about the work progress, culture and environment. Such reviews and comments can also be used to bring positive changes in the inbound office rules.
Conclusion:
Remember, remote team building isn’t just for one particular occasion ; it requires an ongoing team-wide effort to have a meaningful impact. So organisations need to think how they can bridge the physical gap in between employees and involve social interaction for them.
Remote socialising really can be anything – companies have Slack channels where people can post inspiration, bloopers and photos of what’s going on in their day, and a global team-wide music playlist, so they can share what they’re listening to. Few companies also make sure we take time to celebrate our successes over video – whether that’s a product launch, the end of a project cycle, a funding milestone or a new addition to the team.
