Keeping your employees feeling connected to each other can be one of the top challenges for remote teams. With more and more people now working from home and the number of remote teams rising, managers must come up with ways for their staff to communicate. Team building can help your teams to engage with each other, fostering teamwork and collaboration.

What is Virtual Team Building?

Virtual team building refers to the process of getting your remote teams to work together during a fun activity. This can help otherwise disconnected teams to bond and communicate with each other. It’s an excellent idea for remote teams who may have never met or may be unused to working in a remote environment, as they encourage people to feel like part of a team.

As remote workers don’t have the chance to chat in the office or lunchroom, work can turn into an isolating place. With each person working at home on their own, it can be hard to start a conversation with colleagues that you feel like you barely know. Team building is a way to get everyone comfortable working together.

Virtual team building can include activities, games, and group projects that encourage interaction. This can bring the human element into an otherwise remote workplace. It’s a great way to foster a feeling of community within your team.

10 Team Building Activities

The Get to Know You Game

This game is a great first one to try out if you’re new to conducting team building activities with your team. Start by asking each person to email you a few facts about themselves. Add all of these into one document that doesn’t say who gave which fact. Share it with your team and get everyone to guess which point belongs to each person.

This is an excellent ice breaker game for teams that don’t know each other well. It can quickly devolve into hilarity as people get their guesses wrong, creating a sense of fun and camaraderie. Add it into your next virtual team meeting and see how it goes!

Quizzes

Team quizzes in the style of a pub quiz can be a lot of fun and get people chatting and working together. Come up with quiz questions or search online for some. Then split people into teams of 4 – 6 and get them to answer the questions in those teams. The team with the most correct answers wins! People enjoy showing off their trivia knowledge and working together to figure out the answers.

Remote Work Bingo

Create a bingo board for things associated with remote work, or find one online. This could include items such as ‘saw a random cat in my yard’, ‘had a child or pet interrupt a video meeting’, or ‘drank more than three coffees’. Start a Slack chat called ‘Office Bingo’ and add the bingo board on there, explaining the game. As people tick off squares during the day, they must note it in the chat. This is a great way to get your team talking to each other and relating about the difficulties and good points of working from home.

Simulations

 If you want your team to hone their problem-solving skills, a simulation can be an excellent way to do it. Get people to work together to solve a complex problem. You can search online for team building scenarios or come up with one yourself that’s relevant to your workplace. You can make this as work-focused as you like or make it more of a chance to socialize by coming up with a funny or non-work-related scenario.

2 Truths 1 Lie

If you’ve never played two truths one lie, you’re missing out. This team-building activity is the perfect addition to the start of a meeting as it’s short and an excellent way for people to find out more about each other. The way you do it is simple – each person comes up with two truths and one lie about themselves. One by one, each person reads theirs out, and the others have to guess which one is the lie.

Coffee Break

If your remote team is feeling disconnected, why not take a virtual coffee break? Ask everyone to make a cup of coffee/tea/drink of their preference and log onto a video meeting just to chat. This might be the one time that people stop work just to talk rather than attending meetings which are usually focused on work.

The Alien Activity

This activity is most often called ‘The Aliens Have Landed’. It is a game designed to help people learn about the company and how to describe it. It’s an excellent choice for teams with a diverse array of backgrounds and languages spoken.

The idea is that the group imagines that aliens have arrived on earth and wish to know more about your organization. The aliens don’t speak English, so you need to explain your company through pictures or symbols.

Participants may find images online or draw pictures themselves which describe your company, its products, and its culture. On a video chat, each team shows the other groups their images and explains how they came up with them.

Virtual Office Walk-Throughs

As a way for people to get to know each other and how they operate, you could have a session of virtual office walk-throughs. Each team member takes a turn showing their colleagues around their home office via video chat. This can offer more insight into how people work, and participants get to know each other better by seeing each other’s living spaces.

Frequently Used Emojis

Do you think you know your co-workers well? Find out whether you really do or not with the Frequently Used Emojis game. Ask everyone what their top 5 most used emojis are and compile a list. Send it out to the team, and everyone must guess which set of emojis belong to which team members. This is an entertaining way to find out how people communicate.

Online Book Club

An online book club offers an activity for people to complete separately and then come together to discuss. It doesn’t have to be a book, as reading an entire novel can be time-consuming. You could even assign an article or work-related YouTube video for your team to watch and talk about. Many people like learning new things and talking about what you watched afterwards can help people to bond and share their perspectives.

Try out a few of these team building activities with your staff members and watch communication, connection, and collaboration increase!