Virtual team building offers many benefits, such as improving team morale, communication, and commitment. Conducted on meeting software such as Slack or Zoom, these games might be part of onboarding, periodic meetings, or holiday celebrations.
Teams that excel at cooperation, creativity, collaboration, and communication can significantly contribute to the workplace. Remote workers often have fewer chances to develop these bonds, so companies are promoting virtual team-building activities to promote interaction among remote coworkers. How companies do this goes behind playing online games during a team meeting.
With offerings ranging from classic board games to virtual book clubs to gameshow-type games, there are events that appeal to a broad spectrum of workers. No matter what platform you use for video conferencing, there are activity, gaming, and icebreaker ideas for you.
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What Activities Are Good For Team-building Online?
There are so many excellent virtual team-building activities for remote workers to participate in.
- DIY Crafting: Give your staff a list of items they can choose from to make a predetermined item, or have them use their creativity to use anything they can find in their home to build something. Set a time limit and set them free to work!
- Online Office Olympics: OOO can be a fun and exciting team bonding experience. Break your team into groups and then lay out the competitions. You can incorporate everything from karaoke to a virtual scavenger hunt to physical things like completing so many burpees or pushups in a set amount of time. The key is to have something for everyone.
- Pictionary: This classic game can be easily converted to an online version. Workers can draw on a virtual whiteboard or with actual paper and pencils through a video call.
Why Is Team Building Necessary?
The pandemic forced many businesses to allow staff to work from home, and, for many companies, that ended up being a great option that many people chose to keep. Just as getting people together for fun team activities when working in person is important, the same is true of remote workers.
Work provides adults with the chance to meet new friends. Employers are not friend-matchmakers for their staff, but the activities that bond people as colleagues often lead to them forming friendships outside of work. Many participants in virtual meeting activities enjoy spending time with their work friends.
Team-building exercises have many benefits to a company, group, or organization. Why is it necessary? There are many reasons why!
- Build strong communication skills: Strong verbal communication skills are crucial for face-to-face and virtual workplaces. The same is true of written communication. Virtual team meetings will be much more productive if all employees can articulate themselves correctly as they navigate the world of remote work.
- Encourage Camaraderie: Camaraderie is mutual trust and friendship among a group of people. Remote team-building activities can go a long way toward building this among staff.
- Get to know one another: Icebreaker games and activities have many purposes, and one is to help people get to know one another. You can frame icebreaker questions so participants learn helpful things about the team. If you are lucky, you will start to build relationships through this process!
- Have fun: Sometimes, the only objective is to provide a fun break from the day.
- Increase trust: While it can be challenging to build confidence in a team, working together to solve a virtual murder mystery or work your way out of a breakout room can help get you there.
- Improve company culture: Whether your staff is all in-person, remote employees, or a hybrid mix, keeping an upbeat company culture is essential. Online team building has many fun ways to get people engaged and feeling good about things.
- Working as one: A real benefit of team building events is to help facilitate how to work together as a single unit. Whether doing in-person problem-solving or virtual activities, there are many ways to get your team to work as a cohesive unit. Teamwork makes the dream work!
Work provides adults with the chance to meet new friends. Employers are not friend-matchmakers for their staff, but the activities that bond people as colleagues often lead to them forming friendships outside of work. Many participants in virtual meeting activities enjoy spending time with their work friends.
How Can You Get Team Members To Buy Into Virtual Games?
There are many ways to build employee engagement and buy-in as you work to implement virtual games.
- Bragging Rights: Create a virtual traveling trophy and hype up bragging rights! Have a staff leaderboard so that the winners are posted and updated regularly.
- Create Ownership: Ask employees if they want to “host” a team-building activity. It can be as easy as hosting a virtual happy hour or sending out a water cooler trivia game. Sometimes ownership goes a long way toward encouraging involvement.
- Prizes: Offering small prizes is a great way to create excitement about virtual events as well as engage people in some friendly competition.
- PTO: Who doesn’t want more paid time off? In lieu of a cash or tangible prize, you can offer a bit of time off for a prize or to work as an incentive for actively participating in virtual meeting activities.
Work provides adults with the chance to meet new friends. Employers are not friend-matchmakers for their staff, but the activities that bond people as colleagues often lead to them forming friendships outside of work. Many participants in virtual meeting activities enjoy spending time with their work friends.
What Team Activity Can Be Done Virtually?
- Breakout Bingo: During a video chat, you could break things up with a quick game of bingo that will help people get to know one another a bit better. Fill the card with items such as hair color, states they have visited, dream vacation, etc.
- Coffee Break Icebreakers: A virtual water cooler or coffee break activity could be a quick icebreaker to serve as a getting-to-know-you activity.
- Icebreaker Questions: Icebreaker questions can come in many formats. Sometimes to simplify things, you can post them as a “would you rather,” and there are just two choices. Questions can range from serious to funny.
- Pub Trivia: Find trivia questions online or from board game cards like Trivial Pursuit. You can even use work-related trivia! When was the company founded? Who sold the most product last year? Who is the most senior member of the staff? Which staff members have summer birthdays? Whatever the format, virtual trivia is fun and exciting!
- Match The Worker: In this game, participants match the employee with several items. It can be anything from their favorite music playlist to the emoji they use most.
- Murder Mystery: You can find many online murder mysteries that need solving online.
- Show and Tell: Invite employees to bring an item to a meeting that fits a predetermined category. It can be their favorite hat, a childhood toy, a snack, or anything!
- Virtual Escape Room: Escape rooms have grown in popularity, and participants can participate in these from their virtual office. Some are free, and others come at a cost.
What Are Some Team-building Games For Virtual Teams?
Your remote meeting platform can supply you with a fun activity or two if you are interested. Some examples include:
- Microsoft Teams: Some options in the Teams platform that you can play with remote team members include solitaire, Guess Who, Pictionary, and bingo.
- Skype: Even Skype has virtual team-building exercises built right in. Some games you will find by clicking on Skype “extras” include arcade games, classic board games, puzzles, and casino games.
- Slack: Looking for fun games to play on the Slack Channel? There are options like Tic-Tac-Toe, Rock-Paper-Scissors, Codenames, Chess Bot, and more.
- Zoom: Online games built into Zoom include poker, bingo, card games, Boggle, Heads Up, and trivia.
