teambuilding.com
During the COVID pandemic, many businesses found themselves pressurized into remote working. Post-COVID, many of those businesses are not looking back. Remote working is here to stay.
While remote working has many advantages …
- Happier staff
- More diverse workforces
- A wider talent pool
- The ability to offer incentives other than financial perks
- Lower overheads, with savings on office space and equipment costs
… there are also challenges.
Lack of Social Contact for Remote Employees
The issue with the isolation of remote employees is really pressing. During COVID, some remote employees found themselves depressed or more anxious, partly due to their lack of socialization with other team members. This continues to be a consideration even since the social restrictions have been lifted. Working in isolation also impacts businesses because it changes how teams work. While apps and software platforms exist to facilitate team management, this is not the same as hanging out at the water cooler, popping into a colleague’s office to brainstorm an idea, or face-to-face meetings to discuss a serious matter. Communication is largely non-verbal and there’s a reason people don’t deliver seriously bad news by text.
Progress in technological communications has revolutionized the way we work and what we can achieve, but we must not forget the value of face-to-face, in-person interactions.
Virtual Team Building
Leadar met the challenge of connecting businesses with verifiable contacts for B2B relationships, marketing lists, and candidates. It has proved particularly useful for helping businesses find remote employees. But after selecting candidates, businesses should consider what they can do to foster collaboration among their remote employees, improve cohesion and creativity.
Team building is important because:
- It helps diverse workforces understand each other and work together
- It promotes an inclusive company culture where everyone’s opinion is taken into account
- It sets up a network where individuals support each other
Team-building events like paintball or laser tag, escape rooms, and scavenger hunts are fun ways to help individuals get to know each other and inspire better teamwork back at the office. While it’s sometimes impractical (or downright impossible) to organize a teambuilding event in person where remote workforces are involved, virtual team building provides a solution. Group chats don’t have that bubbling sound that water coolers make. Nonetheless, virtual meetups can help team members collaborate, gossip, and feel like a part of a group. Virtual team building uses Zoom, Google Meet, and other collaboration and conferencing technology to help teams benefit from team-building events when they are geographically dispersed. The team that plays together stays together. Here are some of the top virtual team-building events you can try to improve the morale, job satisfaction, engagement, and productivity of your remote teams.
Two Truths and a Lie
This is a fun game to help team members get to know each other. Each team member comes up with three statements about themselves. Other teammates need to guess or discern which two are true and which is the lie.
Never Have I Ever
All team members on the video call hold up their hands. One by one, each team member says something that they’ve never done, such as: “I’ve never had a tattoo” or “I’ve never snuck into a movie theater.” Other players drop their hands if this is true for them, too. This is a great game of discovery because everyone gets to find out something interesting about players who still have their hands up.
Charades
This classic game works well virtually. Most people know how to play. And with a time limit, it can be exciting as well as fun. Charades don’t take too much preparation, but they deliver. It can be great as an icebreaker because it tends to make people laugh a lot.
Guess Who
In this game of discovery, the host or moderator will have gathered some unique information about each of the team members. They will then ask the team to guess with whom that information corresponds. For example: “Guess who has a PhD in marine biology” or “Guess who has seen the movie Inception 100 times.”
Happy Hour
This is a relatively straightforward team-building activity. It creates a virtual party/water cooler environment that serves as a check-in for all remote employees to get together and talk about their experience as remote employees. They can share successes and challenges and find solutions. It’s an effective way for people to put faces to usernames and email addresses, making the working (remote) environment more friendly, less stressful, and less lonely.
Escape Rooms
Escape room games can be played collaboratively as online office games. Escape rooms are popular as team-building activities because they necessitate communication and teamwork.
Virtual Quiz Nights
A quiz is a fun activity that encourages teammates to work together to achieve a goal (win win win). A diverse set of questions will help team members learn more about each other and appreciate their hidden depths.
Scavenger Hunt
In a virtual scavenger hunt, a moderator has a confidential list of objects that they reveal one by one. The participants must find an example of each object in their environment and bring it back to the camera. The first person to get back to the camera with the object gets a point.
Bingo
Bingo is a fun game to play online. While it is competitive, the element of chance can take some of the stress out of the competition. It’s still exciting, though, as long as there is a significant prize!
Making a customized bingo board for your team can elevate the bingo experience and make this simple team-building activity memorable.
Werewolf
Virtual Werewolf is based on the popular card game in which:
- Villagers vote on who they think is a werewolf
- A Seer can reveal who is or is not a werewolf
- A Doctor can rescue people, and
- Werewolves, well, eat people.
Moderators can assign roles secretly via instant messages. This is a wonderful game that really lends itself to virtual team building because it requires voting and great communication skills — speaking to trick others; and listening and observation to avoid being tricked.
To Conclude
The best virtual team-building games are easy to communicate and fun. They also fulfill the goals of getting people to know more about each other, understanding each others’ characters and perspectives, and fostering respect for other people’s experiences. At the same time, virtual team-building activities engender a much-needed sense of camaraderie, relieving stress and ensuring that everyone has an identity within the team.
