14 Quick Team Building Activities For Your Virtual Team

Online escapes vary in difficulty and scope and range from hosted to self-guided. Generate some creativity from your remote team by prompting them to create something using materials from their home. For example, by having the team carve pumpkins near Halloween. At Vistaprint, we have a “watercooler” Slack channel where we share cute pictures of our pets, interesting articles, and fun videos. It does wonders for bonding and gives people a space to have a bit of fun. We all know that exercise is good…and it’s extra-important when you’re in front of a screen all day.

• If you are using material from another source or website , have that material on hand before your meeting begins.
• Love them or hate them, it’s hard not to get caught up in the intrigue of a murder mystery.
• This game is fairly simple and requires each player to keep their eyes wide open without blinking, while the clock ticks.
• For example, virtual trivia, online bingo and icebreaker questions are all popular options.
• Before your event, tiny campfire sends your participants s’more ingredients and a tealight candle.

There are a few bonus virtual connection activities included as well. Virtual team building games typically last 30 minutes to two hours, but shorter options that run 15 minutes are also available. (Click on the “How it works” card to see full instructions for the game.) The game consists of four rounds, each with its own theme. You’ll useGiphy.com or Google Images to find a .gif that fits with the theme for that round and attach that gif to a card.

Virtual Team

They built a slide deck template called “My User Manual” that gives any team – distributed or co-located – a structured way to communicate all their quirks and preferences. Download the template forKeynote orPowerPoint and have each team member fill it out. You can set up a meeting to discuss them in real-time, or share the decks around so people can review them asynchronously. We use Trello boards as sort of a virtual whiteboard, Slack as our chat tool, and Zoom for video conferencing. You’ll need at least one of these tools for each of the activities shared here. Regardless of which activities you choose – the ones above, the countless others that exist online, or those you make up yourself – make it a point to bring your teams together regularly.

Next, give them five minutes to guess each person’s five most used emojis. To make the game even more fun, add some healthy competition with a points system that’s recorded digitally or by the manager with a pen and paper. For the next step, each duo gets on a personal call and tells their partner about their perfect vacation – if they had unlimited time and money. Get the entire group to virtually “form a circle” on a video call to start the process.

How can we prioritize our personal lives while excelling in our careers? Here’s where we explore the emerging conversations about Work 2.0. Crossed wires and missed connections – good communication among teams is tablestakes for effective teamwork. Get best practices and sound advice on how to create understanding and work together better. The game consists of four rounds, each with its own theme. You’ll use Giphy.com or Google Images to find a .gif that fits with the theme for that round and attach that gif to a card.

Set a date to work on the craft project and encourage everyone to dress festively and listen to holiday music. At the end, conduct a quiz and ask people at random who answered what to each question. Everyone anonymously posts a picture of what’s inside their fridge in a shared doc. Have them describe their appearance, superhero powers, and how they would make the world a better place. One by one, have your team present who they invited and why. It will be interesting to compare who chose who and if anyone picked the same person.

But for virtual teams, that’s not as easy as going out to lunch together on Fridays. Consider adding weekly Lunch & Learns to the menu for a great way to get to know your colleagues and something important to them. At lunch time, all team members will hop on a video conferencing platform of choice – snacks in hand – and sit-back and relax listening to that week’s presenter share their topic.

Easy Virtual Team Building Activities

Everyone starts with five points, and loses a point for each activity they’ve done. For a virtual team, these points can be represented by fingers! Start with an open palm, and fold a finger for each point you lose. 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. Not only does building a storyline force teams to use their creative juices, it also helps them listen to each other and improve team cooperation.

You can suggest things such as wine and cheese pairings, or ask everyone to submit their favorite cocktail recipes. Strategically designed virtual team building activities provide communication while reinforcing a shared team identity. These online team games & activities can also mitigate the engagement-draining challenges of a remote or distributed workforce. Basically, do 2.5x as many virtual team building activities as you do local team building.

This gives teams who do not usually work together the chance to collaborate on one project, especially fun during the holidays. Everyone needs to give an answer to their least and favorite part about having a virtual office. Let your team know there is no judgment, and it is an open space to discuss anything positive or negative. A picture says a thousand words, so this is a great activity to introduce newer team members to each other and learn something new about them. It does not take a lot of time and allows people to open up about themselves through a fun anecdote or story. This is a great opportunity to start a brainstorming session and have people interact in a dynamic and electric environment.

Additional Ideas For Remote Team Building Activities

The game master asks the werewolves to wake-up and select a victim, followed by the medic who points to one person to save, and the seer who points to one person to reveal. Finally, the game master announces the sun is rising and reveals whether a villager became wolf-grub during the night. To start the game, players draw roles of werewolf, villager, medic or seer. Werewolves do the eating, villagers vote werewolves off the island, medics can save a player and seers can peer deep into another player’s soul to reveal their wolf-status.

Our favorite collaboration tool and what our team uses is Notion. Notion is an “all-in-one workspace” best for calendars, note-taking, and project management, which would help you maximize your team’s planning. Create your boards, layout and completely customize them to your organization’s preferences. It is a great tool to help onboard new employees and encourages colleagues to get to know one another on a deeper level.

Developed by expert online team game designers and a team with 5+ years developing unique virtual group events. Once inside, it gives you a playground of dozens of ideas that you can click and customize in a matter of minutes – with instant quotes directly available on the platform! For every event, they provide a briefing that includes all the details organized such as a designed invitation, host information, and a place to insert your points of contact. At the meeting, share the answers and have your teammates try to pair the answers with the right person.

Make it easy to stick to daily movement by doing it as a team. Tai chi is great as it’s accessible to most, and the slow, deliberate movements are doubly beneficial for soothing your mind as well as your body. You can even turn this into a team challenge by seeing who can do this the most days in a row.

Each individual takes a turn hosting a session where they teach or hold court on a subject they know exceptionally well. This taps into what makes each team member unique and stimulates everyone’s curiosity and drive to learn. Virtual team building increases motivation and productivity. Using gifs to express yourself can be a lot of fun and can get your team LOLing together. Copy this Trello template and get ready to battle it out with your colleagues. Afterward, you could convert your choices into a team playlist so your team members have music for every mood while they work from home.

Team Building Icebreakers: Be Vulnerable

” Give everyone 30 seconds to 1 minute to choose, and then have everyone share their answer. You can then spend time thinking about and discussing everyone’s answers, and what you each learned from one another. Another break opportunity used by people who work together in an office environment is the water cooler. Topics may be a popular streaming show, current events, family news, or other lighthearted discussions. Before the meeting, ask members to be ready to share three unusual fun-facts about the city/state/country they live in that aren’t commonly known. This can be a good way to learn something new, while improving understanding of the location and cultural environment where your teammates work.

You can search for the musician yourself or recruit some of your team members with ideas for people they would like to host and listen to. Begin your meeting https://globalcloudteam.com/ with an organized talk about global events, news, and goings-on. Prior to the meeting, provide current news stories for the team to read over.

Put simply, virtual team building is a way for remote employees to form bonds and develop their collective collaboration skills, using various online platforms and technologies. It’s usually up to the team leader to instigate specific initiatives to do just that. These initiatives include icebreakers, games, activities, challenges or fun packages sent by post to peoples’ homes. Done well, virtual team building will increase employee engagement and make the job more enjoyable for all team members as they get to know each other. Superhero Academy is a popular virtual team building activity for remote teams.

Geographic Fun Facts

While joining a Zoom call, every person on the team should change their usernames to that of the chosen character. Ensure that you enter the room with your video and audio turned off. One player can then take the lead and start guessing the actual names, one after the other. The Team moderator makes a list of common facial expressions and sends it to one person from each group. This chosen member emotes the given expression, while the other members of the group figure out what that is. Well here’s the catch – the usage of hands is prohibited while enacting.

It’s therefore essential that every team-building game has a plenary, or ‘what have we learned from this? Donut allows your team members to meet up for virtual hangouts. This can allow for personal conversations and ice breakers without any hassle, and can feel like a one-on-one coffee date.

What Are Virtual Team Building Ideas?

If you can video chat, get each team to submit photos of what they have collected. This team-building activity gets everyone involved and feeling competitive. The aim isn’t to create something museum-worthy, it is to spark creativity and get everyone interacting with each other. Heads Up is an easy game to play with your team if you are in a pinch. It is a great brain teaser and also helps your team get to know each other a little better without having a difficult setup process. As the “host” of the meeting, write a small speech or instructions to tell your team.

Have the team guess who responded with what answer, and then have the author explain their answer once they have been revealed. If you choose the latter route, do not have the team “reply all” when giving their responses to keep them anonymous. This lack of organic relationship formation can lead to remote meetings feeling very transactional and somewhat dry because they stick to the agenda.

Though more formal than some of the other games presented herein, it’s a really great way to get to know each other’s personalities a little better. You don’t need to have everything mapped out to the last detail, just keep it simple. Chat for a bit before or after meetings and keep the team building team building games for remote workers fun and focused. You will easily help build open communication, friendships, and happiness in the workplace. You need team building games for remote workers that will encourage communication, build out-of-the-box thinking, and creative thinking.

Online Office Games is energetic, competitive, and everything you need to build some serious team engagement while working from home. It is also our most popular event type with 150,000+ guests to date. We often hear from participants that these virtual office games were the most fun they ever had in a Zoom room. What’s more fun than putting your skills to the test at a game of virtual trivia with your colleagues? We’ve compiled a list of 34 virtual team building ideas to improve morale and bond with your team during the COVID-19 pandemic. Remember, any quick activity works best when you’ve got the whole team participating or working together!

Tools For Virtual Team Building

One fun idea for your happy hour is to center it around a theme. The theme can be related to something specific to your team or your office, or it can be a group decision. You could host a book club, make it a game night, play a drinking game (using alcoholic or non-alcoholic drinks), or even theme things around holiday events like Halloween or Christmas. Virtual team building is one of the best ways to reunite the parts of office life you’re missing the most.