With more people working remotely in the digital age, leaders and managers must find new ways to keep their teams cohesive and motivated. The shift from conventional office spaces to online settings has brought new challenges, especially in creating team dynamics and personal relationships among staff members who work from different places. Knowing how crucial team spirit and teamwork are for organizational success, the idea of team building activities for remote teams has become a key strategy in developing a connected and efficient workforce. These activities are not just for fun and entertainment; they are an essential part in creating a solid base for creativity, productivity, and employee satisfaction. As companies deal with the difficulties of remote work, carrying out effective team building exercises becomes necessary to foster an interactive and helpful virtual work culture. At Trovve, we faced the same challenges. Being a remote team for over seven years, we experienced a roller-coaster ride with remote work. A tactic that has helped our team cope is incorporating weekly or monthly team-building activities into our schedule. This article explores the importance of such activities, providing realistic and engaging options for remote teams to improve their cooperation, morale, and overall performance.
Guess Who?
There are various ways to get people to work together on a project, but one fundamental truth remains: communication is key. Communication issues arise when teammates do not have adequate opportunities to interact. Hence, many remote team-building exercises exist to create a dialogue among members of a distributed workforce.
One way to facilitate communication among employees, especially in remote teams, is to play a guessing game, which is also a good way for employees to get to know each other better. During your scheduled team-building activity session, have employees take a survey answering things like “What was the last song you listened to?” Then let your facilitator read aloud group responses from the survey and have employees guess who wrote what. Such team building activities are crucial for creating a solid base for creativity, productivity, and employee satisfaction in remote team
Rebus/Bust
Rebus or Bust is a game that serves as one of the engaging team building activities, where your team will solve rebuses (words, illustrations, and symbols that stand for words or phrases) as quickly as possible to make the most correct guesses by the end of the game. To play Rebus or Bust, a key component in team building activities, you will need to split your team into groups and give each group adequate time to list down 10 rebuses, or you can look for rebuses online. Each team will take turns guessing the answers, and points will be awarded for every correct answer.
Have Fun with Logos Games
A logos game is a fun way to build team spirit and friendship among your team members. We’ve all realized at some point that there are hidden meanings in logos and felt that satisfying “Aha!” moment. Logos games are part of team building activities that challenge your team to look closely at famous logos (symbols or signs) and reveal their hidden messages. This activity helps team members connect and improves their attention to detail and creativity.
This activity can be played individually or as a team. Logos games are intellectually stimulating because they give logos you see every day a new context and prompt you to think beyond the obvious. You can check online for the famous logos you can use for this activity, and do not forget to have fun!
Seven degrees of Kevin Bacon
If your virtual workspace is experiencing a slow day, consider incorporating team building activities like playing Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon to stimulate activity. This group activity is an effortless way to get your team members to interact. As a team building exercise, Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon challenges your team to exercise their minds to find links between objects that may not be apparent at first. It is usually done using scraps of paper, but you can also do this with MS Teams.
How it works: Requires Video/Camera on
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- Divide your team into two groups.
- List objects or ideas that are unrelated to each other.
- Write them down on bits of colored paper and place them in separate jars.
- As the facilitator, share your screen and show the jars with colored paper.
- Ask either group which jar they want you to choose from and show them what is written down on the bit of paper selected using your camera.
- Give each group 60 seconds to create a link between unrelated objects or ideas.
- The group that gets the correct answer will win a score.
Online Bingo
Working from home can be stressful, so building connections with co-workers is a challenge. Virtual bingo can help your teams build relationships and find common ground; it is known by most people, and we always play this fun game at Trovve. An easy way to play bingo online is to personalize it according to your company’s culture or products so everyone can understand it better.
You may schedule these online bingo games with Microsoft Teams—all you need to do is schedule a meeting and have a host engage everyone with a shared screen and their camera on. Since this is a virtual activity, you can host a Bingo bonanza and create personalized bingo cards.
Team Building Activities: Who is that Baby?
Sharing childhood photographs with colleagues can be a great icebreaker and one of the enjoyable team building activities. Collect photos of all staff members and display them via video conference using MS Teams, allowing people to guess which pictures are their co-workers’. The team member who guesses correctly wins that round.
Playing this game is an excellent way to spark curiosity and creativity in teammates by encouraging them to recognize facial features they may observe in those they are unfamiliar with.
Mobile Tournament Games/Esports
Host mobile game competitions, such as Call of Duty, Mobile Legends, or Players Unknown Battleground, as engaging team building activities. This is a fun way to see the playful, competitive sides of your team. These games are played in squads, so your team members will have to form groups, and the group that wins should receive a prize. These mobile games are available on Android and iOS devices.
Team Building Activities: Online Lunch Date
Trovve has been doing remote work for the past few years, but we still manage to have lunch together like a family. One excellent way to get to know your team members and improve positive behavior is to sit with them and have a little chit-chat while eating.
Sharing what they plan to eat for lunch is a way for everyone to show their creativity, whether they choose to go to a café they love, get a delivery of their favorite food from their favorite restaurant, or make a dish they enjoy. This is a fun team building activity that can be done with Teams, and it is easy to join a video conference with the mobile app.
Team Building Activities: Forensic Sketch Artist
Forensic Sketch Artist is a uniquely enjoyable party game, engaging office workers and team-building groups in an interactive exercise of skill. Microsoft 365 has the perfect tools for this activity: Microsoft Teams for video meetings and Whiteboard for drawing or sketching.
Put each player in groups of two or three and encourage them to invent a story about a robbery. Choose a player from each team to take on the role of a forensic sketch artist. The rest of the group members should describe the robber, who will try to sketch their descriptions. The sketch artist should be warned that it is likely that no one will be able to perfectly recreate their descriptions perfectly, however, the objective is to have fun nevertheless!
Messy-Desk Photo Contest
You can simply walk to your co-workers’ desks for help if you have questions about a project or task when working on-site. If you work remotely, you can send your co-workers quick messages and hope that they will respond as soon as possible.
But have you ever wondered what your co-workers’ work desks at home look like? Messy Desk Photo Contest gives everyone a chance to brag about their tiny office spaces at home by sending pictures in group chats. Microsoft Teams is a perfect tool for this activity because you can have a channel for everyone and the chat features allow you to react or send/reply with an emoji, a GIF, or attach a picture.
Team-building activities can help eliminate the boundary that often hinders employees from communicating more effectively and freely. Engagement activities such as these fosters community among your staff, resulting in more willingness to engage with each other. When your staff can feel and act as a unit, productivity, morale, and trust will automatically ensue.
