The last two years alone have brought such a sporadic change in our daily lives, our lifestyles, and even workplace culture. The technological advancements have made remote working possible, but as convenient as it sounds, there are flaws in this way of working as well.
Staying away from the usual office setup can adversely affect your employees and their collaborative, team efforts. This is why virtual team-building programs are sought out by managers. These exercises keep up team spirit, give employees a break from isolation, and help with team building.
6 Great Virtual Team Building Exercises for Remote Working
Virtual Lunch Breaks:
Taking lunch breaks with coworkers has always been a brilliant form of nurturing office relationships. Even when they are virtual, giving employees a break from work, where they simply socialize with each other and talk about the happenings of the week can be great to improve morale. Setting up meetings for lunch breaks with your team at least once or twice a week can help improve team efforts.
Virtual Coffee Meetings:
While working remotely, setting meetings in cafes or taking group coffee breaks are impossible. These sessions or meetings usually allow a balance of work and conversation and motivate employees to discuss ideas amongst themselves.
You can set up a coffee meeting every morning, where employees either go to their favorite cafe or stretch their legs out on their balcony and enjoy coffee with the whole team. These meetings should ideally be light and motivational, starting the day with a positive change rather than getting straight to work.
Bucket List Challenge:
This is a fun exercise that can help your employees know and connect better. It entails asking every member to share their achievements and set a list of goals, professional or personal, that they want to work on in the near future.
Members with similar interests and goals can even help each other out and shed some light on their experience, creating a long-lasting bond. This is a great way for employees to get to know each other and understand where everyone is coming from.
Three Truths and a Lie:
This is another playful virtual team-building exercise that allows employees to know about each other’s personalities. It entails each member telling 4 statements about themselves, in which one is a lie. The remaining members of the team have to guess which statement is a lie.
This is a great ice-breaker exercise, especially for team members who have never met each other. Even the manager can join in and add to the playfulness of the meeting.
Team Bingo:
We’ve all played bingo, a very popular game, with our friends. Well, a great team-building exercise is Virtual Team Bingo. This is a playful spin-off of Bingo, where the action items are related to work.
This could be something funny a coworker said, a funny gif of an office moment, particular traits of an employee that people adore, and more. You can easily do this online, where several bingo templates are available. This is a fun way to bond with your co-workers and break away from the monotony.
Remote Show and Tell:
A great way to have a virtual team-building exercise is to get the employees to socialize outside office hours every once in a while. A remote show and tell would include team members displaying a special talent, recipe, or even a story to the rest of the team.
A video conference can be set up and members could be given a brief idea of what it’s all about. Allowing socializing outside work hours helps nurture a more personal relationship between team members, enabling them to be more open and excited for teamwork.
These are only 6 virtual team-building exercises you can try for remote working. There are many other techniques and exercises, and depending on what you think your team needs, you can choose the best one(s).
