Establishing a bond between remote employees in the virtual office culture is quite challenging. To ease it, we have Virtual Team building activities.
Virtual Team Building Activities refer to those group team building activities usually carried out using any collaboration platform like Google Meet, Zoom. These activities' ultimate goal is to bring their teams together virtually despite being apart geographically.
Meeting deadlines and finishing the tasks in the pipeline is essential. However, Virtual Team Building activities allow you to ensure your team stays in line. Here are few points that emphasize how remote team activities add value.
Establishes a good relationship among the peers and allows them to collaborate better on work.
Will give a break to remote employees from their work routine, and this small break will help them focus better on work, increase productivity.
Trigger employees' lateral thinking ability; thus, the chances are high that remote employees will apply similar strategies to solve work-related problems.
When you hire a remote team, Virtual team-building activities help you get your team to engage, interact, and bond with one another. Several remote development companies with the remote developer and employees practice these virtual remote team building activities.
Here we have come up with some virtual remote team building activities and games.
1. Happy First Minute - Unusual Icebreakers
Icebreakers provide an excellent kick start to a virtual meeting. It spontaneously creates a quick connect, to be precise, a personal connection with teammates.
How To? Before starting the virtual meeting, ask any easy ice-breaking questions like share the emoji you used today while texting? What is your go-to Web series to watch at night?.
Give everyone one minute to answer the question.
This activity helps remote employees to understand one another better by standing in their shoes.
2. Catch-up Over a work Talk with Idea Board
Try to get the remote teams to think about some new ideas and concepts. It may be for an upcoming project, or it may be for the current work. A small talk over work ideas can break the myths revolving around remote work culture.
How To? Get a whiteboard or excel or document sheet from your regular collaboration tool, start the Idea talk and see how the team responds.
This idea board talk builds a rapport with your team.
3. A Virtual Coffee Station
A Virtual Coffee Time is the best time to meet friends and colleagues virtually and chat. A simple way to manage remote teams is by encouraging coffee chat moments.
How To? Allow your team to grab their favorite coffee or any beverage and block the calendar for the break.
This Coffee Chit Chat will allow remote co-workers to dig the happy moments and boost their minds.
4. Quick Book Review in a Non-review Way
Hosting, Read a Book activity is a fun and exciting activity. You can suggest this for only readers and book lovers of your team.
How To? Once in eight days, host a virtual book club and request the participants to express their view on the particular book they liked the most.
This activity triggers instant conversation, and in the end, a healthy understanding happens between the team members.
5. Virtual Pooling of Knowledge
Share and encourage team members to share information on the latest trends and technologies. Give updates on work and review the work, provide ideas and suggestions to improvise.
How To? Utilize screen sharing and code sharing tools to impart and suggest ideas and help to solve complex codes.
An informal mentoring or pooling enhances your team's quality and additionally builds trust.
6. Virtual Office Olympics
An easy way to increase team activeness, weekly online gaming activities, also referred to as "office Olympics," can be held. These activities can be either online paid games or interactive virtual games.
How To? Form teams and invite them to play online team games such as Pictionary, trivia, virtual board games, virtual puzzles, to name a few. Office Olympics like the kitchen treasure hunt, pick me up can be included.
These games directly contribute to team involvement, interaction, and bonding.
8. Pic Talk
Visual Icebreakers are sometimes needed. An image or graphical picture quickly shows what it signifies. Show and Tell is becoming quite a popular trend in virtual team meetings.
How To? Show an image, a picture, or a graphical image and question what it describes. You may also draw half the picture on the sheet and share, requesting to fill the remaining.
This activity stimulates the brain, refreshes the mind, and acts as a brainstormer.
8. Discuss Over Plans for Vacation
Given the current situation of pandemics, traveling is not advisable. Virtual Team Vacation is an ideal activity, as it gives individuals to discuss their plans and trips.
How To? For this activity, pair up two members and ask them to discuss their vacation plans in a one-on-one call with each other. Later, one member must brief the travel plan of another person to the group.
This activity enhances listening abilities and communication.
9. Interactive Virtual Meetings
In the Digital age, one needs flawless virtual team management. So, use collaborative tools to manage and proceed with the virtual team meetings.
How To? Use tools like Uber Conference and Google Hangouts to interact with the team effectively.
The main idea is to streamline productivity.
10. Online Movie Date
Increase the flavor in remote team management with entertainment quotient "Movie Night"
How To? Using Video Conferencing and other techniques, stream a movie to your remote teams and ask to leave a review in the chat.
The activity enhances interaction and channelizes communication.
Bottom Line:
When you hire a remote development team, the only major issue in remote employees is chances of feeling lonely. Following the above engaging and interactive Virtual team building activities is the best way to make your remote team active and productive.