Working remotely has changed the entire concept of the employment game. You can do certain things as a team remotely to build connections and have fun.
One of the most common questions that remote team managers have is how to build and maintain culture remotely. They also wonder how to connect with teams if they are hybrid and remote.
There are a few things that you can do over a zoom call or a call on any other platform that you might be used to integrate a fun way to build connection and to get people to know each other better as a remote team.
The amazing thing about these virtual team bonding activities is that you can do them at the beginning of your meeting, you can also interject them throughout your meeting – or – if you have a standard meeting, you can actually split the activities out over time over multiple meetings.
Without further ado, let us jump into the list of fun activities to connect with your co-workers remotely.
Team Presentation
Now, this won’t be just some work-related presentation – but – you might want to look at it in terms of an in-house TEDX talk where you give each employee five minutes to talk about whatever they want. It could be anything, such as why Harry Potter is a must-read series or why some random movie is the best.
This way, you will encourage your remote employees to express their opinions on something that they love and are passionate about. You can take turns once a week or once a month to do this fun activity and make everyone participate in it. Every person on your team has something in their life that they can talk about for five to ten minutes – even forever – if they had the chance to.
You might ask people to present their slides as part of their presentation. Again, making people talk about what they are passionate about is typically a great way to build connections, get to know your co-workers, and do something fun out of work that isn’t corny.
Show & Tell
You can integrate this strategy where people join the online platform, grab something – just anything from their house – and bring it for show and tell. It is a good way to connect with people, and seeing what people bring to show is always so interesting.
It is a way to get to know your co-workers by doing fun unrelated to work. The “show and tell” activity can be a massive icebreaker – it will also bring back memories of being a little kid. There is something lively about showing and telling about something to your remote co-workers.
Once Upon a Time
This one is an excellent way to bring about creativity in people and fits of laughter – aka – when you want your remote team to loosen up. Before building the story, you will want to let your team know the ground rules.
You will want to build a fictional story – something that is a lot of fun. And you are going to do this in the round robin fashion, which means that every remote co-worker will have a chance to participate in this in sequential order.
The key to this strategy is that you will have to build the story and have it come to a conclusion by the time it reaches the last person. So, you don’t want the last person hanging where they are scrambling to actually finish the story.
Also, according to the ground rule, everyone has just one sentence to integrate into the story. If you look at it – you see that this is hilarious and a great way to bring about creativity and prepare your remote team to participate in brainstorming sessions apart from having fun and connecting with your remote team.
You can also do the “last word response” activity, which you will do in a round-robin fashion. While connecting with your co-workers, you can also use this fun activity to practice active listening.
Scavenger Hunt
Hear us out! It doesn’t matter what online collaboration platform you are using – you can put people into breakout rooms and give them half an hour or more to go, collect, and do everything. You might give them the task of taking a picture of everybody in a wig by screenshotting everyone on the call.
Or – you might ask your remote team to gather things from their house or whatever other ideas you have for a scavenger hunt. Think about how fun these activities can be – you will be putting people into random teams and making them participate in a fun and high-energy competition.
Fun activities are always a fun way to get to know people, connect with them, and do something that is everything but not work and hence really fun to do.
You can also find apps like Goosechase that help you run a scavenger hunt. You can use any of the available interactive experiences apps to connect with your remote co-workers.
Cutie Pie
This is another great virtual team-building activity. As a facilitator of the online meeting, you will be asking everyone who is going to be attending the meeting to send you in advance their baby pictures. Simply put, you will ask your remote team members to send you pictures of them when they were babies.
Now, when the pictures come in, you will actually interject the pictures into the PowerPoint. So, you will take little snippets, and every remote co-worker will get their own page. You can then forward the PowerPoint to each person and do it as a round-robin.
When you kick off the meeting, you will tell your co-workers that you have something fun for them, and you can make them guess which baby picture belongs to which co-worker. Now, if you think about it, then this is definitely a great way to know people – especially when they were tiny.
This fun activity can actually serve as an icebreaker and lead to other conversations after the meeting.