Have you or your team recently switched to remote working?
Are you looking for the best ways to strengthen the bond among the members of your team?
Well, team building activities are what you and your team need right now. However, you might be asking yourself, aren’t these activities supposed to be for in-office teams?
But why not for remote teams?
Just like regular office teams, remote teams can also make use of remote team building activities to develop emotional connections among their remote workers.
However, as the members of a remote team are working from different locations, the approach for team building is quite different compared to one used for in-office teams.
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Continue reading this article till the end to get all the important information on remote team building activities.
Table of Contents
How Do You Bond With a Remote Team?
As a manager, it is your responsibility to bring your remote team together. You need to understand that emotional interaction between the members is essential for them to socialize effectively.
Whether you are a manager or a remote worker, team building exercises will help you to establish cordial relationships with your teammates.
Thus, the best way to bond with individuals of a remote team is to organize and participate in virtual team-building games/exercises.
How Team Building Activities Improve Team Collaboration
For every team, collaboration is the key contributor to their success. Without effective team collaboration, it becomes difficult for teams to achieve their predetermined objectives.
Moreover, due to the absence of in-person communication, it is highly challenging for remote teams to collaborate effectively. Furthermore, managers also find it difficult to coordinate and manage remote teams that have weak interpersonal communication.
Virtual team building unifies remote teams and helps team members to form meaningful relationships with each other.
With the help of virtual team building activities, remote workers get to know more about their fellow team members. By developing a mutual understanding, it becomes easy for teammates to trust one other and put collective efforts to accomplish their common goals.
Team building not only improves collaboration but also tends to boost the happiness and productivity of team members.
“Trust is knowing that when a team member does push you, they’re doing it because they care about the team.” – Patrick Lencioni
Remote Team Building Activities For Engaging Your Virtual Team
Being a team leader or a project manager, you need to ensure that every single person on your remote team feels comfortable and valued.
Even if you are a remote employee, you may be willing to go that extra mile on your part to mingle with your team members.
Well, we are listing down some of the easiest yet highly effective team building games/exercises that you and your remote team can start doing any day:
1. Video meetings
Team meetings conducted over voice calls are ineffective as compared to video conferencing.
How do you make a virtual meeting fun?
Video meetings not only allow you to share your thoughts but also the emotions attached to them. Additionally, it becomes possible for other team members to receive visual cues over a video conference.
Apart from discussing official work, you can also visually interact with your remote team and have informal conversations. You can even ask other team members to recommend team bonding activities that they believe can be effective for bringing the team together.
2. Socialize over group chats
As a remote team, you may be using a dynamic chat or messaging app that allows individuals to interact in groups.
But, you shouldn’t limit your group chats to discuss only your projects. You can create a separate group for your team where you all can share and talk over things like the latest news, articles, or favorite breakfast recipes.
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Within this activity, you have to ask each member of your team to share one photo of their life.
After sharing the photo, each member has to explain the memory or story linked with the photo that they’ve shared.
Apart from life photos, you can also share photos of your pet, favorite places, the view outside your house, etc.
4. Virtual tea/coffee sessions
While working remotely, it will not be possible for you to take group tea/coffee breaks with your teammates and have a quick chit-chat session that usually happens in an office.
Well, there’s no need to feel bad as you can recreate those tea/coffee sessions virtually over video calls.
All you need to do is to invite your teammates to join a video call where they all can have fun and enjoy while sipping their favorite beverages. It is completely your personal choice whether you want to organize such sessions on a daily or weekly basis.
5. Bucket list challenge
This challenge is among the best fun team building activities that your remote team must try.
To start with this team building activity, all your team members need to share their bucket lists, preferably over a video conference. You can also ask the team members to share 5 or 10 achievements that they want to accomplish in the near future.
After sharing the bucket lists, team members can match their bucket list items with others to find out the activities that are common. Now, if possible, members with similar activities on their bucket lists can challenge themselves to try accomplishing a common bucket list activity together.
6. Three truths and a lie
This is rather a very simple but highly effective game for eliminating the discomfort that remote team members may have between them.
For playing this game, you will again need to organize a video conference.
The rules of this game are straightforward. Each member of the team has to tell 4 things about themselves among which one is a lie. Other team members have to guess that false statement.
This exercise not only allows remote workers to know about the personalities of colleagues but it also improves their ability to pay attention to even the smallest details.
7. Team bingo
Bingo is one of the most popular games that you might have heard of and even played with your friends. Well, the bingo we are talking about here is different only in the sense that the action items featured on it are related to remote work such as sharing a funny gif with a fellow worker, wearing pajamas while on a meeting with a client, etc.
There are several team bingo templates available on the web that your remote team can play. Besides, you can also customize the action items on the bingo board to make it more relatable to your work culture.
8. Online trivia and puzzles
Sometimes, a remote worker may be unable to find a topic to start a conversation with colleagues.
In such a scenario, you can try online team building games such as trivia and puzzles. You can easily find such games on the web and play them for free.
Share your scores with your teammates and challenge them to beat your score to make things more interesting.
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9. Movie nights
This may sound unrealistic, but it’s completely possible to watch a movie together with your remote team without literally visiting a movie theatre.
All you need to do is to host a movie and stream it over a video conference. During the movie, make sure that comments are enabled or use a separate chat app where team members can leave remarks and exchange comments.
This remote team building activity may seem difficult to put into motion, but it’s completely feasible as long as each team member has a good internet connection.
10. Meet in-person
Meeting your remote coworkers face-to-face is the best way to interact and strengthen your bond with them.
However, as your team members may be dispersed in a large geographical area, you may have to limit such team meetings to once or twice a year.
And if some members do not want to travel thousands of miles for a meetup, don’t blame them. Also in these unprecedented times, when we are forbidden to travel, you still have the video conferences at your disposal.
How ProofHub Can Help You With Your Remote Team Building Activities
ProofHub is a leading all-in-one project management software that allows remote teams to plan, collaborate, organize, and deliver projects.
However, ProofHub is not limited to just managing projects, but it also helps managers and team leaders with remote team management.
The platform comes with several tools that will help you and your remote team to collaborate and work together as a single unit.
Manage projects, tasks, and remote teams using a single platform. Switch to ProofHub today!
Below are some of the key features of ProofHub that remote teams can use to perform various team building exercises:
- Built-in chat/messaging tool for one-on-one and group chats
- Discussion topics where remote team members can share their thoughts and ideas
- Dedicated space for making announcements for recognizing team achievements, birthday wishes, work anniversaries, introducing a new team-building game, requesting feedback of team members, etc.
Want to know how ProofHub can fit in with your team or need help setting up your workflow on ProofHub? Contact our support team or leave your query at [email protected].
Conclusion
For remote teams of any size, team building activities are vital for developing strong bonding among the team members. Managers and team leaders have to make sure that they utilize multiple team building exercises/games to help their team members socialize with one another. The remote team building activities mentioned in this article are not only easy to perform but are also highly effective. Moreover, you can start doing these virtual remote team building activities with your remote team anytime.
If you found this article to be useful, don’t forget to share it with your remote co-workers and managers.
