The year is 2023 and many organizations have been running virtual team building activities as a remote organization for 3 years now!
Most of your remote team members might have never met before and this can cause feelings of loneliness, impacting your team’s productivity. Scheduling virtual team building activities is a fun way to strengthen interpersonal relationships, reinforce company culture, and make remote work less isolating.
While you might be using video call solutions like Zoom, or Microsoft Teams, it isn’t easy to come up with exciting team building activities for your virtual office. But a little creativity can go a long way to make your team feel connected and engaged.
We have compiled a list of 14 non-yawn inducing virtual team building activities you can start using for your next team-building session.
Whether you’re celebrating birthdays or helping the team unwind on a Friday night, you can’t really go wrong with karaoke. These sessions are straightforward to set up and let everyone express themselves without restrictions.
Ask participants to pick a song and get its karaoke backing track. During the session, only the singer will keep their mic on as others enjoy the music — or you can have them all sing along.
Creating a karaoke playlist and looking for recommendations? Here are our favorites:
Scavenger hunts are a popular virtual team building game and need no introduction. While you can use team chat apps like Slack to post photos to the clues, we recommend using a video chat app for a better experience.
The rules for the virtual scavenger hunt are simple: the first person to find the item gets the point, and the highest scorer on the leaderboard wins the game.
Start the hunt by giving the clues. It could be broad like a breakfast item or more specific like cereal. The participants need to show the item on the screen to score points.
Here are a few examples of items you can ask:
Virtual improv sessions let individuals exercise their creativity muscle as they are improvising on the fly. Here are two example improv exercises you can try:
This is actually a very fun alternative to your typical icebreaker questions and boring video conference calls.
This is your typical office Olympics — only this time it’ll be a virtual event.
Create small groups to play spirited online games, fast-paced trivia games, and ask icebreaker games. Thanks to the energetic environment and some friendly competition, your employees will grow more comfortable in each other’s company, which will ultimately bolster employee engagement.
Easy to see why employees consider this team building event the most fun they ever had during a virtual meeting.
The remote workers wellness session consists of a series of activities aimed at health and wellness. The session usually starts with an icebreaker followed by a guide sharing their insights on the topic and giving some exercises.
For instance, a mindfulness session might begin with a 5-minute guided meditation session. As the actual session begins, the expert will explain the concept of mindfulness, its benefits, and how you can practice it. The expert will also share a handful of tactics, such as how to control the team meeting or interview jitters through belly breathing.
You can consider the following employee wellness topics:
After the pandemic, the water cooler culture where employees got together to randomly chit chat has (nearly) become ancient history— that’s unless you get more deliberate about it and leverage it as yet an online team building exercise.
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Lunch Roulette is a popular Slack extension that automatically pairs colleagues in a separate Slack channel to plan a 30-minute video call together. Think of it as a virtual coffee or lunch setting, where they can talk about anything else other than work.
Houseparty is a face-to-face social networking app that’s an excellent platform to play fun games and host virtual activities. It’s actually similar to a video conferencing tools like Skype but has some unique features that make it stand out.
For instance, it allows colleagues to connect and play classic games like Pictionary, Chips & Guac and Guess Who. You can also improvise and create your own online version of popular game shows like virtual Show and Tell and Jeopardy, among others.
Don’t hold back; let your creative juices flow!
In the DIY craft challenge, everyone on the team gets 30 minutes to build something using items available at home. You can set the ground rules such as build something using cutlery, draw/doodle a poem, sketchnote a TED Talk, etc.
Keep the challenge as simple as possible, considering some team members are not as naturally artsy. Perhaps you can provide some tutorial videos to help them get started.
You can also ‘Bob Rossify’ this activity by letting an artist teach a simple craft. You can send team members a Hoppier spending card to buy a list of items required for the session and let the artist guide the team through the session.
Okay, it’s not possible to host actual campfires in your virtual workspace, but that doesn't mean you can't still have fun.
Miniature campfires allow you to do all the fun activities virtually, sans the actual campfire. Instead, you can light up a candle, crank up the thermostat, get some classic s'mores, and indulge in live performances, ghost stories, and games.
Scattergories are a workout for the brain. They promote creative-thinking by compelling players to name objects within a set of categories, given an initial letter, within a time limit. Although the game is meant for groups of two-six people, you can create breakout rooms or play the game in teams of up to six people.
The moderator shares the interface of Scattergories through their screen, which the participants can refer to. After two minutes of starting the round, participants share their answers, and the moderator will assign the scores following the game rules.
Virtual escape rooms are perfect for improving team collaboration and camaraderie. In these games, the teams use their problem-solving skills to break out of a cabin, find a treasure chest, or reclaim their kingdom within the time limit. Before players start the game, the gamemaster provides the instructions.
Some of the most famous virtual escape rooms are inspired by Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, and other pop-culture shows and novels.
Whether you work in a small team of five members or bigger teams of 100+, curated virtual tasting experiences or a virtual happy hour are among the most engaging remote team building activities.
Attendees try an assorted variety of wines, cheese, chocolate, etc., with tasting notes and suggested food combinations. An expert explains how these products are made, what makes each product unique, and how to taste them for a truly exquisite session.
Virtual tasting experiences usually run for about an hour, after which you can do a pub trivia session to end it on a fun note.
If you want to steer away from typical office games, try murder mysteries to engage the crime junkies on your team.
Our favorite games are Murder in Ancient Egypt, Blood, Gold, and a Night of Jazz, and Clue Virtual Murder Mystery, which are packed with mystery and have loads of fun puzzles and challenges.
People stick to their habits if they work in groups. This is where teamwork and accountability is effective. Many times people set fitness goals but don't follow through. In such cases, forming an accountability group of people working on the same goal is helpful.
You can set monthly health and wellness goals and track them every day using a shared spreadsheet. The goals could be as simple as drinking eight glasses of water, walking 5000 steps, or more complex goals such as lifting weights 3x per week.
You can introduce rewards to make it more competitive. Since everyone has different fitness levels and has different goals, creating breakout groups can help like-minded people work together.
Building a cohesive team takes a lot of work but it doesn’t have to be a drag. You can quickly boost engagement and productivity by introducing these virtual team building ideas.
You may have noticed that most activities we’ve included are flexible. For instance, you can use the improv session as an icebreaker and continue with the other ideas. You can choose the format that fits your team and your team members’ personalities.
Try out some of these activities in your next team building session, and let us know how it went!
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
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