Team building can be hard, especially when many of your employees are working from home or are on a hybrid schedule. It’s hard to find a time to gather everyone for a group activity when half or more of your employees are located around the country. It doesn’t have to be completely impossible due to the advances of technology. Meetings are already held on Zoom and Google Meet all the time. Now, no matter where you are, you can still feel connected to your employees. Remote team building activities can change the vibe in all the right ways.
Best Technologies For Remote Team Building Activities
Online Quiz Platforms
A traditional office icebreaker is a trivia quiz. While this might seem like an easy way to distract your employees, there are structured ways you can do it in a remote environment. Use tools like Water Cooler Trivia to spice up an employee’s break and learn more about their interests outside of work. After creating your group, you can choose the trivia category you want and how hard the questions are. You get a customized quiz sent to you once a week that only takes two minutes to complete.
Another similar tool is QuizBreaker, which allows you to customize how often you receive quizzes and how long they are. Plus, this tool lets employees take a crack at guessing who said what on a quiz. By making a game out of learning about your employees, you can turn remote team-building activities into something employees look forward to.
Employee Recognition Programs
Kazoo is an employee experience platform that aims to streamline how your company communicates without losing the fun. One of the solutions Kazoo offers is an Employee Recognition and Rewards tool. This tool allows you to weave in continuous ways for employees to recognize one another. Plus, Kazoo also gives you some key insights into how your employees collaborate. You can easily see what motivates employees in collaboration and performance, as well as how recognition drives your employees.
Remote Meeting Collaboration Tools
Whether it is a meeting to touch base or a virtual coffee klatsch, you want to keep your employees engaged throughout remote team-building activities. A great meeting app tool that engages your audience is Klaxoon. Images and text are easily shared live with the entire team through the Klaxoon meeting app. Additionally, you can kick meetings off by posing a question to your team. When they answer through their apps, Klaxoon creates a live word cloud that shows which response has the most likes.
Klaxoon also comes with other features, such as live surveys and polls, that give your employees many ways to participate and have their voice heard throughout a meeting.
Best Remote Activities to Try
Trivia
One of the easiest ways to bond with your coworkers is by taking part in a few rounds of trivia. There are so many topics to choose from, and these can be predetermined based on what generation most employees are part of and what their interests are. While there are existing sites to use for trivia games, as a boss, you can always use Kahoot to find something broad enough for anyone. Another great site to use is Sporcle, which is easy to navigate based on category.
Personality Tests
Personality types like the Myers-Briggs test can be a great way to find out more about the people you’ll be working with long-term. Whether you agree with what you find is totally up to you, but they can be a fun way to bond over how similar or different you are to other people at your company. You can also try the Enneagram or the free personality type test from 16personalities. Find out more about yourself and how you operate while also creating a great conversation starter with others!
Browser-Based Multiplayer Games
One of the most popular activities has to be playing web games together, and there are many that you can play with a whole crew of people. You don’t need any special skill or expensive gadgets–just a working computer and good Wi-Fi. A popular party game like Codenames can be played online! Everyone can divide into two teams and play each other by guessing words on the board based on the one-word hints given to them. Some people even created entire worlds in Minecraft that employees could enter and add to! If you’re willing to spend the extra money, this could be awesome if your company is filled with Gen Z and Millenials.
Movie Sessions
If you think your company might do well with a few movie watches, you can always use Zoom or a site like Watchparty to share your screen and play a movie or episode of a television show for everyone. This can be a great activity because you can get requests and feedback from employees while keeping the conversations to a minimum. Let’s face it, talking all of the time can get tiring. Put on a fun movie, episode, or video for everyone to watch!
Coffee Talks
Some companies came up with the bright idea to section out 30 minutes for everyone to make themselves a coffee and hop on Zoom together to chat about life and all things going on in the world before moving onto work. Sure, you can give some work updates, but taking that time to catch up and chit chat is great for building connections. If you don’t care for coffee, make yourself some tea and sit by your computer, ready to listen to life updates!
Best Companies AZ
Teambuilding doesn’t have to be hard. Just because you don’t work in a traditional office with one another doesn’t mean that you can’t connect and get to know each other on personal levels. You can still have fun, play games, make a Minecraft escape game, or watch a few episodes of a sitcom together.
Check out BestCompaniesAZ for information on companies, events, recent blogs, and all things career related!
