Virtual team building activities help reinforce identity and raise group morale
Strategically designed virtual team building activities provide communication while reinforcing a shared team identity. These online team games can also mitigate the engagement-draining challenges of a remote or distributed workforce.
In the last few years, teams across the globe have learned about the different ways you can engage with your coworkers virtually. Consistent collaboration between colleagues can help foster a stronger community while improving overall team performance and productivity.
The virtual team building activities are a source of entertainment and a way to foster connections and interaction between your team.
Why Virtual Team Building Activities Are Important
- Improve communication
- Better team collaboration and cohesion
- Boosts to productivity as remote workers learn to work together as a team
- Opportunities to check in with your employees
- Build trust between management and the team or from worker to worker
- Improve mental well-being, boost morale, and lower stress
The Hear Me and Draw Game
Hear Me and Draw game is a funny team building activity to play remotely, its purpose is to improve communication between people.
It involves everyone being in the same virtual meeting and one person given the responsibility of being the ‘speaker’. Everyone else in the room is known as ‘artists’.
The speaker must pick a random image and describe it in a way that the artists are able to draw it. Must only describe the image using geometric shapes, making it challenging for the artists to understand.
The speaker chooses a simple image, and must describe it using geometric terms such as directions, degrees, lengths and shapes.
For example: the speaker says draw a long skinny vertical rectangle with three little horizontal rectangles of equal width of the vertical rectangle coming from the right side of the vertical rectangle to the right, with one at the top, one at the bottom, and one in the middle’, but not ‘write the letter E’.
After the correct guess, all players show their drawing on screen. The next orador can be the drawer that guessed correctly, or any other member of the group.
The Pancakes vs Waffles Game
Contrary to the most of games that start high and then fun collapses, Pancakes vs Waffles becomes better with each following round.
The game starts with a question: “What should we keep in the World: Waffles or Pancakes?” followed by each player substantiating his choice. Then, all players vote for either Waffles or Pancakes, the winning word stays, and the losing word is eliminated forever.
For the first round, your team has to decide on whether the world is going to keep pancakes or waffles, and the other is to be obliterated from existence. Anyone can advocate for a favorite choice, and ultimately you must have a vote of majority to make the decision.
After one option is eliminated, you add a new competitor. For example, the game may become Waffles vs Pumpkins, and then Waffles vs Puppies, and then Puppies vs Kittens, and then Kittens vs Romantic Relationships, and similar.
Typically the longer you play, the more intense the conversation gets and the more team members will share their values. This way people will learn a lot about each other, their opinions and values.
Opening Chit Chat
Opening chit chat is an activity that should give the team some time to relax, socialize a bit, and get used to talking to each other on a virtual platform. This one kind of goes without saying, but you may not realize how valuable it is!
At the beginning of your virtual meetings, allow for some natural chitchat to allow team members to get to know each other better and catch up with one another. Try video conferencing with the camera on, if possible, for an even more personal experience.
This little bit of time can reveal who has kids, who does what interests on the weekends, who loves to cook, and more. If you are really slick, you can even plant some questions in there to spark conversation, without anyone knowing what you are doing such as: “What did you all do this weekend?” or “I had the best pasta for lunch, anyone else have anything homemade today?”
This is a time for everyone to catch up and get to know each other. This isn’t a structured activity, but it does give the team some time to relax, get more comfortable with each other, and ask how everyone’s lives are going.
Simply chitchatting is a great way to naturally bond and get to know each other more!
The Things Game
The things game is a group remote activity of talking and topics. Before the activity starts, each of the participants adds topics to a common pool.
The main guidelines is each topic must start with the word “things”. For example, “things my dog wishes he could eat for breakfast” or “things we want to do during our next video meeting.”
One person starts as the host, and reads off a single prompt. The other players then anonymously submit answers to the host, which you can do via private message.
The host reads the answers out loud, and then you go in a circle giving each person a chance to guess who said what. You can have players accumulate points and win prizes, or ignore points all-together.
For the next round, switch hosts and continue with the same game mechanics.
Make your team have fun with this entertaining exercise. In the end, people will get to know each other a little better.
