While many have been working remotely, it’s become clear that full days of Zoom calls and webinars has quickly become old. While there are ways to edit your background to help bring entertainment to these calls, it’s becoming boring. Working remotely is nice, but it doesn’t give you much time to have casual conversations and bond with your co-workers like being in the office.
Luckily, there are many virtual team building activities that you can do. These times have been stressful for everyone to adjust to, and these virtual activities can bring some entertainment and enjoyment to everyone’s day. It’s important to help you bring your team together and help them not feel isolated and alone while working from home. Below, we have compiled a list of virtual team bonding activities to try with your team.
Weekly trivia contests
There’s a reason why Jeopardy has been around for so long, people love trivia. If you and your team members do, you need to check out Water Cooler Trivia. It’s a platform for automated weekly trivia quizzes. Teams are emailed a Monday morning trivia quiz and responses are due that night. Then you receive the results the next morning. The best part is that the schedule is customizable, so you can adjust it to make sure it’s right for you and your team. You can also customize the quiz by choosing the category, difficulty, and region (if you have global teammates).
Share your bucket list
Everyone has a bucket list. It’s a list of things that you want to do or experience in your life. Naturally, it says a lot about someone and helps you get to know them better. There are many ways to set this up with your team. Depending on the size of your team, you can either designate one person each week to share their bucket list or plan a call and have your team go one by one. Also, you can specify the length of these lists and decide if members should include items they have already done. This is an easy way to learn more about your team while also seeing how similar you might be.
Share your favorite things
Having your team members share their favorite thing is a simple activity. It’s also a great way to break the ice while giving team members a chance to learn more about each other. It’s less anxiety-inducing than other activities, since there are no wrong answers. Like other activities, this is also one you can customize however you want. You can assign a topic such as “favorite thing about working remotely”. Then, go around and have your members share their answers.
Create a birth map
A birth map is another fun activity that allows you to learn something new about your team members. All you have to do is share an image of a world map and invite your team to place a sticker on/near their place of birth. Then, everyone can go through and say where they are from and either share a story or their favorite thing about their birth place. This is a super simple activity, and you never know if you might be from the same area as one of your coworkers.
Community coffee breaks
A community coffee break is an easy and effective way to catch up with your team members. You can schedule a 15 or 20 minute period every day or week when your team isn’t busy, and allow them to catch up. These conversations can be work related or just for fun to get a nice break from their work. It might be best to schedule these midday so your team can get a little energy to finish off their day.
Share a picture
Picture sharing is an easy way to get to know your team members, as well as bond over shared interests. You can invite everyone on the team to share a picture from their workspace at home and ask them to write a funny description about it. Also, you could make it a guessing game and have everyone on the team try and guess whose space belongs to each person on your team.