This post is a comprehensive resource on virtual team building.
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And other virtual team building ideas!
Virtual Team Building Activities
Here are some fun examples of activities you can do with remote teams.
1. Online Champion Chef
Challenge your team members to an epic cook-off. You can choose a secret ingredient, like apples, cheese or celery, and then have your team members prepare a dish around it. Each person takes a photo of the final dish and posts it to a shared channel for all team members to see and vote on.
2. Celebrity Doppelgänger
Somewhere in the world is a person that looks at least somewhat like you. The chances of that person being a celebrity are probably 0.00001%, which is what makes Celebrity Doppelgänger fun and challenging. For this activity have each team member that wants to participate submit a head shot and a photo of a celebrity they look like. Then, post all of the photos to a shared channel or platform and have other team members guess on the matches. The team member that guesses the most matches correctly wins.
3. Escape the Virtual Room
Escape the Virtual Room is like an online escape room where team members have to solve clues and puzzles. The goal is to eventually get off the virtual conference call and go do productive work instead. You can create clues that tie in Wikipedia, YouTube and other familiar resources.
4. Virtual Team Building Icebreakers
Virtual team building icebreakers are questions you ask at the beginning of a virtual meeting to help everyone get to know each other a little better.
For example, you could ask:
- What is your role and what did you eat for breakfast?
- When was the last time you rebooted your computer?
- What was your favorite TV show growing up?
Virtual Team Building Games
The following is a list of fun virtual team building games you can play with remote teams.
4. Capture the Virtual Flag
Capture the Flag is a game played across summer camps everywhere, and now you can play the game online too. Here is how to play Capture the Virtual Flag:
- Divide your people into small teams and setup a shared spreadsheet for each team.
- Each team marks a 🚩 somewhere on the spreadsheet.
- If an enemy team can surround the flag with 100 “x” marks without deleting the flag, then they capture the flag.
- The competing team must then hide the flag somewhere in the same spreadsheet and prevent the original team from finding it for 24 hours.
You can continue playing until one team has captured all of the virtual flags.
5. Guess That Song!
This virtual team building game for remote employees is version of the popular “Name That Tune!”
To play, the host creates a playlist on YouTube or Spotify and goes through the songs one by one. The first team member to correctly state the name of the song and the artist gets 1 point. At the end of the game, the person or team with the most points wins.
6. 20 Questions
20 Questions is a game where one person decides on a “thing” that they are, and other team members can ask up to twenty questions to figure out what that thing is. For example, the decider could be a dog, and the other participants would ask questions like, “are you alive?”, “do you have bark?” and similar to figure out the final answer.
Virtual Team Building Challenges
Here are a few challenges you can do with virtual and remote teams.
7. Water Cup Challenge
Drinking water is a good way to stay hydrated and healthy while working from home. Challenge your team members to drink at least three glasses of water each throughout the day. You can track progress on a spreadsheet and award prizes at the end of the month.
8. Learn a Language Challenge
Learning a new language is empowering and also a great way to improve communication, friendships and engagement for remote teams. At the beginning of a month or quarter, have all of your team members login to a language learning app like Duolingo and choose a language to learn. At the end of the month compare progress and highlight the team members that improved the most.
9. Read a Book Challenge
Reading one book each week can contribute to more diverse thinking, new ideas and similar. Challenge your remote team members to read one book each week and report back on what they learn. You can read fiction, non-fiction and otherwise, and the challenge is more about keeping the pace up.
Make a list of your own ideas for virtual team building too!