Working remotely can take a toll on company cohesion and employee morale. When remote employees feel lonely or unsupported, productivity slips and the momentum for achieving goals, both big and small, can dwindle or stop.
How can a company support its remote workforce and mediate the effects of physical separation?
Virtual team building can bring remote employees together and make them feel as close as if they were in person. Leveraging the power of virtual team building takes a little time, technology, and creativity—especially if you’re looking to incorporate your company’s vision, purpose, and goals.
To help you get started on designing a strategic plan to reinforce a shared team identity, here are 5 virtual team building activity ideas to help create social connections.
Virtual competitions
Intuition’s Challenges allow your team to compete with each other—from step counting to a meditation challenge, your employees can look forward to new activities while checking-in with each other.
Remote happy hours – with a twist!
On one hand, company happy hours are a bit easier to plan since logistics isn’t a concern. However, employees may not be too excited to join yet another conference call (even if it’s casual!). Setting a purpose for the happy hour is a small way to get big, positive results. Come up with a fun prompt for people to answer or see if anyone on your team is a budding mixologist. Adding a personal or learning element to remote happy hours will give everyone something to look forward to.
Photo contests
Technology makes it easy for anyone to take a great photo! Start a weekly photo contest centered around a theme—nature, productivity, the color blue. Open a new Slack channel for people to share their shots and have the team vote. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the creativity. It’s also a low-stakes, fun way to break up the monotony of a remote work week.
Recipe Swap
Working from home and staying inside means we’re all testing our cooking prowess whether we like it or not. A recipe swap is an easy way to both alleviate stress when it comes to cooking and provide at-home chefs with tried-and-true recipes. Teams can even try cooking the same thing one night and share their results the next day!
Book club
Reading is another form of therapy and meditation. A book club brings people from all sections of the company together. If novels are too big of a time commitment, try a short story or article club. Randomly break people into remote teams to discuss or, if there are 5-8 people, discuss as one group.
