10 Ideas To Improve Team Building For Remote Employees & Workers

Whether you’re leading a small startup or a large organization, this guide will provide practical employee engagement ideas and insights to help you build a more engaged remote workforce. Together, we’ll explore how to empower employees, improve internal communication, and ensure your team feels connected—even in a virtual environment. Channel your inner Olympian and flex your sports trivia knowledge with this Olympic-themed virtual team building activity for remote teams. An international tech company noticed declining participation in monthly team-building games, with feedback revealing activities felt impersonal and disconnected from daily work. They shifted to more frequent, smaller-group activities like virtual coffee breaks and shared interest clubs, incorporated personal check-ins before tasks, and encouraged sharing non-work stories. This personalization and regularity fostered belonging and increased active participation.

Design your agenda in SessionLab to also help you keep track of time and any important links and resources. Having everything you need to run your session in one place can really help reduce stress, save time and make everything run smoothly. When it comes to documenting things, we also recommend taking notes during a session and where possible, using software to make this easier! Instead of brainstorming on paper and reading out ideas, try using Mural or Miro to collect ideas effectively.

Team Canvas Session

Players decode visual clues and guess the hidden message through creative emoji interpretation. Cooking classes work well for teams who https://theorg.com/org/asianfeels enjoy hands-on activities and are popular for celebrations. Trivia works particularly well for large groups and celebrations because everyone can participate simultaneously.

They ask, what are the “incremental decisions” that facilitators make, and “what are the consequences of these decisions? After all, participatory processes are not neutral (Dhillon, 2017; Switzer, 2020), and neither is facilitation. Community-engaged projects can introduce complexities around power dynamics, ownership, and issues of representation (Burch, 2021; Guerrero et al., 2013). Equity-based design must consider all learning (formal or informal) as situated in social, spatial, and historical processes that are marked by inequalities (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016). This is important, because proficient facilitation is a strong predictor of both social action and policy impacts in many participatory projects (Boivin et al., 2018; Nelson et al., 2004).

• Choose a topic related to your work that you want to learn more about – anything from SQL to leadership styles to trends in recruiting practices – and find colleagues who share that interest.
• Seed the wall with leadership recognition to model the behavior and encourage specificity in appreciation (what exactly someone did and why it mattered).
• Employees take turns making statements about things they’ve never done, revealing surprising facts about themselves and their colleagues.
• This might include working on communication, collaboration, alignment, team values, motivation, and anything else that can enable a group to work together more effectively.

With ocean soundscapes and delightful vacation destination footage, your travel companions will compete with their knowledge of travel destinations, vacation-themed movies, summer pop hits, and even a cabana-wear contest. Your yacht captain gives guests a playfully immersive experience for a virtual team vacation from your work day that your colleagues truly deserve. In this tropical-themed team building activity, Captain Furling welcomes online guests aboard his luxury vessel and quickly takes them out of their homes to a gorgeous beach in Cancun. If you’ve ever wanted to take part in your own Family Feud-style competition, this is your chance!

These activities boost productivity, reduce turnover, and ensure employees feel valued and connected to their teams. With more employees working remotely, creating structured, engaging activities that foster connection, collaboration, and a strong company culture becomes essential. These activities ensure that remote workers feel valued, aligned with the company’s mission, and connected to their colleagues.

By intentionally creating spaces for genuine human connection, you’re not just boosting morale; you’re building a more resilient, innovative, and successful team that can thrive from anywhere. Explore our collection of 5-minute team building activities for a set of quick and simple activities you can bring to any meeting. Enabling better teamwork and building stronger, more cohesive teams isn’t easy. Whether you’re running a team building day, team workshop, or simply adding some team building activities to your meetings, we hope that some of the methods above can help you and your group come together and do better work. While many of the fun team building activities above will bring your team together in some way, these methods are designed to expressly create better team bonds and build trust. We love team building activities that challenge the group to work together in inventive ways and also help energize a workshop setting.

Fun Employee Engagement Activities For Remote Workers

After a few minutes, ask everyone to keep a snowball and find the person who wrote the answer. Not only does this team building exercise invite energy into the room, but it encourages people to get to know each other too. Though it seems simple, this team building exercise can really demonstrate the power of effective teamwork and is a great opener for a team building workshop. Simple tasks that require team focus, cohesion, and awareness are great for any group working on team building. In Count Up, a team has to come together and count up to twenty with their eyes closed and without any other communication. People cannot say more than one number at a time, and if two people speak at the same time, the group must start over.

Virtual Team Building Activities Focused On Learning

Making remote team building activities work for hybrid teams takes careful planning. When some team members are in the office and others are remote, include virtual elements in all activities so everyone can participate fully. Tools like Bulby help bridge the gap between in-person and remote team members. This creates an equal experience for everyone and builds connections across the whole team. In today’s world, where remote work and virtual meetings are commonplace, mastering virtual presence is essential for effective facilitation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many community-engaged practitioners struggled with how to meaningfully and ethically build and sustain relationships, partnerships, or projects, amidst mass upheaval, loss, and uncertainty. Prior to the pandemic, meetings happened in community drop-ins, social service organizations, or in neighbourhood meeting places. Many people cannot access quality internet or technology to participate in online spaces due to age, income, geographic location, gender roles and family responsibilities (Fang et al., 2019; Xie et al., 2020). Even with access to the internet, download speeds and device access can present additional barriers, especially for low-income communities, and seniors (Andrey et al., 2021).

These questions encourage openness, build trust, and foster meaningful connections within remote teams, ultimately enhancing teamwork, collaboration, and a sense of community. Workshops and skills training sessions are structured learning experiences where teams develop new abilities together. These are powerful activities that build teamwork because they create a shared language and framework for collaboration, whether the topic is conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, or a new software tool. When a team learns together, they build a common foundation for tackling future challenges and understanding each other’s working styles. Improv and drama exercises are theatrical games designed to enhance confidence, creativity, and spontaneous collaboration.

Furthermore, many marginalized and/or structurally disadvantaged communities experienced heightened stress and isolation during the pandemic. These physical, economic and structural impacts of COVID-19 were exacerbated by racial, gender and class-based health inequities across the global north and south (Knight et al., 2021; Kumar & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2020). Finally, the abrupt shift to online or remote platforms changed aspects of how people related to each other. Past scholarship has documented how technology shapes what is possible relationally (Heringer, 2021; Noone, 2020). As people began to gather online or by phone, implicit rules of social engagement began to emerge for each platform, such as greetings, muting, video use, emojis, and chat etiquette.

Here, engagement is neither a technocratic means to an end (e.g., we ‘engaged’ a community in order to), nor a fixed state (e.g., they were engaged). No matter how small or large your virtual team is, there’s bound to be common interests across teams and departments. Take a poll to see where people’s passions lie and encourage individuals to connect. Here are a few examples of remote team building activities to support your employees’ unique interests.