Virtual Insanity — Tired of Your Team-building Activities? Try These.
Your corporate mandated fun time has begun
Your corporate mandated fun time has begun
Science shows that the more a team interacts, the easier it is for them to build trust. Logic dictates that the more face-time teammates have with each other, the more comfortable they become with each other's communication style.
As managers and leaders, we must create space for these interactions, especially in remote environments. Below are some of my favorite team-building activities for my remote teams.
Keep in mind you can’t force fun, but you can create the time and space for your teams to have fun. Remote activities should have a low barrier of entry for maximum enjoyment. Some quick ground rules for any remote activity:
Be inclusive. Make sure everyone is on a level playing field before getting started
Keep it light. Watch out for the overly competitive folks and help facilitate away from any outbursts or awkwardness
Encourage, but don’t force participation. Depending on the time of day some folks won’t be interested in participating and that’s totally fine. Work with your team to figure out how to get the most folks involved and try different time slots throughout the year
First Meeting of the Week
My favorite is something fun we’re doing weekly on my current team. It’s the first 10–15 minutes of our team meeting and covers two topics.
Weekend Highlights
Your Zoom Background
Weekend highlights is pretty self-explanatory, but the background is a bit more unique. Each week we rotate facilitators of the meeting and whoever facilitates chooses a theme for the background. Something like:
Most underrated movie
What you wanted to be when you grew up
Things you like to do when you travel
There’s an endless amount of themes. Each team member loads up a background representing the theme and after their weekend highlights, they explain their background.
It’s been a fun way to learn more about everyone on the team and get us warmed up to discuss any other items later in the meeting. It gets even better when folks have similar interests or ask follow-up questions. Ask follow-up questions, be curious, learn more about the folks you’ll work with every day.
Time: 10–15 minutes
Participants: 3+
Codenames
Easy to play and gets people talking, Codenames is a board game with a great online version. Playable at codenames.game, this game sets one spymaster that must give clues to help their team guess the right words to win the game.
Hop in, create teams, and see how folks work and think together. How teams get to the conclusion and rationalize what the clues mean based on word sets is half the fun, and a little subterfuge is also in play for the other team.
Time: 20ish minutes per round
Participants: Max of 8
GeoGuessr
I had a team that played GeoGuessr weekly and it was a lot of fun because it forces you to “travel” and think about other areas of the world. The game drops you in a location on Google Street View and using clues you have to guess where you are.
The Pro version gives you more options and I believe only one person needs it to unlock additional features. Great as a weekly discussion point and can be done async throughout the week.
Time: async, weekly (~15 minutes for all rounds)
Participants: Unlimited
Board Game Arena
With async and live games, Board Game Arena presents hundreds of opportunities for games in small groups. Async functionality is fun because a game could last the full week and gives you something to chat about during your other weekly interactions.
Playing live is equally fun as you get all of the reactions (and maybe even some light trash-talk) that you wouldn’t from an async game.
Does it have the best UI? Absolutely not, but the fact that there are hundreds of games and filters to find the right game for you and your team is pretty amazing.
Playable in-browser, Board Game Arena makes it easy to learn rules and get straight to the game-playing. It will help if at least one person knows the rules as you get into it, but it’s not a hard requirement.
Time: 10 minutes — 2 hours
Participants: 2–12
Jackbox Party Pack
A classic collection of multiplayer games, Jackbox Party Pack goes from the creative Drawful to the eery trivia of Trivia Murder Party.
Best part is it’s all playable on your phone. The game creator will get a code and players only need to put the code in to begin playing. Straight-forward and simple.
One of the best sets of group games, Jackbox is usually good for some laughs and competition. There is potential for it to be a little dirty, so keep an eye on that.
While it’s not a hard requirement, Jackbox requires a bit of setup the first time so everyone can hear the sounds/music, but after that, it’s smooth sailing. Be sure to practice setup for the best experience.
GameRant put together a good list of the 18 best Jackbox games so you can hone in on one of the packs to purchase.
Time: 10–30 minutes
Participants: 2–10
Icebreakers
“Alright, Alexander should be here any minute, we’ll get started when he is.” It’s three past the start of your meeting and folks have been silently checking Slack, their phones, etc, because a key player of the meeting isn’t there yet.
Guess what, you just missed out on three minutes where your team could have been learning more about each other. Instead of sitting in silence, ask an icebreaker question. There are soooo many lists out there for icebreakers and I’ll probably post one of my own at some point, but a few fun ones for now:
You can take one book, one album, and one food with you to a desert island, what are they?
Which TV show reality would be the most fun to live in?
Would you rather fight one hundred duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?
What are there more of in the world, doors or wheels?
If you had the chance to time travel, but only had a 30% chance of getting back to your current time, would you do it?
All it takes is one person who doesn’t mind asking the question and away you go.
Time: 1–10 minutes
Participants: 2+
Other options
Shell Shockers — browser-based Egg FPS (this one’s no yolk)
The Hike — “A slightly evil pick-your-path adventure” —requires some prep, but highly interactive
Kingmakers — a fun pivot out of Columbus, OH during the pandemic, Kingmakers went from a brick-and-mortar board game library to a virtual game host. Lots of fun, even for gigantic groups.
Guess the Refrigerator — all team members take a picture of their fridge ahead of time and send to the game meister. Each is pulled up one at a time and the group must decide who the fridge belongs to.
YouTube Soiree — Using Watch2Gether, you can host a watch party where anyone can add to the playlist. Set some ground rules, maybe set a theme, and see what folks bring up. Can even be used for more educational get-togethers (ex watching a Ted Talk together)
There are so many more options out there so what other activities or games do your remote teams enjoy?