Fun Team Building Activities for Remote Employees

Managing a virtual team with team building exercises is quite a challenge but not impossible. It’s difficult, especially when your remote employees are spread across numerous time zones but only interact with each other via video conference calls. Whether your team is exchanging funny photos of their dogs on any channel like Slack or they’re playing games, it’s significant for them to socialize rather than feel vulnerable. Outside the work context, there must be a platform where employees can interact with each other.

Any professional, fun activity will act like an ice breaking session. Being a distributed agency, we know a few tricks to keep every team member connected. Games for a remote team is a fun way to dissolve monotony and refine goals in meetings. Trust-building activities and ice breaker games help to achieve team bonding.

Benefits of Activities for Remote Employees

Hire your remote team from among the very best like Aspired. There are many benefits of a remote team that help you expand your company in the modern world. Moreover, you must keep your team engaged with some fun activities. You might wonder, “why activities? What are the benefits?”

Well, activities for remote employees are for your own company’s benefit. A proactive, smart, and efficient team will lead towards a successful business. List of activities and games for remote employees is mentioned below;

• Increases cohesiveness and rapport of employees
• Increase productivity of groups
• Enhance smart communication
• Build trust among employees
• Learn about employees on a professional and personal level

Team leaders of your organization are the right people to build a good relationship between the company and employees. They help them prompt creativity, imagination, and relaxation.

Top 9 Team Building Activities

1. Rock paper scissors tournament

Log in to your favorite conferencing software and try out the classic games in real-time. The game can start with two people. The winner will continue playing with the next person, and so on. It’s one of the preferred ways to test your employee’s responsiveness, reflexes and encourage spontaneity. It’s another way to warm up your team before any brainstorming session.

2. Learn each team member’s life story in five minutes

Listening and mirroring is another great exercise to know other remote team member’s interests. This activity will build great relationships among employees. You can set a clock for five minutes and ask two of your employees to tell their life story, each other in 5 minutes. Once the time is up, they both have to relay the story from memory in a group conference call.

3. The aliens have landed

Aliens have landed; it is a game that suits a remote team perfectly. It helps each member understand cultural and language differences to strengthen the company’s culture. So, how do you play this game? Firstly, ask your group to imagine that aliens have landed on earth, and their mission is to learn about your organization.

Since the aliens don’t know or understand the English language, you have to explain your work with five pictures or symbols. Ask each member to draw 5 pictures that communicate and describe your organization/product and our working culture. You can take time and look thoroughly at all the pictures and discuss common themes. This game is interactive and fun; you can even light a fire in your group chat or video conferences with it.

4. The Birth Map

Birth map is another fun game for the virtual team, and it helps them build more interaction. First, you need to print out or upload the map of the world on a mutual screen. At the start of the game, you need to ask your team members to pin or stick a note on the region that’s their birthplace. Now encourage each member to share a short story about their birthplace and what they love most about that place.

Birthplaces or dates are emotionally linked with each individual; this game shows the diversity of voices in your team. It also allows them to share cultural values with some interesting and fun facts about the place.

5. Mindfulness Icebreaker

In this activity, remote team members write down thoughts, ideas, or feelings on a piece of paper during a meeting. Many employees in the meeting have stress tasks, projects, deadlines, or other issues. When an individual opens-up about their feelings, it helps them process their thoughts smoothly. A participant can rip up that piece of paper to maintain their privacy and focus on group tasks.

6. Two Truths and a Lie

Truth or Lie is a popular game among big groups. In this game, every team member has to make three statements in the group related to themselves. Then, it’s time for other team members to guess which two of the three statements are true. This way, you can encourage your colleagues to pay close attention to personal stories and traits. Also, be attentive to the details because it encourages all of their focus on consistency. You can play this game during a coffee break; it will always result in fun chit-chat.

7. A picture of your life

Ask each member of your remote team to join an online meeting board before the meeting starts and share a picture of something related to their life. It can be anything, but there must be a story in that photo about a particular member. For example, a photo of their desk, working desk, a picture of the shoes, or the view from their window. Now ask them to share the story with everyone about that particular photo.

Here at Aspired, we utilize this game as an ice breaker before starting out with our remote team. Additionally, we share one thing that we’ve learned most recently; this game was full of surprises and fun. It helped us understand each other and create a casual atmosphere.

8. Scavenger hunt

A scavenger hunt is a versatile game, and you often witness children playing it. This game can be played anywhere, both outside and inside of the office. In several innovative ways, this game requires a variety of creative skills, problem-solving methods, and strategic thinking. More importantly, it helps many remote employees work as a team and develop bonds between them.

9. One-word exercise

A one-word exercise brings excitement among team members. This game starts by assigning a topic for the meeting; each member has to pick a phrase related to the central theme. They have to write it down on paper. With the help of a one-word exercise, Aspired gives their remote team members an opportunity to share their expectations and hesitations.

Final Thoughts

Everything from the recruitment process to team building, is the main offering from Aspired. We engage with our team in the most creative way to turn them into a high-functioning and cohesive team. Hire your remote team from Aspired because we give them a cooperative and interdependent environment. This way, when our clients hire our remote team, they can achieve their business goals more effectively and efficiently.

Aspired keeps in mind that building a team doesn’t mean we have to hangout or deliver teamwork. Fun team building activities for a remote employee is a process that is based on an approach that reflects consideration and employee psychology.