Why is Remote Team Building Important?
Generally, during the week, we spend eight hours a day in office space; therefore, a strong team develops. We regularly stumble into each other at their desks for conversations, breaks, and occasionally even formal discussions because we are intimately familiar with one another’s personalities. Therefore, these human touches establish a solid link that leads to easy cooperation to deliver more exciting results in the organizations. However, if the team works remotely, the physical distance between the members can quickly result in a complete sense of separation, which can make remote workers feel detached from their coworkers and unsupported. Ultimately, this may lead to more worker attrition and lower employee well-being. Psychologically, working remotely and living alone might provide independence and flexibility. But still, it can also lead to burnout, loneliness, longer hours, and other issues that can lead to health concerns, depression, and stress. Thus, human contact, communication, and connection with coworkers would lessen the influence and help one lead a balanced and healthy life. In its most basic form, remote team building creates links between remote employees to resemble physical teams. Overall outcomes, productivity, engagement, and morale, would all rise as a result. To promote a good work-life balance, we’ll look at the most appealing ways to engage with remote teams or employees in the below post.
Virtual Chat Rooms
Although communication is a crucial component of employee connection and occurs naturally on the office floor, remote teams might feel somewhat lonely. To get around this obstacle, it’s necessary to set up a virtual chat room where staff members can enter at any time and continue talking, especially during breaks or lunch. The manager’s job is to encourage staff to participate in this online chat room community and make using it a daily habit. Platforms like Slack, Asana, Flock, Zoho Cliq, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Skype, etc. make it simple to adopt virtual chat rooms.
Initiate a Virtual Healthy Lifestyle
The need for businesses to support employee well-being has never been greater than in the age of remote work. Introduce a health challenge program if you’re seeking team-building activities that also include the welfare of remote employees. Such programs will help them deal with their isolation and exhaustion from long workdays while creating a successful team-building strategy. Online group workouts, daily step challenges, nutritional advice, healthy cooking classes, group therapy, life coaching, and mental health workshops are all excellent places to start. The breathing app Spiro would be good to kickstart this program.
Virtual Company Events
Organizations or stakeholders can plan the company events virtually like the way it is held on the office floor. It would be best if you managed virtual business events the same way you would an actual event. Include an agenda, a host, a range of speakers, some entertainment, a chance for participation, etc. The entire team benefits significantly from this and feels pleased and enthusiastic. You can use various video meeting applications, including Zoom, Webex, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoho Meeting.
Virtual Gaming
Working alone can be stressful, which can make tasks tedious and demotivating. But the games and the enjoyment can make this more amusing. The fun will make your staff less stressed, creative, and engaged. The following are some entertaining and exciting games you can start your team off with;
Alice Escapes Wonderland: Working together on puzzles, mazes, and other tasks will bring your remote team’s disparate members together. An excellent exercise for your remote team may be a virtual scavenger hunt. Use an online escape room to challenge your team’s limits to solve a mystery. Virtual bingo is a straightforward and enjoyable game that engages the whole team and demands focus and attention. Attempting to solve a triggering mystery, Murder Mysteries is a beloved role-playing game. War of the Wizards is a brilliant and captivating online team-building game for remote workers. Gingerbread Wars is a fantastic alternative if you organize a virtual team-building activity for the holidays.
Encourage Recognition
A platform for rewards and recognition can be a terrific approach to guarantee that appreciation becomes ingrained in daily life when we are not physically present to do it. Employee appreciation can be a valuable tool for team development and communication when everyone is geographically separated and working from distant locations. The encouragement of your team and their celebration of accomplishments is one of the main advantages of being recognized. Perkbox provides the platform as the rewards system in this instance.
Discuss Personality Tests
Setting up personality tests and discussing the results is one method of determining a remote employee’s strengths, weaknesses, and working style. Each team member brings different personality features, abilities, working styles, and ways of thinking. Using personality assessments during remote team-building activities might help to create a higher-performing team. Each of these individual differences among teammates is a cause for celebration because they precisely aid in maintaining originality and producing results. Some personality tests that would help in this scenario are Character Strengths Survey, The Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, DiSC 5-Minute Personality Test, and many more.
Remote Friday Feeling
On Fridays, everyone in the office is busy making plans for the weekend, but remote teams are typically cut off from such activities. Activities on Virtual Fun Friday allow peers to interact and relax remotely. The policy of holding no meetings on Fridays would undoubtedly relieve some of the load on your staff. We can always order lunch from nearby restaurants, deliver it to employees’ homes, and then have the team connect and eat together. Thus, having lunch together and having a good time talking is quite conceivable. The team can connect to pub trivia after lunch. You may all enjoy it virtually without going out. A virtual session for stretching out or doing some aerobics would lift your spirits on a Friday. The Friday mood would ease the stress of the week’s busy work and brighten the atmosphere.
Non-Work-Related Conversation
Are you working remotely and occasionally find it isolating and lacking opportunities to communicate anything out of your work scope? The remote teams might start a session that wasn’t about their work profile or communication totally out of their work scope. A conversion unrelated to work would undoubtedly be fresh up the make remote workers’ days. Even such a workshop would assist staff in sharing the fantastic news that had occurred to them. Whatever it may be, announcing positive information may be a terrific way to start a conversation and bring teams together as they congratulate one another on tiny victories. When everyone is physically present in the office, we bump into a colleague’s desk to chat if we need a break. But if we’re working remotely, we’ll need to use several SaaS for your offices, such as Slack, Zoho Cliq, Discord, Flock, Fleep, Asana, and many others, to achieve this. Such non-work related chats will reduce the employees’ anxiety and help in the most impressive remote team building because humans become weary of routine activities, primarily if we work remotely.
Set Friendly Challenges
Occasionally, challenging activities will interrupt the mindset of routine work. Friendly virtual challenges would be a great way for remote employees to stay connected and refresh their thoughts. An excellent method to get going is a fitness challenge. Such activities will not only foster some amusing competition but also improves well-being. Start with apps like MapMRun, Stridekick, MoveSpring, and MyVirtualMission. In this regard, virtual game challenges would also be advantageous, and ClasofClans would be a fantastic place to start. Other online challenges that would spice up the remote teams are: Blindfolded Drawing Challenge, Try Not to Laugh Challenge, Alphabet Challenge, Ice Bucket Challenge, Guess the Lyric Challenge, etc. Employees and employers would benefit from learning challenges; for example, acquiring a certification can be rewarded with reimbursement or other recognition.
Host Remote Workshops and Classes
If amusing virtual seminars, virtual stand-up comedy, and remote storytelling workshops were undertaken, the teams working remotely would become more enthused. It would be good to provide engaging and non-professional domain online workshops that would enliven and appeal to remote teams. You can hire a virtual stand-up comedian from Kabloom events to amuse your remote workers. Even companies can hold contests for home-cooked meals where employees can participate and display their skills. Developing a robust remote team that fosters collaboration and boosts employee morale requires such non-work events. If you wish to create the workshop, the SessionLab platform would be great for utilizing their pre-made templates. Based on the remote teams’ availability, the corporate virtual comedy shows can be booked through LaughterLounge. If you’re looking for musical comedy events, using laughevents is your best option.
Host Joint Meditation Sessions
Since people work remotely and hence choose their schedules, it is difficult to stop and take a break, adversely affecting the employees in the long run. To overcome such barriers among remote employees, joint meditation sessions can be fostered among remote teams to rejuvenate the employees. If you want your staff to take a regular break from their demanding schedule, encourage them by holding meditation sessions that everyone may attend at once. Udemy Meditation Courses are available for folks who sometimes want to meditate privately. Along with mindful breathing or meditation, other topics that might be discussed during this session include good health and diet advice, general lifestyle advice, etc. Corporate mediation sessions are held on several platforms, including Mindfulleader, Headspace, Mindful, and others.
Virtual Debates
With various expertise levels, a virtual debate session will enable distant teams to build vital interpersonal and communication skills. Virtual debates are engaging sessions introducing fresh ideas, subjects, and discussions that can amuse employees and make them feel more like part of remote teams. Even mini-debates would help teams seated far from one another establish good communication. The virtual debate can be conducted amongst teams or among groups of employees for the most outstanding results. Virtual arguments can begin on any subject, such as the best pizza, mocktail, cocktail, gaming or reading, real-world problems, technology, the oceans or the forests, etc. At the same time, virtual discussions among newcomers or interns to discuss technology issues, project details, etc., will improve their skills.
Slack Extensions
It’s an excellent idea to find out time to share about us when we’re not working because we’re all linked remotely, and it’s a terrific opportunity to learn about one another’s interests. These Slack fun channels are sometimes the best team-building ideas and the easiest to manage because remote coworkers need the opportunity to speak casually at desks, passages, or cafeterias. These channels can be a pleasant way to connect with colleagues who work remotely, learn about shared interests and pastimes, and share cute photos of family members, pets, and homemade meals. Below are quite a few interesting apps that can be easily integrated into Slack:
GIPHY: Finest online source for the newest and best-animated stickers and GIFs. Simple Poll: Users may build and participate in simple polls. Foursquare: Find the most incredible locations to eat, drink, or hang out quickly using Foursquare, all from within Slack. Tic-Tac-Toe: If you want to take a brief break and play some games, Tic-Tac-Toe is the best option. Rock-Paper-Scissors: It makes playing the game on Slack simple and quick. Digg: It will suffice your need to stay current on local events by offering well-chosen content from your preferred media source. Donut: Donut is a Slack extension that automatically matches up with your coworkers so they can schedule a 30-minute video call.
Unwind Your Body with Yoga
Another activity that can unite disparate remote teams and encourage harmony between the mind and the body is yoga. Nothing brings together stressed-out, lonely professionals sitting in remote locations like a yoga session. Holding sessions with employees who do not work together or who only infrequently cross paths can make this a little more distinctive. Other activities, such as dancing and aerobics, can be combined to have a blast and leave the staff feeling completely rejuvenated. Numerous virtual yoga platforms or apps are available, such as Gaiam, Dailyyoga (which millions of people enjoy), GloYoga, 5MinuteYoga, etc. Sosparty offers corporate clients weekly virtual yoga sessions.
Advantages of Remote Team Building
Here are a few benefits of remote team building: When a capable team surrounds an employee, a support system is established. If they are aware of who is listening, they will feel more confident and be better equipped to express their ideas. Since remote work can sometimes be isolated and lonely, fostering a feeling of community can help lift spirits and make people happier when things are tough. Employees may collaborate more effectively for spectacular achievements when they genuinely understand their peers and capabilities. A strong corporate culture can be developed in large part through team building. You may enhance internal and external communication by establishing a business culture, primarily if you work remotely.
Final Words
Even if we try, we can’t function like a robot; it will haunt us after a while since we are human. Through numerous studies, this conclusion has been reached. So many businesses, from small startups to major corporations, are looking for ways to amuse their remote employees. The list of activities for developing a remote team is infinite. The key is to look for fresh, creative ways to connect your remote staff, stay in touch, and foster a positive work atmosphere. Next, you can check out apps to make work easier in work from home.
