.png){kind=logo}
Is your remote working team lacking a sense of togetherness? It’s common for many remote teams. Before this isolation negatively impacts company performance, it’s critical to find some way to revive social connections. Virtual icebreakers are one effective way to increase team bonding and bring your team closer together.
Team bonding is one of the key inputs into building a strong team culture. Remote working activities and games are key inputs into team bonding. Naturally then, remote games and activities can directly benefit team culture.
Remote activities and games with colleagues can get a bad rap as a waste of precious time, but that’s flat-out wrong in our humble opinion. For companies who have just recently shifted to remote working, team bonding is an essential investment that should not be overlooked.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how to break the ice between remote working teams. Despite the many benefits of remote working, the physical distance can make it challenging to develop meaningful relationships with team members. Without these relationships, consistent communication between team members is unlikely.
These favorite remote working activities and games are designed to break the ice, engage team members, and boost company culture. Not all of these activities and games will work for all teams. The trick is to try as many activities and games as possible to see what sticks.
The key: carve out a set period of time every week for team bonding, such as Monday morning. The best types of remote working activities and games can be easily set up and automated on a weekly basis. Whilst team bonding is incredibly important to company success, you don’t want to create barriers with hours of organizing and logistics. Keep it simple.
Water Cooler Trivia is the perfect way to keep remote working activities and games simple. A quick trivia game on a Monday morning helps gives teammates a beginning-of-the-week kickstart. Deep down, we’re all a little bit competitive, and a trivia quiz will put your team’s knowledge to the test while sparking conversation.
These trivia quizzes are automatically distributed to email inboxes of participants. Water Cooler Trivia allows you to pick and choose from a wide variety of trivia topics, building quizzes that fit your team’s industry, city, and department.
Sign up takes less than 60 seconds, and at that point there’s zero ongoing weekly setup. The quizzes and results are fully automated. This is a remote working activity that you can quickly introduce to team members. To actively promote team bonding, after everyone has completed the quiz, you can organize a video conference call for a rundown of the answers. This will give the team an opportunity to chat, have a laugh, and break the ice!
You can easily bake these trivia quizzes into your team’s weekly schedule, choosing the day and time that the quiz and results are released each week.
In a physical office space, the kitchen acts as a social hub for team members (duh). This is where you often hear conversations about plans for weekends past and future. Creating a virtual facsimile of this environment can be achieved surprisingly easily through virtual coffee meetups via Zoom.
If you’re working remotely, you’re familiar with Zoom. This video conferencing application has become the backbone of the remote working experience. Why not use the tool to host a mid-morning virtual coffee break with the rest of the team? Bringing everyone together will create a team bonding opportunity.
This doesn’t have to be a long engagement. On busy days, you could even have a working coffee break. Team members simply set their cameras up, bring a coffee to their desk, and complete some tasks whilst chatting with colleagues. Remote working can sometimes be isolating for those that enjoy the buzz of a physical office space.
Have coffee connoisseurs on your team? If so, you could turn this virtual coffee meetup into a book club-style gathering with team members offering tutorials on how to make their perfect cup of coffee. These are the kind of lighthearted moments that percolate through your team culture.
One of the most effective ways to promote team bonding is normalizing the discussion of lives outside of the 9-to-5. Show-and-tell is an activity that gives people the opportunity to share something about themselves that others perhaps wouldn’t know. This helps create conversations between team members and identify common interests.
Show-and-tell could take place on a weekly basis, with team members taking it in turns to be in the spotlight. Ideally, you want to have as many people engaging with the presentation as possible. If you can get other team members to ask questions, this will inevitably boost cross-team interaction and foster team culture.
Figuring out how to break the ice between your remote working team is tough. Rather than overthinking remote team culture, we believe that you should start laying the groundwork with activities and games that engage team members. Hopefully, after reading this article, you now have some ideas on how to break the ice. Water Cooler Trivia has already become a go-to tool for hundreds of teams and small businesses as they look to inject some fun into their team culture.
Get started with Water Cooler Trivia today!
