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24 Best Virtual Employee Engagement Games, Activities & Ideas - What are the 13 Key Elements of Employee Engagement?
24 Best Virtual Employee Engagement Games, Activities & Ideas.34 Virtual Team Building Activity Ideas | Outback Team Building & Training
There are a ton of virtual team building activities you can use, both free and paid, to help keep your remote team connected. If you and your colleagues are interested in taking part in more classic pastimes together, the website Playing Cards offers all of your childhood favorites. Help members of your organization get to know each other better using the Slack-integrated Donut app. You can create a variety of different programs that match employees up at a frequency of your choosing. From cross-departmental meetups to new hire introductions, the various ways to connect are endless!
How does it work? Donut will random introduce coworkers through direct message, encouraging them to organize a video chat. Whether they virtually enjoy donuts together is up to them — although highly encouraged by our team! Water Cooler Trivia integrates into your email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams channels and automatically sends trivia quizzes directly to your team members on a weekly basis. You can choose the trivia schedule and categories, and Water Cooler Trivia will write the questions, automate their distribution, and grade the results for you.
Make learning fun and stay connected with Kahoot! With Kahoot! This online platform offers quiz and open-ended questions, polls, word clouds, and more. Not meant to be a serious learning and development tool, your questions should be upbeat and relevant to your organization. Think core values, company history, and fun facts about employees. One of the most enjoyable things about working in an office environment is the social aspect — walking to a nearby coffee shop or going for after-work drinks with colleagues.
So, why not plan virtual coffee breaks or happy hours with your team? Using any of the available online video tools like Zoom, Skype , or Google Hangouts , you can easily establish a remote version of these social activities. For example, you can schedule minute meetups for coffee once or twice a week and set aside an hour after work once a month for virtual happy hour. This should be a purely social activity to help employees feel connected and engaged with one another.
And, although this group video chat platform may seem like just another FaceTime or Skype, Houseparty comes with some unique social features — namely games!
Through Houseparty, you can connect with your colleagues and play any number of available games. Here are some of the most popular ones that you can choose from:. Start off by asking each person on your team to share their favorite recipe. It could be breakfast, dinner, dessert — the choice is up to you!
Once everyone has submitted their recipe, challenge your colleagues to try one out each week. The entire group can tackle the same one, or you can all try your hand at something different. Ask your team members to make the recipe before the end of the week and then block off some time to share how it went with each other on a Friday. You can turn this unusual circumstance into an opportunity to get to know your coworkers better. Ask each member of your team to snap a photo of a part of their workstation that they feel represents them or their personality.
After everyone has submitted their picture, host a video meeting. Share you screen and one by one have your group guess which item belongs to which team member. This will not only help everyone connect and get to know each other better, it can also bring some laughter to an otherwise odd work situation.
This is one of our favorite Zoom games for work! Do you have a bunch of movie or television buffs on your team? Decide on a movie or TV show that everyone wants to see and plan a night that you can all commit to watching it. The next day, set aside some time — before a team meeting or at the end of the day — to discuss it.
You can go over themes, favorite characters, or theories that you have, and even encourage a little friendly debate! Take your movie night to the next level and watch it at the same time as your coworkers while on a video communications app like FaceTime or Houseparty.
Get to know your colleagues in a fun new way by taking a personality test together that reveals each of your quirky attributes. Set up a video conference call and go through the questions at the same time. Get your results and share! Here are a couple different free personality quizzes that you can try with your team:. If you have a team who loves to game, Mario Kart Tour is a great virtual team building activity to try with your group. Available for download on iPhones and Androids, you can play this app-based version of Mario Kart right from your smartphone.
Challenge up to seven of your colleagues to a friendly round of races, featuring a cast of your favorite characters from the original video games. Have a video chat open on your computer at the same time to get the full competitive effect!
Is your group the outdoorsy, adventuring kind? The app provides analytics for your personal achievements, while also sharing your activity to your network of friends. In your feed, you can also see what your connections have been up to, comment, and give kudos! Get the competitive spirit going by challenging your coworkers to a friendly round of your favorite word game.
There are plenty to choose from, including:. For many, the bar games available at local establishments are half the fun of heading out for drinks with your team. With this online video game, you can challenge your colleagues to a virtual round of pool directly through Facebook.
Simply sign up through the social network and let the games begin! You know what they say. Absence makes the heart grow fonder! But hear us out. We wrote an entire blog post outlining icebreaker questions for some quick and fun team bonding. If you got a laugh at those, check out the other , then jump on a video conference with your colleagues and dive into them.
If you want to give your team the opportunity to simply get together and socialize in a non-work capacity, you might want to consider hosting virtual lunch meetings from time to time. The premise is simple: give each team member a preset budget — we recommend twenty dollars — that they can expense back to the company.
You could even use your lunch meetings as an opportunity to learn new skills. It can be a lot of fun getting to know a bit more about your colleagues and their histories.
And with a virtual team building game like Birth Map, you might be surprised what you learn about people. Then, using a video conferencing platform of your choice, ask your teammates to share a story from their birthplace or talk about their favorite thing about it.
If your team used to thrive off of being in the office, remote work has likely been a challenging transition. If you and your team are in search of a hands-on virtual team building activity that offers a ton of production value and engagement, you might want to consider investing in one of these paid virtual team building activities.
In one of our most popular app-based team building activities, groups connect virtually using the video communications platform, like Zoom , and the proprietary Outback app. From there, coworkers break out into teams to solve who had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit a deadly crime. Choose to work through the case on your own or have one of our event coordinators virtually host it for you. You can also watch the above video to get a sense of how you and your group can take part.
With Virtual Jeoparty Social, you and your colleagues will step into your very own virtual Jeopardy-style game show—equipped with a buzzer button, a professional actor as your host, and an immersive game show platform! Best of all, this game has been infused with an ultra-social twist: players will take part in a unique social mixer challenge between each round. Step into the Outback Time Machine and take a trip through time, from the pre-pandemic 21st century through the decades all the way to the 60s.
This exciting, fast-paced virtual trivia game, packed with nostalgia and good vibes, is guaranteed to produce big laughs, friendly competition, and maybe even some chair-dancing. Within minutes, your home office will be transformed into a game show stage with your very own game show buzzers! Will your team earn gold? For the next round, switch hosts and continue with the same game mechanics.
Here is a guide on how to play Things. Spreadsheet Wars is a tiny virtual hackathon, where participants can show off their skills in Google Sheets and similar programs. Spreadsheets are powerful tools and most people have only scratched the surface of formulas and other features. By playing games like Spreadsheet Wars you can help upgrade these skills and have fun while doing it.
Flight of the Navigator is one of the better movies that came out of , and today plays double duty in the realm of online team building games. For this activity, start by watching the movie, which you can find on Amazon or Disney. Your drink can be coffee, tea, water, or anything you like.
The goal is to have a common element that you can play some fun virtual games around. Alfa, Tango, Foxtrot, is more than just a fun phrase that makes you feel more like a fighter pilot.
If you call anyone literally ever, then the NATO phonetic alphabet will help you have more clear and deliberate conversations. For your team, you may not use the NATO alphabet together much. Still, the skill is fun to learn and when it does come up it will feel like a strong bonding element for your coworkers.
The 26 code words in the NATO phonetic alphabet are assigned to the 26 letters of the English alphabet as follows:. Source: Wikipedia. To play, each person has half an hour to build something from materials available at home. For example, a guy in my grade 8 class combined an old school egg beater with a fork to make an ultimate spaghetti twirling machine.
You could make pasta art, an epic pillow fort or doodle a poetic harmony. Without these reminders, morale can drop and team members can become disillusioned. An easy way to keep morale high is to record videos of any in-person, company-related activities. For example, a few of our team members recently hosted a booth at an industry trade show, and our founder, Nick Gray, recorded a three-minute video recap of the experience for the entire team. Bonus : Here is a great video from Help Scout that demonstrates how video can replace weekly meetings.
Donut is a Slack extension that automatically pairs your colleagues up, and then they can plan a 30 minute video call together. At Museum Hack, we have a soft rule that work should not be discussed during Donut calls, this is really just a chance for team members to get to know each other.
And since the Slack extension is automatic, this is a really lightweight way to incorporate team building into your remote company. Icebreaker questions are simple prompts that allow you to get to know your peers better. For example, you can start a remote meeting by having each attendee share their name, role and what they like to eat for breakfast. Here is an epic list of icebreaker questions to help you get started.
Five finger showdown is a gem on a list of virtual team building activities, and a perfect icebreaker for large groups. For this game, everyone on your virtual conference call holds up one hand with five fingers extended. Then, either the host alone, or team members taking turns list of specific and unsuaul life experiences.
If a team member has the mentioned life experience then they can put one finger down. Either the player that puts all fingers down first wins, or if you want a twist then the last player with fingers remaining up wins instead. Kindle readers unite! A virtual book club is an opportunity to connect with like-minded people on your remote team.
Like real world book clubs, the basic function is to organize members around reading the same material at a similar pace and to discuss thoughts and feelings about it. We recommend you start with a novelette or even just an essay. The goal is for the material to be short enough that you can read the entire thing in one or two sessions. This duration is great for testing commitment to the book club and deciding whether you should do something larger and longer.
Then, when you are ready, check out this list of books. No need to worry! Remote coworking is a real thing, and it might help your team be more productive. To set up a session for your team, simply create a Slack channel called coworking. Note: If no one else is online or in the coworking channel, you could always use a tool like Focusmate to find someone to work with. One of the nice things about going into an office is the social outlet of being in rooms with other people.
For example, you can say hi in the morning, have lunch together, or go for drinks or a meal after work. For remote teams, even if you are oceans apart, day after day, you can still garner some of these social benefits. You may just have to work a little harder. Have your team members prepare any meal, and then connect for a virtual call while you eat and chat.
You can suggest ice breakers or games to keep the conversation going. Having low-key connection time like this is a good way to relax and bond without focusing too much on work or team building.
In the last few months, sales of dumpling making ingredients in China have skyrocketed; people are cooking and eating at home more often. This love for cooking and eating is generally popular worldwide.
While these team activities are mostly meant to be fun, there is also a strong element of communication. When you prepare a recipe you need the foresight and clarity to know what the reader might have trouble following. Overcoming this challenge is a useful skill to build. In real life, the challenge involves taking a picture of a trashy park, beach or other public place, then cleaning it up and taking an after-photo of the clean space and all the bags of garbage.
The online team version of trash challenge has the same mechanics. Take a before screenshot of your desktop, then delete all the files you no longer use and empty the trash.
Finally, take a screenshot to show your progress and share it with your team. With virtual team building, consider the following tips for maximum benefit. You may also want to consider how to 10x your team.
In an office setting, even the introverts may participate because of the sheer pressure of physical presence.
To make sure everyone participates in your team activities, use mechanics like breakout rooms for small group dynamics during your virtual meetings, and icebreaker questions so everyone has a chance to share.
Basically, do 2. For example, if you dedicated five minutes at the beginning of office meetings to icebreakers then your virtual meeting equivalent is If you organized one company offsite each quarter, then you should organize at least two and maybe three virtual off-sites in that same time period.
In an office setting, you may be able to get away with just jumping into the business part of your meeting. With virtual meetings on Zoom, Webex and other platforms, we recommend including team building elements each time. You could play a quick game of Online Bingo, or do a mini scavenger hunt. Many of the activities on this page will help! Remember when we were little, and fun stuff sometimes came by mail? You can give your remote team members a boost of nostalgic dopamine by sending fun packages in the mail.
For example, snack packs, tech gadgets, cute socks and other items. Our team members in large cities sometimes have opportunities to meet and hangout, but for the entire team these opportunities are few and far between.
When we have projects or big meetings, we sometimes fly team members in, and we also plan company retreats. For example, we did a company cruise of the Caribbean that was equal parts business planning and fun. Here are some more tips for remote team building.
Learn more about conference call applications. You can also look into how to use Instagram for team building. Virtual team building is the act of building stronger relationships between remote workers. Like team building in the real world, the virtual counterpart focuses on improving skills like communication and collaboration, while also promoting friendships and alignment. You can work with a third party on these efforts, or DIY by adding games and activities to your team calls.
Remote work can be lonely, disengaged and unproductive; or the complete opposite. What makes virtual team building important is that it is the catalyst to the more positive outcome.
Organizations that invest in virtual team building have work-forces that are more creative, communicative and productive; which is a huge competitive advantage. Virtual team building activities are games, challenges and exercises you can do with remote employees to help build stronger bonds. Online team building games are games that are specifically meant to boost employee engagement, morale and connection.
You can play these games over video conference calls, video games, or even games you play via email, Slack and other platforms. One way to make a virtual meeting fun is to include elements like icebreaker questions and group photos. In addition to strong leadership, one of the most effective ways to build team morale remotely is to do games and activities together. For example, virtual trivia, online bingo and icebreaker questions are all popular options. To engage a virtual team you can follow many of the same principles that apply to engagement at the office.
For example, ask your people questions, do phone calls, and participate in team building activities. If all your remote colleagues do together is work projects, then that is all they are going to know they have in common.
Instead, plan activities and conversations that allow team members to learn more about each other personally. When people learn they have common interests outside of work, like travel, pets, music and more, they form deeper bonds.
One of the best ways to make a team call fun is to include breakout sessions. If the main call has 30 people on it then you can schedule breakout rooms with four or five people. The advantage of these smaller conversations is more people will have the opportunity to speak and share their ideas. An easy way to make virtual meetings fun is to include icebreaker questions or games.
The purpose of a virtual team is to accomplish a goal, virtual or otherwise. In some cases a virtual team will pursue a business purpose like profit generation, while other virtual teams may have a mission based or community purpose.
A virtual activity is any activity that you can do online as part of a team or otherwise. Some virtual activities are nearly identical to real-world counterparts, while others are unique to the virtual format.
One way to create a team remotely is to do fun and engaging activities together. By giving your remote workers time to connect with each other you create organic opportunities to build meaningful relationships. Skip to content. Team Building Resources February 02, As a remote team, we geek out over virtual team building.
So, we made this list of fun virtual team building activities for remote teams. The goal is to help you skyrocket your company culture and employee engagement. Online Office Games with teambuilding. Contact Us Learn More.
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