We won’t pretend that the prospect of team-building remotely is a fun one. It’s hard enough to get people excited about in-person team-building, let alone team-building they have to do over Zoom. But we believe that with a positive attitude, a bit of enthusiasm and our top tips, you can build a strong, cohesive team from your respective laptops, and have fun doing it!
Assign a specific person to host and lead the event
Make sure you have someone specific who is organising and leading the event. They will have prepared in advance, deciding what activities to do and planning ways to engage everyone. It’s important to give this person (or yourself, if you’re going to lead it) plenty of time to ensure that they have time to find all the necessary resources and organise a team-building session that will be both helpful and memorable.
Take everyone’s needs into consideration
In the planning stage, reach out to everyone you expect to attend the event and ask them about what times suit them best, what video call platform they are most comfortable on and what they hope to gain from the event. Team-building remotely is going to be a new and weird experience, and you want to make sure it’s going to be worthwhile for everyone involved. Organise the event to fit into everyone’s schedules and when picking activities to do, see if they match up with what your participants are hoping to gain. For example, if time management is something your employees want the team to work on together, you could find an activity that involves cooperating with one another to complete certain tasks within a time limit.
Give everyone a head’s up of what they’ll be expected to do
I’ll say it - there is nothing worse than turning up to an event and one of the icebreakers is ‘tell us an interesting fact about yourself.’ It’s so hard to think of something good on the spot, and you end up sounding really boring when you resort to telling your team what you had for breakfast that morning. Not all icebreakers require preparation - quickfire questions like ‘What’s your favourite flavour of ice cream?’, for example, are fine. But if you want to do icebreakers that involve the participants doing anything along the lines of sharing facts or stories about themselves, they will definitely appreciate an advance warning so they can brainstorm beforehand.
Games, games, games!
The key is to make the team-building event fun, rather than a chore. This is especially true if you are doing it out of working hours, for example during lunch or in the evening. People don’t want to give up their free time for an event that is boring and goes on for way too long. What games, you ask? Well, lucky for you, MuseumHack has put together a list of 37 fun virtual games that will make any Zoom team-building session way more fun than anyone thought possible.
Overestimate the time frame for your event, and then don’t go over it!
Anyone who’s been in a meeting that was supposed to last an hour and ending up lasting two can agree that it is extremely frustrating. When planning your event, figure out roughly how long it should take and then add a small window of time at the end to allow you to run over slightly. For example if your event should last an hour, tell your participants that it will last an hour and 15 minutes. That way, if anything, you’ll finish early, and that will definitely get you more brownie points than overrunning. Plus it will mean less people are tempted to fake a bad internet connection and just disappear before you’ve finished playing all the games you spent so long deciding on!
So, with these tips in mind, go ahead and plan the best virtual team-building session ever. There’s no reason a little distance should stop you from building a strong, cohesive team who can work together no matter what 2020 throws at them.