Finding the right team building activities for your company can be tricky, even trickier when you have a team of remote employees. This article shares five unusual remote team building activities which help build an engaged team, no matter where they are.
Having a couple of remote team members’, or an entirely remote team, is becoming more commonplace everywhere; regardless whether they are located in offices across multiple cities or even countries, or in a remote home office. When managing a pool of remote employees, your team meetings most of the time will include a couple of employees who are located in different parts of the world.
It is crucial that you help your team make a positive connection and start looking into unusual remote team building activities. As an employer, you need to find ways to connect with all of your team members and get them to interact with one another despite their current location.
As mentioned in our previous article, 16 Unusual Team Building Ideas to Strengthen Teamwork, team building activities are a great way to bring the workplace together and teach your employees how to work as one. Having a team of remote employees does not have to be difficult when it comes to team building activities.
To assist you in strengthening your team, we have five unusual remote team building activities to help bring the gap closer and make your team more integrated, regardless of the distance.
Vlog your Surroundings
One of the unusual remote team building activities that your team can partake is vlogging your surroundings before they start their day at work. A video blog or video log, usually shortened to vlog, is a form of blog for which the medium is video.
This allows you and your team to catch a glimpse of an unfamiliar without ever leaving the comfort of your office. The vlog can be done in a live group chat or recorded and sent to the team’s email. You could also use a good video editor to add subtitles or voiceovers at a later point in time so you could avoid background noise.
The vlog could include other details besides the country and location, such as the weather, the front-page news, holidays that the locals are looking forward to and more. How interesting would it be if you could enjoy the picturesque view of the snowy mountains in Sweden or check out the hustle and bustle of a busy street in Washington?
To make this activity even more interesting, you can get your team to nominate someone else for the next vlog session. Your team then gets to learn new things about each other, besides just putting a name to a face.
Company Trivia Session
Another of our favourite unusual remote team building activities, is a company trivia game.
You can create a simple trivia question before each team member begins to update everyone about the current project that they are working on. Consider multiple-choice answers, as it is easier and faster for everybody to pick an answer instead of letting them guess.
While this requires some homework on each of your team members, as you would need to know the right answer, it would be worthwhile and exciting.
Examples of questions include:
- Personal related questions:
- How many children does Sam have?
- Which team member is allergic to avocado?
- Which team member has a twin?
- Which team member recently got engaged?
- Employment related questions:
- Which team member has been with the company the longest?
- Who recently celebrated her fifth year work anniversary?
- Which team member closes the most number of task or projects?
A great tool to do this is QuizBreaker, which is a more organised way of doing the typical icebreaker questions game by email.
Team Lunch (or Meal)
It is often said that food brings the company closer and it is the best reason to bring people together. So why not start organising a team lunch session? It is similar to meeting lunches; only thing is that you and your team have lunch with your remote employees.
The tricky bit would be the time zone! While it may only be breakfast for you, it could be dinner for your remote team. Even though it is one of the most unusual remote team building activities, having a meal together allows your team to learn new culture and cuisines from each other and from different parts of the world.
Image: kizzbeth, Flickr
Flat lay your Desk
The third unusual remote team building activities that we have is an interesting one. You could get your team members to take a flat lay of their desk and share it with the rest during your team meetings. A flat lay is basically taking a photo of items from directly above and these items are usually arranged or styled on a flat surface.
The state of your office desk can reveal lots about your team members’ personality. Get the team to take a flat lay of their desk and share the story behind a piece of stationery or an accessory on their desk. This is a good way for team members to get to know each other better.
Snapshot your Coffee
Another one of the unusual remote team building activities that your team can start is taking a snapshot of your coffee or any of those fancy beverages that you are currently drinking. It could be that protein shake, the tangy fruit juice or that beetroot latte with the creative froth design.
While it may sound dull and boring, how many countries have Starbucks Coffee made available to them at every corner of the street? Or perhaps your remote employee is interested in that protein shake that you drink every morning. Just like food, interesting coffee order or beverages is another door to unlock when it comes to strengthening that bond among your team members.
Image: GoToVan, Flickr
In Summary
These unusual remote team building activities mentioned above are just a small part of the hundreds of possible meeting activates that you can try out before finding your own activities that best fit your company culture.
Have a couple of unusual remote team building activities that your company is currently practicing? Share them with us!
