Now that remote working is the standard across many industries, businesses have been forced to rethink the way they approach team building. With a remote team scattered across the world, traditional team building activities aren’t practical. When you factor in a lack of face-to-face interaction and other barriers to employee engagement, improving employee morale and encouraging higher rates of productivity becomes a challenge.
However, remote working doesn’t have to mean you say goodbye to team building altogether. With the right online platform and a premium pick of exercises in your repertoire, you can turn a disparate team into a united workforce.
Quick Activities or Full-Day Activities?
In-person team building tends to take up an entire day. While the results can be beneficial, removing so many people from their duties can cause a lot of problems for most businesses. Rather than limit your options, online team building activities provide you with a practical alternative.
Instead of spending weeks synchronizing everyone’s schedules and sacrificing an entire day to team building, you can boost morale and encourage togetherness any time you come together online. Provided you’re deploying them regularly, bite-sized team building activities can be incredibly beneficial.
20 Last-Minute Team Building Ideas
Even if your employees aren’t working shoulder-to-shoulder, you can still foster a healthy culture of togetherness with team-building activities. Below, you’ll find 20 of the best last-minute team building ideas to get you started.
1. Group Gratitude
Everyone loves being told they’re doing a great job. Are shout-outs already a staple of your all-hands meetings? Take a moment during each virtual get-together your team members have the chance to tell each other what they’re thankful for. It could be general gratitude for making a new starter feel welcome or specific praise for assistance with a recent project.
2. Quick Collaborative Playlist
Great music can bring people together, inspire creativity, and help a team work better than ever before. A music team activity is an effective way of engaging remote employees. Why not get everyone to compile a playlist, with each person picking a track that best represents their current mood?
3. This or That
Guaranteed to get everyone talking, this game can be played with small teams and large groups alike. A good fit with video conferencing platforms, all you need to do is ask a simple question and provide two potential answers.
4. Typing Time Trial
If you’re looking for a more practical team building activity, try a typing speed race. Direct your employees to a free online typing test and task them with completing the exercise as quickly as possible, making sure they share their results.
5. Assign Meeting Roles
A surefire way to keep everyone engaged during a meeting is to assign roles to participants. Pretty much every meeting will have a moderator and minute-taker assigned, but why stop there? Put someone in charge of polls and surveys, task someone with taking screenshots of your sessions, and so on.
6. Icebreaker Questions
One of the simplest virtual team building activities to include in your next meeting is an icebreaker question or two These basic prompts can be used to introduce new employees to a larger team, help remote colleagues connect, and encourage better communication in general.
7. Host a Virtual Dance Party
Are your virtual meetings stagnating? Cut through those awkward moments and long silences with a virtual dance party. Pick a playlist of popular tracks and use a music team activity meeting template to get your online dance party started.
8. Flash Feedback Session
Even if we don’t always like hearing it, constructive feedback is invaluable to any business. During every meeting, set aside a few minutes for a round of open feedback so employees can share constructive feedback with colleagues and entire departments alike.
9. Online Trivia Tournament
Nothing gets people working together better than a team-based trivia tournament. Want to make things easy for everyone? Use the TikTok trivia template to host a few rounds of beginner-friendly questions. Eager to find the real cinema buffs in your ranks? Use a movie trivia template instead.
10. Jet-Setter’s Dream Board Challenge
Anyone who loves to travel has no end of dream destinations left unticked on their bucket list. This activity involves team members putting together a handful of images of places they’ve always longed to visit. Along with being a great icebreaker, this activity will encourage your employees to open up and reveal more about themselves.
11. YouTube Roulette Showdown
We’re all guilty of spending more time than we should watching funny clips and NSFW videos when we shouldn’t be, so why not turn this modern-day pastime into a virtual team building activity? Task your team members with sharing their favorite YouTube videos with everybody else.
12. Digital Pictionary Showdown
Pictionary is a great game to play in groups and can easily transfer to the virtual space with the help of a digital whiteboard. Task one person with drawing a prompt, with everyone else working together to figure out what exactly the prompter is attempting to sketch.
13. Time Management Polls
Remote work can lead to a few time management issues. If your business is having a little trouble with it, why not use polls to find out what works for everybody else? Use polls to help you nail down preferred start times, ideal meeting frequency, and the perfect length of your next online session.
14. Spin-and-Win Trivia Challenge
Participants spin the wheel to determine a category, then engage in a quick-fire trivia round related to the chosen topic, injecting excitement and variety into the game.
15. Word Cloud Connection
Word clouds are a useful visual tool that encourages openness and allows disparate employees to find common ground. Pick a theme and then ask team members to input a few words that come to mind. The results will be displayed in real-time, giving you a clear idea of what everybody’s thinking.
16. Emoji Extravaganza
Emoji use can be pretty particular. This challenge sees teams put together a variety of quirky emojis relating to a particular theme. Keep it simple to make life easy or use outlandish prompts for the most ridiculous results.
17. Word Association
Most of us have been playing this since childhood so you shouldn’t have any stragglers. There’s no time limit to a round of word association, so they can be slotted in anywhere. For best results, set aside 5-10 minutes each time you get together to play it.
18. The Object Memory Game
This team-building game might seem simple, but it really tests the gray matter. To play, use a virtual whiteboard to jot down around 20-30 words before showing everyone what you’ve written. After 30 seconds or so, remove the list from view and see how many words your teams can remember.
19. Virtual Coffee Break
Operating remotely has its benefits, but a lack of social interaction can sometimes pose a problem. An online coffee break might not seem like the most exciting virtual team building activity, but it’s one of the most effective ways you can bring a remote team closer together.
20. Two Truths and a Lie
This activity lets your team have fun while they learn more about each other. Ask everyone to write down three facts about themselves. The twist? Only two of them are true. Rather than focus on qualifications and career experience, focus on personal details and anecdotes. This way, everyone learns a little more about the real person behind the name and job role.
Take the Effort Out of Online Team-Building with Gloww
Now you’ve picked out a few last-minute team building ideas, you’re ready to use them to engage your virtual teams, boost morale, and drive productivity. However, you’ll need the right tools at your disposal. With Gloww, you have a video conferencing and engagement platform for the perfect online interactive presentation, that’s packed with useful features that will revolutionize your approach to remote work. Spice up weekly meetings with icebreaker games and team-building activities, plug those skills gaps with content-rich webinars, and more.
Ready to enjoy the full benefits of Gloww? Get started today and create your first session for free. Failing that, why not take a look at our pricing tiers to discover more about Gloww’s premium features? Need a question about the platform answered? Contact the team today.
