Many businesses benefit from remote teams. With teams scattered across many time zones, it’s now possible for workflows to run continuously. This is good news for clients and helps keep profit margins healthy, but it’s not the best framework for a culture of collaboration and connectedness.
Are your virtual teams struggling to find common ground? Perhaps your online employees are finding it hard to move beyond awkward introductions and forge valuable relationships with those they work with. Is work suffering due to a lack of interaction and lackluster communication? You can resolve many issues by exploring the benefits of online team building games for remote employees.
What Are Online Team-Building Games?
As in the real world, virtual team building activities are intended to get your employees thinking collaboratively and working together. They’re typically used at the start of weekly meetings or project updates, getting everyone on the same page and stirring a remote team into action.
Some activities are more interactive than others. If you want to inspire some creativity, use virtual whiteboards for some quick-fire drawing games. Alternatively, use rounds of trivia to see how much attention people have been paying to email newsletters and company updates. If you want to encourage people to loosen up and let go of their inhibitions, music activities and sound-based games are another option.
Despite what they’re called, many team building games pit player against player. The goal of these games is to encourage each player to reveal more about what makes them tick, endearing themselves to their colleagues and fostering connections that will translate into their working lives.
Why Start a Virtual Team Meeting with an Activity or Game?
If you’ve lined up your first all-hands meeting, it’s worth remembering that all of your attendees are relative strangers. They may have interacted over email before, but they’ve probably never spoken on the phone, let alone chatted via video call. Activities and games can break the ice and encourage meeting participants to seize this new opportunity to interact with colleagues remotely.
Even if your employees do know each other, an enthusiastic crowd isn’t exactly guaranteed. By adding a game or activity to the start of a meeting agenda, you’re giving everybody’s gray matter a workout. The more alert meeting attendees are, the more likely it is that they’ll engage with meeting content and discussions.
15 Great Online Games for Remote Employees
Once you’ve decided on the perfect template for your online session, you’ll need a stockpile of great games lined up to spice up those virtual get-togethers. Need some ideas for your first online event? We’ve picked out 15 must-try virtual activities your teams will love.
1. Video Charades
Everyone’s played charades at some point in their lives. A staple fixture of many Thanksgiving and Christmas get-togethers, you can take the fun online with a game of virtual charades. Use a random image generator or send a random image link to a nominated player, who then has to act out what they see without muttering so much as a syllable. The first player to guess the correct word gets the point!
2. Typing Speed Challenge
This online activity pits players against each other based on a skill they put to use every day of the working week. If you haven’t guessed the rules of the game already, it’s simply a race to see who can type the most words in a minute. You can use online typing speed tests for this game, asking players to share their results with everyone else once their minute is up.
3. Word Association
This light-hearted classic is guaranteed to raise a smile. To start, nominate a player to kick the ball rolling by saying a single word or simple phrase. Then, a second player has to pick up the baton, saying the first word that comes to mind. You can repeat this process until every member of your team has contributed. Alternatively, turn it into an elimination game, with those who spend too long scrambling around their vocabulary disqualified until the next round starts.
4. Something in Common
Team building sessions are designed to get your employees talking and thinning collaboratively, which makes this game a perfect fit. Split session attendees into groups and encourage them before asking them to talk among themselves and come up with a few things they all have in common. You can keep topics focused on work or give them free rein to talk about their own interests and backgrounds. Interactive tools like virtual whiteboards are particularly handy for this game.
5. Quick Draw
Everyone loves a good drawing game. A fast-paced round or two of Quick Draw will break the ice, raise a few smiles, and encourage everyone to start thinking collaboratively. While you can play this game as a large group, it works better with smaller ones. Use breakout rooms to split your team into smaller groups, then use random word generators or a predetermined glossary as inspiration. Award a point for each correct answer and apply penalties for any wrong ones. Later, bring everyone back together to see which player tops the leaderboards. To make life easier, use Gloww’s scribble game to bring your next round of Quick Draw to life.
6. Truth or Dare
A favorite with college students for years, Truth or Dare will bring some jeopardy to any team building session. This one also translates well to the virtual world, so you can make it a staple of your remote activity sessions with your teams. You’ll of course need some prompts to get you started, so use random generators for inspiration. Be careful not to get too wild with this one. Stick to casual topics when coming up with truth prompts and don’t get too creative with dare ones.
7. Virtual Game Shows
Who doesn’t love a good game show? Whether your favorite was Family Feud, Wheel of Fortune, or Name That Tune, you can bring a touch of nostalgia to team meetings with virtual versions of these classic games. Would you prefer to create your own custom game shows? With Gloww’s quiz features, you can bring that gameshow spirit to every session. Why not cap off a department meeting with a round or two of virtual team trivia to see how well your employees really know each other?
8. Got a Good Joke?
Humor is an integral part of a healthy team dynamic. Do you have any budding comedians in your midst? Encourage employees to pipe up with a work-friendly joke as a bite-sized icebreaker. You can even turn it into a mini-challenge. Pick a theme at random, then ask everyone to offer up their best joke based on it.
9. Host an Online Office Olympics
Searching for a game that’s guaranteed to engage every last one of your team? Office Olympics is the way to go. While you won’t be able to include any physical games, you can still repurpose this one as a virtual extravaganza. Pull together all your favorite games from previous meetings and team building events and pick out a selection of the very best. Include a mixture of trivia games, drawing challenges, and other brain-busters. Once you’ve decided on your Olympic categories, you can assign players to teams and get things started. Award points to winning players and teams as you normally would, but save the applause for the virtual closing ceremony when you tally up those totals to see which team has secured the most points overall. We also have a sports team activity template to make things easier.
10. Liven Things Up with Lunch Roulette
One thing that’s sorely missed when working online is social interaction. The good news is that there’s a virtual substitute for the traditional workplace cafeteria. With Lunch Roulette, two employees are picked entirely at random to join each other for lunch over a video call. Rather than focus on work topics or talk about impending project milestones, they’ll be tasked with chatting about anything else. A great way to break the ice and thaw frosty relationships between distanced colleagues.
11. Online Wellness Experiences
In an ideal world, it would be great to be able to fly teams off to faraway destinations for some much-needed rest and recuperation. Sadly, this isn’t practical. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t promote wellness and healthy living. Rather than focus on games and fast-paced activities, an online wellness event can include introductions to key concepts like meditation, mindfulness, and more. Take some time preparing rich media assets to share with your team or consider reaching out to a wellness expert to appear as a guest speaker. Here’s more on how you can create a healthy remote work culture.
12. Hangman
Most people have been playing hangman since the first grade. This classroom staple will still appeal to adult players, so make it a firm fixture of your team meetings. The rules are simple. One person has to think of a single word or phrase, while everyone else has to guess it by calling out letters, one at a time. Correct letters are revealed, while incorrect ones lead to another dash appearing. If enough incorrect guesses are made, the stickman is revealed in all his grisly glory and the game is over. With Gloww’s virtual drawing tool, it’s easy to recreate this classic guessing game virtually.
13. Theme of the Week
This one is inspired by those cultural appreciation days of school years past. Set aside one week out of every month to play host to a themed event. Nominated themes can be just about anything, from iconic sports games to entire countries. Your employees are free to engage in all manner of ways. They may decide to turn up to a virtual meeting wearing an outfit emblazoned with the colors of a national flag. Alternatively, you might want to whip up some exotic cuisine together in a virtual cook-off. Here are more ideas on questions and themes.
14. Learn a New Language Together
Many people regret not learning a second language earlier in life. While mastering a new vocabulary tends to get trickier the older we get, the learning process can still be a fun one. Why not make your next team building activity a learning one and encourage your employees to master a new tongue together? You can host collaborative classes, invite guest speakers, and celebrate the home country of the language itself with themed lunches, quizzes, and more. Have a look at our world trivia template to get you started.
15. Battle of the GIFs
Nowadays, GIFs are as common as emojis in text messages and social media posts. Most of your team has probably got a small gallery of GIFs lined up for every eventuality, so think about framing an entire game around them. To play this quirky team building activity, simply pick a category or theme at random and everyone else has to seek out a GIF that best represents the prompt. You can pick the winner of each round yourself or use live polls and base the decision on a group vote.
Get Set for Game Time with a Great Virtual Meeting Platform
If you want to liven up remote meetings with team building games, you need to be using the right platform. Looking for a reliable video conferencing solution that delivers first-rate features, plenty of interactivity, and access to a huge range of ready-made templates? It’s time to see what Gloww can do for you.
You can create custom sessions in moments, packed with games and activities to break the ice and get your teams thinking collaboratively. Whether you’re looking to lighten a longer all-hands meeting or want to host a dedicated team building event, Gloww has all the tools you need for an event to remember.
Already have some ideas? You can get started with the platform for free today. Have you already tried the free version of Gloww and want to learn about our advanced features? Explore our premium pricing plans to see what else this innovative conferencing solution can do for you. At Gloww, we’re always happy to respond to questions from curious users. Do you have something you need to ask? Get in touch today.
