Conference calls aren’t exactly a barrel of laughs. In a virtual meeting with many participants, it’s easy for employees to disengage. Important information goes over their heads, and they’ll also miss out on the chance to interact with their colleagues.
However, conference calls can be a great platform for remote team bonding. With the right games and creative activities, your next virtual meeting can inspire collaboration and encourage your employees to connect. Not sure where to start with team building activities for conference calls? Read on for all the inspiration you’ll ever need.
21 Fun Team-Building Activities You Can Do Over a Video Call
Drawing a blank with virtual team-building activities? There are plenty of ways you can engage remote teams, whether it’s a virtual escape room or a tough round of online trivia. Looking for more suggestions? We’ve got plenty of ideas you can try.
1. Virtual Scavenger Hunt
Draw up a list of common items your employees will likely have scattered around their home, then challenge them to find as many of those items as quickly as possible.
2. Team Trivia
If you’re looking for a classic team-building activity that will encourage friendly competition, team trivia is the obvious choice. Check out Gloww’s Black History month trivia, Super Bowl trivia, but also movie trivia, and much more.
3. Virtual Team Exercise Sessions
Remote working has its advantages, but it’s easy to let health and fitness goals slide. Make sure your employees are in fighting shape by organizing regular team workout sessions. Check out this sport team activity.
4. Pet Check-Ins
Regular check-ins with your remote employees foster stronger relationships and improve communication. While you’re at it, why not see how those furry felines and cute pups they share their home with are doing?
5. Happy Hour
If you’re hosting a conference on a call on a Friday afternoon and you’ve just cleared an entire meeting agenda, why not let your hair down? A virtual Happy Hour event is a great way to boost team morale and encourage colleagues to communicate.
6. Two Truths & A Lie
Does your team need some help opening up? This game involves participants sharing two genuine tidbits from their lives, along with one bald-faced lie. It’s down to everybody else to separate fact from fiction.
7. Buzzer Charades
A popular parlor game with endless possibilities, it’s amazing how quickly charades break down barriers and get people talking. Rather than have everybody shouting over each other during a video conference, bring some order with a virtual buzzer.
8. Drawing Challenge
There’s a good chance that at least one of your team has a hidden talent for drawing. It’s even more likely that the rest are going to be hopeless at it. Use a virtual whiteboard to set up an online drawing challenge, using live polls to find out everybody’s favorite once you’re done.
9. Start Meetings with an Icebreaker
If your meeting gets off to a frosty start, you’ll struggle to entice shyer members of your team out of their shells. With an inspired icebreaker, you can say goodbye to shaky starts forever. Stick to simple prompts like favorite things, or relate your icebreakers to your business instead.
10. Solve the Emoji Board
This team-building game is a fairly new one, but it’s quickly becoming a favorite. First, pick a category like classic songs, famous films, or popular books. Then, ask everyone to recreate the title of one of these things in emoji form, with everyone tasked with deciphering the results.
11. What’s Outside Your Window?
Remote workers don’t exactly get many insights into the lives of their colleagues. This activity involves each employee offering up another little slice of their everyday lives. You can ask people to move their laptop or webcam for a quick glance at their favorite view, or simply ask them to describe what’s going on outside instead.
12. Spot the Difference
Pick someone at random, and then ask everyone to focus for 10 seconds. After this, the picked participant has to shut down their camera and remove something from view. Anyone who calls out the difference correctly wins a point.
13. Guided Tours
Remote employees have a life beyond a computer screen. The next time your team is gathered together virtually, ask a couple of participants to provide colleagues with a guided tour of the place they call home. For convenience, make sure these participants are using a tablet or smartphone.
14. Bring Bingo to Conference Calls
A lot can go wrong during a typical conference call. To keep participants engaged throughout, create bespoke bingo cards, with common distractions and interruptions replacing numbers. The first player to form a complete line wins.
15. Virtual Minute to Win It
With Minute to Win It games, the usual rulebooks are thrown out of the window. Ask your team to think on the spot and come up with a shortlist of farcical physical challenges. Then, pick one participant at random to take on the challenge.
16. No Shop Talk
Set aside some time during a conference call so employees can share news and updates from their personal lives. It could be a wedding invitation, pregnancy announcement, or something as simple as a must-try recipe they’re eager to share.
17. Draw What I’m Describing
One player picks an object at random, then has to describe it to everyone else without actually saying its name. The rest of your team then attempts to draw what’s being described, with the closest match declared the winner.
18. Complete the Sentence
Inspire creativity by reading aloud a list of incomplete sentences, with your team having to come up with the closing half. Have fun reading out the results once you’re finished.
19. Live Polls
Use polls for instant feedback on work-related questions, or stick to casual topics for a light-hearted icebreaker.
20. List Five More Things
This word association game also goes down a storm. Draw up a list of prompts, then say one aloud to each team member. They then have ten seconds to come up with a list of five things related to that starting point.
21. This or That?
Take the classic question game to a whole new level with a debate club twist. Players still need to decide between one of two options, but they now have to explain their choice to everyone else.
FAQs
How do you have fun on a conference call?
If you want to keep employees engaged during a conference call, break things up with regular activities and icebreakers. Even a simple live poll can be a great boredom-buster.
How do you facilitate a conference call?
Firstly, make sure everybody knows when a call is about to start. You might also want to have your team brush up on conference call etiquette so nobody is talking over anyone else.
How can I make my conference more interesting?
Regular conference calls can get old quickly. Make them something your team looks forward to with interactive elements and recurring activities.
Rethink the Way You Do Conference Calls with Gloww
Does your entire team dread that weekly conference call? It can seem counterproductive to take employees away from their work if they’re not going to actually engage in a meeting. What’s more, uninterested employees miss out on the chance to check in with colleagues and overcome the obstacles posed by remote working. However, it doesn’t need to be this way.
With a video conferencing platform like Gloww, those weekly calls can be transformed into fun-filled events packed with team-building activities. Create unique meeting sessions packed with icebreakers and games that will inspire, or take a look at our template library for some tried and tested approaches.
Get started creating your next conference call event today with Gloww. Interested in unlocking Gloww’s advanced features? Have a look at our premium pricing tiers. Think we might have missed something? Get in touch with the team with your questions.
