Culture Remote Work

5 Virtual Team Building Ideas for Remote Workers (& Why It’s Important)

2022-04-2213 min readWritten by Christian Eilers

best virtual team building ideas for wfh employees and remote bonding options for distributed teams

Summary:

Whether in person or via Zoom call, virtual team building sessions are critical for remote companies and distributed teams.

Team building. Is it really necessary? And how is it possible to do team-building activities remotely?

When we think about team building, it usually conjures images of classic team-building game activities like throwing a ball around a circle of people or telling each other fun personal facts. Maybe it brings to mind taking the team out on an obstacle course, where everyone has to work together to overcome each hurdle. Perhaps it’s just a lunch out together as a group at a nice cafe or restaurant.

Of course, things need to be a bit more creative when you’re involved in remote teams! But virtual team building is 100% possible.

Remote working is becoming more popular, particularly within software engineering teams. The results from GitLab’s 2019 Global Developer Survey show that only 23% of all respondents indicate a fully onsite team. No less than 96% of US workers would like flexible working conditions, according to a recent survey by Werk.

Remote workers are the future.

Offer the flexibility of becoming remote workers, and everyone wins — so long as your team works well together in a remote-friendly culture, which is where remote team building comes in.

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Why Remote Team Building is Important

Codenamed Project Aristotle, Google researched what made the most effective teams within their business. The results found that the most important attribute of an effective team was “…an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk-taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive.”

Maybe surprisingly, Google did not find co-location made teams more effective.

Without building interpersonal bonds and trust within a team, individuals may be scared to reach out to their teammates for help on project issues that can cost time, money, or wind up snowballing out of control. Trust is key.

But remote team building isn’t only about helping your engineers work better together and building this interpersonal trust. It’s also a way to mitigate some of the individual issues that can come with remote work.

According to Buffer’s State of Remote Work Report 2019, “the second biggest struggle that remote workers face, after unplugging after work, is loneliness.”

Without a team physically around you, it can be difficult not to feel isolated at times – even if team members are just a message or call away. Loneliness can weigh heavy on the mental health of remote workers if they aren’t well-equipped to handle it.

That’s why building and strengthening within-team bonds is critical for remote teams. The remote happier teams are, the more productive they are, leading to better results. Investing in remote team building brings better outcomes for both employers and employees.

Rising to the Challenge of Remote Team Building

While it’s a bit more difficult to bond with people who aren’t physically co-located, it’s definitely not impossible. Many of us have personal relationships that are mainly remote, whether it’s an old friend, someone we met online, or family that doesn’t live in the same city.

If we think about these relationships, we recall that they can be a little more difficult to sustain than those relationships where we are physically present more often — but it’s always worth doing.

This is why it’s so important to do remote team building: to build and sustain relationships.

Treat planning virtual team-building activities as an opportunity to think outside of the box and make sure to ask remote teams for suggestions: they may have prior experience of what works and what doesn’t for them personally.

How do they personally like to share information? Are they a visual person, and love seeing photos of the team? Or do they prefer physical team-building games? Everyone will have different opinions, but each team session can use different types of interaction to ensure everyone feels included.

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Team Building: In-Person, Online, or a Combination of the Two?

When developing a team-building exercises schedule, there are a few options available. You can get the whole engineering team (or even the whole organization!) together in the one spot at the one time, the in-person option. You can also do entirely remote exercises – or a combination of the two techniques.

Ultimately, with a remote team, it’s best to do a combination of in-person and remote team-building exercises. Don’t balk at the cost of bringing together the team for a co-located team-building week or weekender. Instead, think of it as an investment in your people. After all, there is no replacement for in-person relationship building.

These weeks or weekenders should be scheduled for at least once per year, or potentially more regularly if your team is amenable to it.

Remote Team Building Games and Other Team Bonding Activities

The in-person week or weekender

Among remote employers, annual retreats are a popular team-building activity. Big-name remote tech companies like Zapier and Buffer offer company retreats for their employees; a chance to get together and spend a week or so in the company of other remote employees working and playing together.

Not ready to organize it yourself? There are companies such as Surf Office that can help design your perfect remote company retreat, too.

Online gaming as a team bonding tool

Ask any gamer about their game of choice and you’ll be able to tell they mean business, with strategy, leagues, and online friends. It’s not just a solo affair — they play with others that are just as serious about the game, and often work in teams.

That’s why it’s no surprise that online gaming can make the crossover to become a key team-building activity. Over at Podium, the business communication startup, they have incorporated Fortnite play into their regular activities. As the company’s CEO says, “…developing roles and communicating as a squad in the game actually translates well into real life.”

You don’t have to limit your team to existing, bounded games. With Dungeons and Dragons experiencing a resurgence, tabletop and/or imagination-bounded games are also a great way to have teams working together towards non-work-oriented goals.

There are options that exist to play these types of games remotely such as Fantasy Grounds and Roll 20. More of a fan of text-based classics? Try playing Zork over Slack!

There are even options for completely asynchronous teams. One of these is playing turn-based digitized board games through Board Game Arena. If your teammate opponent can’t take the next turn until they wake up on the other side of the world, it doesn’t matter!

Like you’d usually have lunch breaks together or drop by someone’s office for some idle chatter, you can squeeze this chat into meetings instead. Allocate time for this chat within meetings, perhaps at the halfway point.

While you can do before or after meetings, you may notice attendee drop off. Your remote employees may not deem it important unless it’s mandatory with attendance. Use virtual coffee breaks (preferably with video capabilities) as they do at Gitlab, to your advantage.

Your (remote) in-house game show

If you have the time to pull a presentation together, it’s entirely possible to have game show-style events for your remote team!

At Arc, we enjoy the occasional trivia-style team-building games with our remote team members — although we now know better than to trust our colleagues when it comes to voting in Slack for “ask the audience”-type answers! (It turns out at least 30% of our colleagues will just send party parrots etc. instead of anything useful… you know who you are 👀)

Rich chat tools for memes, industry news, etc.

There are plenty of amazing chat apps available that can help your team bond, such as Slack or Discord, which your engineering team may already use for work. By creating separate channels for different types of chat (for instance: memes, industry news, and company news/achievements), you can help drive interactions based on interests.

Ensure employees know it’s fine to take some time each day to browse and post interesting content. You can also have a live video meeting channel on at all times so that people can drop in to chat.

One of the ways that Buffer helps remote employees interact is via their shared life improvement/life hacks public shared blog and pair cells. This is an awesome way to form those social bonds that help with self-improvement that may naturally occur in real life.

Their examples include daily workout goals/tracking, meditation, reading, and more. Buffer further encourages employees to get in on the action by distributing Kindles and movement trackers.

Watching conferences together and talking about them after

Can’t afford to send the team to expensive, far-flung conferences? That doesn’t mean they can’t attend virtually. Many of the world’s top conferences (such as The Linux Foundation conferences) offer live-streaming keynotes, talks, and even labs. Get your team to watch the live streams, and then follow up with discussions post-talk.

Conferences offer up cutting-edge tech solutions and techniques, so watching talks (especially keynotes), can help spark new ideas and conversations within your team, and sometimes even uncover new ways to do work.

Social media is how the world communicates; it’s how we learn more about a person without actual conversations. Instead of letting your employees use outside social media for their team-member discovery efforts, deploy enterprise social media to keep it within the business.

You can develop your own social media with biography, interests, work history, etc., that others in the company can browse over, plus use it as a tracker of company highlights and communication tool. Enterprise social media is becoming more popular for business: check out Zurich insurance’s journey with Workplace by Facebook for a real-world implementation.

Here at Arc, every couple of weeks, the entire team dials into an organization-wide videocall. It’s not an all-hands meeting, or a business update, though; instead, it’s a chance for someone to share knowledge. It may be related to our work, or it may be something completely unrelated!

Our front-end engineering lead, Oliver Lin, recently traded in on his status as Arc’s unofficial photographer-in-chief to teach us how to take great holiday photos (and make us completely jealous of his travels).

Part of the deal with team-wide sharing is that Arc puts on a meal for everyone. It may be dinner time for a team member in LA or breakfast time for one in Taipei, but as long as the munching sounds don’t make it through the microphone, that’s fine!

Opportunities to work with another team for a week/month

Another in-person team-building activity is the opportunity for team members to spend time with each other via work-away arrangements. Picture this: two engineers working alongside each other for a week/month. What could they accomplish with the added support?

By offering avenues for staff to work in another’s city alongside their counterpart, it can help strengthen team bonds. You can encourage this by offering travel, accommodation, and hot-desking allowances for each employee each year.

Summing-Up Recommendations Based on Best Practices

1. Prioritize in-person team building events

Even though they’re more of a budget challenge than remote team-building exercises, doing in-person events can really encourage team cohesion and boost individual enthusiasm. Don’t forget to share the photos on your team Slack channel!

2. Do a mixture of in-person and remote team-building exercises

Even if you run plenty of in-person events, your team mainly operates remotely — so do team building remotely, too. This way, your team can communicate in a similar style to their everyday interactions.

3. It shouldn’t always be about work

Although there are team-building exercises that involve work (such as the work alongside another team member initiative) or are work-adjacent (such as virtual conference attendance and chat), it shouldn’t always be about work.

Fun, team activities like virtual tabletop games, or going go-karting on your company retreat should be included for comprehensive socialization. Make sure that your company culture is positive, and built to encourage interaction!

4. Have a rich digital communication experience

The better equipped your team is to share anything and everything with their team members, the more likely they are to do so. Communications platforms like Discord where you can share content, chat, and do audio/video conferencing, offer a comprehensive solution.

These types of platforms also offer the opportunity for engineers to develop bots to extend the platform, which can both be a fun personal activity as well as potentially helps with work.

You can also utilize add-ons that have already been built by others, such as the Donut app for Slack, which is designed specifically to help remote teams communicate more effectively on the platform.

5. Learn from your team

What works and what doesn’t? Was there a particular challenge that still needs solving? Use your team’s experience with other remote team-building exercises to shape your program, plus incorporate feedback from the activities you run to enhance them in the future.

Whether it’s virtual team building, ice breaker games over video calls, or a preference to get together in person, ensure your employees know their feedback counts when planning your next activity!