Virtual Team Building Activities
For a virtual team morale boost!
Are you looking for some virtual team building activities to boost team morale? Here are 6 great tips!
For every person who loves the work-from-home life, there’s someone out there who misses the office chaos, comradeship, and the frequent mid-morning coffee breaks. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a whole new set of challenges to employers and employees, making online team building activities a vital tool to keep employees motivated, boost their morale and ensure productivity levels do not fall.
In this article, we will shed light on ways to keep team morale high with the help of some virtual event solutions such as icebreakers and other activities for teams working remotely. All of these ideas can quickly boost moods while allowing better communication and increased work spirit.
6 Online Team Building Activities to Boost Employees Morale
1. “Do You Really Know Your Team?” Icebreaker
As the team leader, you need to ask all your teammates to answer two to four “about me” questions in the HubSeven platform. The questions don’t have to be too complicated. Employees can answer simples ones such as:
• What’s your favourite holiday destination?
• If you were an insect, what would you be?
• What’s your favourite book?
• If you could eat one dish for the rest of your life, what would you eat?
Once everyone has answered these questions, share the answers during a virtual meeting and see if your teammates can pair the answers with the right person. Once everyone has guessed, reveal who gave what answer. This game can provide pretty hilarious and exciting results and give your employees a chance to explain their answers so others can learn more about them.
2. Virtual Happy Hour
A Happy Hour is the perfect virtual event solution. This free activity takes about 30 to 45 minutes and works best for teams with 2 to 10 members.
First, send all of your participants a Happy Hour box packed with goodies they’ll enjoy during the virtual get-together, such as a co*cktail kit. Then, hold a virtual happy hour video conference on an online event platform where your employees can kick back with their kits and converse about exciting things.
If you are afraid things will get awkward, you should have various icebreakers prepared, such as the “Do You Really Know Your Team?” icebreaker we shared above!
3. Virtual Movie Night
Finding someone who doesn’t like watching movies is hard, so we know that a virtual movie night is definitely going to be a hit! It does not involve a lot of team interaction, but team members can still bond in plenty of ways.
Get your team to vote on a movie they would like to watch for the virtual movie night once a month. Go with the movie that gets the most votes. Once everyone has watched it, have a post-movie discussion for about 15 minutes so everyone can share their opinions and chat about their favourite part of the movie!
Your team members don’t have to watch movies independently. There are many real-time video-sharing apps such as Teleparty and Kast that allow people to host virtual movie nights and watch together. We think most people would enjoy this activity, but we recommend that you switch up the genre each month to accommodate different preferences.
4. Virtual Mad Libs
Next up on our list of virtual team building activities is a rendition of the phrasal template word game Mad Libs called “Virtual Mad Libs.” Mad Libs is a short fill-in-the-blanks word game that can be an entertaining ice breaker before an online meeting.
You can create the game on your own and share it virtually with your team members or use websites like Mad Libs, Mad Takes, or RedKid.net to play it virtually. It would be best if you played this game with your employees at least once a week.
This game is great for team members that are good with words and like reading and listening for clues.
5. Online Pub Quiz
An online pub weekly or monthly quiz is an idea that many team building companies are suggesting for employers. This game is not only fun but can allow your employees to feel energetic and instantly more motivated.
To play this game, you need to pick various topics, assign a host, and have your team members grab a drink to participate. You can either come up with the questions yourself or use an online pub quiz question generator.
Anyone who enjoys quizzes will love this pub quiz because such people usually have a high motivation for information. However, those with high motivation for goals or achievement but a low motivation for initiation might not enjoy this game.
6. Virtual Book Club
Another great idea for corporate virtual team building is to organize a book club! If your team members enjoy reading, this idea will surely be a winner.
Start a book club and have everyone do the reading offline on their own. Give them a deadline and have them keep a log of their thoughts and perceptions as they go about reading. Make sure that you pick a book that all team members are capable of reading within a month. At the end of the month, hold a discussion on video chat to share your thoughts!
However, it would help if you were mindful that, unfortunately, not everyone enjoys reading. Some people find it draining or are unable to find the time for it. If you have some team members who think that reading is a stressful commitment, consider letting them sit this one out.
Final Thoughts
Did you like these 6 corporate virtual team building tips to boost employees’ morale and make them motivated? We hope you did! Try one out with your team today and see if it helps you achieve your end goal.
About the author: Sarah Hill is a content writer at Seven Events Ltd, a leading event management company offering online team-building activities and venue finding services in the UK. She started her career in the events industry almost a decade ago as time progressed she became an avid event blogger sharing her insight on corporate event planning.
Regardless of whether you’re managing a real or a virtual team meeting, the basics should still apply! Take a take a look at two more of our pages to help you run better meetings:
Effective meetings
Effective meeting checklist
Tools to help your workshop facilitation skills
If you want to get better at leading team development, this article is a good place to start. But if you want to take your team leadership to the next level, here is a great set of tools to get you on your way.
For example, you might want to facilitate a meeting which encourages your team to build a shared understanding of what teamwork means in your specific context. That is, what it means to your team and more widely, to your organisation.
To do this though, words are often not enough. Building teamwork is also about what you do, starting with that shared understanding of teamwork, and agreeing together what you value.
That’s exactly what our “teamwork definition” tool is designed to do. You’ll find this tool, plus a wealth of other resources for team leaders in our colossal Team Building Bundle.
Containing 240 pages and 50 tools, these are the 8 key guides we recommend to help you do more than define teamwork, build it!
Why is Teamwork Important
Build a Better Team
The Problems with Teams
Team Health Check
Team Building Exercises
Leading with Style and Focus
What’s the Problem?
Making Better Decisions
