Team-building in A Remote Environment
Creating Chemistry During COVID-19
Employee engagement and workplace satisfaction should be top of mind for all managers and decision-makers, especially as we navigate the challenges of this pandemic. Employees who are happy with their work and their environment will be more engaged, more efficient, and much less likely to seek alternate employment. In recent years, places like escape rooms and ropes courses have become more widespread. A potential factor could include the increase in firms using such sites for team-building exercises.
As more businesses begin virtual operations as we continue to fight COVID-19, facilitating team-building exercises can be challenging. If you wonder what you can do to replace the traditional team-building activities, here are a few of our favorites at Red Sky:
Trivia
A classic trivia game is an excellent way for your employees to engage with one another. It’s also cheap and easy to set up. You can try a random trivia generator from the internet or build the trivia questions yourself. If you are willing to invest a little more time, you can even try making your trivia questions around a specific theme or topic within your industry. You could also create trivia questions about your employees as an icebreaker if your teammates do not know each other well.
“Who’s in that Picture”
This one is best for small to medium groups. A week before the event, ask those participating to send in a photo or two of themselves either doing something fun or in an exotic location. Once you’ve collected your pictures, blur out the faces and any distinguishing features from the image so that it’s challenging to identify the individual. Put the photos into a slide show, and have your participants guess which of their co-workers the photo features. Not only is this game a fun way for your employees to showcase cool adventures or places they’ve visited, each picture inevitably leads to a story and a conversation. Hence, it’s a great way to facilitate engagement if that is a challenge for your organization.
Virtual Cooking Class
A quick Bing search will lead you to a seemingly never-ending list of companies that offer virtual cooking classes for your team. Cooking classes not only lead to a (hopefully) delicious home-cooked meal, it also helps facilitate conversations. Virtual cooking classes tend to range quite a bit in price since some will ship the necessary ingredients to each participant in advance. Alternatively, you can also have a team volunteer introduce a personal recipe and lead the class, sending out the list of ingredients beforehand to the rest of the group.
Game Night
For this, it’s best to pick a game that is either simple to teach or a game that everyone already knows. When it’s Game Time, have everyone start in a single meeting room and go over the game’s rules and the format for your event. You can choose from various tournament formats. We recommend avoiding “elimination” formats that would remove participants or leave people waiting around. Many collaboration applications, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom, offer you the ability to assign people to “breakout rooms,” which would open a side conference room for the games. The host would then transfer the players to breakout rooms for that round. Once the game has concluded, participants rejoin the main meeting room until they complete their matches. The next round begins.
Being physically distant from one another presents challenges to building team camaraderie. Still, there are great ways to step away from your day-to-day work and foster these meaningful relationships. One of the critical factors to employee workplace satisfaction is their relationships with their co-workers and managers. Team-building events can help build strong ties.
