Thinking about new ways to have fun with the team at work? Here are 10 fun work activities that your team will love!
With more and more employees working remotely, it can get challenging for companies to maintain their employee engagement, which might lead to decrease in the productivity of the team. Of course, encouraging fun at work is not always easy, as well as adopting the right tools and practices for virtual team bonding sessions. However, working in a stressful environment doesn't yield productivity as much as working in a stress-free environment. Thus, it becomes important for organizations to adopt ways in which their employees can cool off and de-stress while also bonding with their team.
A study by BrightHR found that employees who have fun at work tend to take less sick leaves and are more creative at their workplace. Moreover, bonding sessions tend to increase their productivity and lower their stress levels. In another study by the University of Warwick, it’s concluded that employees working in a fun atmosphere show a 12% increase in productivity, whereas show a 10% drop in productivity among unhappy workers.
With companies understanding the importance of building a strong team culture, most of them look for tools and hacks to bring in some fun and team bonding sessions into their employees' day-to-day work. This blog will help you find the right strategies to incorporate fun into the workplace. Happy and inspired employees are the ones that are most likely to be productive and efficient. So let’s get going!
Fun at work = happy employees = Increase in productivity.
These are benefits of having fun virtual sessions at the workplace:
Reducing boredom at work is important to increase overall motivation and productivity of teams. Having fun at work helps in team building, which also helps in creating happier and engaged teams.
Are you ready to let the fun begin? Here are 10+ virtual activities that are a lot of fun!
Who doesn’t love a game of trivia quiz? These contests help teams to scratch their heads and learn new things, while also acting as a fun icebreaker among the employees. It makes the workday fun with interactive contests that the whole company can participate in, thus bringing all employees together.
You can try apps like Ricotta Trivia on Slack. Schedule trivia and photo quiz contests with 20,000+ MCQ questions, 15+ categories like Marvel, Friends, Star Wars etc. and a real-time leaderboard. Let the fun times begin!
Five Things is an improv game that can be played with your team on Zoom or Skype. To play Five Things, you start by setting a theme and picking a person. The selected person has to name five specific items according to the set theme within 15-20 seconds. After that player is done, he/she can choose another theme and pick out another player.
For example, if the theme is set to Avengers and the person picked out is Daniel. Daniel has to name 5 Avengers within 15 seconds. Once he is done, Daniel can pick another theme and a different person and so on.
This or That, also known as Would You Rather, is a quick and easy way to engage your team. A set of two options are given and employees have to pick their favourite option. For example, Netflix or Amazon Prime, Coffee or Tea or Camping or Glamping. You can also look at our list of 40 Would You Rather questions to get started.
You can make this more interesting by hosting a quick icebreaker round to get to know a person, and then do a quick game where employees guess the preferences of their co-worker. This could be a lot of fun over a video call on Zoom, meet or Skype!
It tests the bonding levels of co-workers and also reveals the things that we don’t know about them or the things that others don’t know about you! This game can be played to get to know your co-workers well.
How fluent are you with words? Building your words, also known as word formation, increases one's vocabulary knowledge while also having a bit of fun at work.
The host of the game gives one complicated word to the team, and the players are supposed to form more words from that one single word in a limited time period. For example, the host shares the word ‘Infrastructure’. The team can form words like ‘Structure’, ‘Ant’, ‘True’, ‘Rat’, ‘Cut’ etc.,
This is a fun activity where an employee can collaborate together, leading to a fun team bonding session.
Unleash Shakespeare within you! This would be more of a team play, where one member can start a sentence and others can keep building on the sentences until it forms a complete story.
One person has to set the theme of the story and starts with 2-3 lines, the next person has to continue the story from there and take turns to complete the story. This is a great way to get everyone involved in a creative and fun exercise. To play a game of Story Building on Slack, install Ricotta Trivia and get started on a collaborative story-telling session with your team.
Want to get to know your co-worker better? We have the perfect suggestion! Truth or Dare reveals the fun side of a person. It makes a person give us a new detail about themselves or show us how daring they are. It becomes even more fun with more people!
The game starts with one individual asking the selected person whether they want a Truth or Dare. Once picked, the person is asked a question if chosen ‘truth’ or given a fun activity if chosen dare.
It's recommended to keep it impersonal in a work setting so that this won't lead to any uncomfortable situations. You can also refer to resources to get ideas for any Truth or dare questions and activities.
Guess who is a Zoom game that starts by one player selecting their choice co-worker.
The aim is to guess who the opponent's chosen person is. This game tests the observation skills of the co-workers along with how well we know them.
For example, You can ask questions like “Does the person have brown hair?” If the answer is yes, you can eliminate people with hair colour other than brown.
To play this game:
This is a super fun and quick game that can be great for some extra laughs. Do give it a shot!
A quick virtual game of scavenger hunt can be a great stress buster. To play scavenger hunt virtually, select a host that will organise the hunt. The host will create a list of items, and challenge the co-workers to gather the items from their room or backyard within a time period of 1 minute to 5 minutes, depending on the difficulty and number of the items given.
The person/ team with the maximum number of items in the list will be the winner and can be rewarded with a gift card. To add a fun twist to the game, ask the participants to build a story line with the items found. This would be super-fun, when the participants come up with funny stories.
Find the treasure is real fun when played virtually or physically. Everyone knows how to play treasure hunt physically, but let’s find out how to play it virtually.
The host creates 6-12 documents that are uploaded in a drive with password protection, whereas the password of the second document lies in the answer of the first document given to the players. When the players keep finding the answers, they can move to the next document in the shared drive. The final answer will be shared to the host when returned to the main room. The final doc can have a treasure like a gift card or any other prize of your choice.
This could also be made informative by creating the docs in the technical domain or the project, the one you are currently working on. So in this way, it will be fun as well as like a training session.
Who doesn’t love word games? Word Association is a rapid fire game, where players tell everyone the first word that comes to their mind when they hear or see the word.
For example, if the host starts with the word ‘Silent’. Then the next person may continue the game with words like ‘Library’ or ‘Church’ and the third person continues it with ‘Books’ and so on. This can be a timed game and the rule is to not repeat the same word twice. The person or team that continues creating a long word chain in the designated time, without repeating words, wins. Easy-peasy!
Playing these fun games can help you bring joy to the workplace. You can plan these activities and dedicate about 60 minutes every week for a fun team bonding session! For quick team building sessions, you can use Slack and make use of the cost-effective Slack apps and integrations for team building.
One such app found in the app store is Ricotta Trivia, is great for team building games such as trivia, icebreakers and social games on Slack. It's a user-friendly app which one can find easy to use across teams.
A more open workforce leads to an increase in productivity and performance. Think about the things you do at the workplace and try to make some room for jokes, fun and relaxation methods to improve your productivity!
Try Ricotta Games & Trivia
