Must-try Virtual Team Building Activities, Games and Ideas for remote team engagement online on Slack or Zoom conference calls for your team.
With an increasing number of companies opting for remote or hybrid work, it becomes increasingly important for employees to get to know and bond with each other. Bringing the social and fun aspect to the workplace can do wonders to improve team morale and bonding. Online team building is the answer for having happy and motivated employees. So, how do you indulge in online team building and icebreakers? It’s simple - virtual games and activities on Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom or Google Meet!
These virtual team building activities during quarantine range from social games, group DIY classes, virtual clubs to icebreaker questions. They help build new and strong relationships, improve collaboration and boost employee morale by helping everyone unwind and de-stress. These remote team building activities are the answer to resolving the feeling of social isolation or nonrecognition.
Some of the best and top-rated virtual games are Pictionary, Word Building, Hangman, Icebreaker games and other water cooler activities. These are virtual team building games and activities that are very effective for increasing remote team engagement and manage global teams effectively
So let's deep dive into the list of virtual team bonding games. This list includes
These team building solutions will help your employees connect, wherever they are. Find inspiration and try out some of these easy virtual team building hacks to help your team bond better and also have some virtual fun.
Time - 5 minutes, at your own pace
With your host, Ricotta Games & Trivia on Slack, your team will have loads of Trivia fun! With an option to schedule the contest, your team can play asynchronously without having to lose focus from work. Choose from fun categories like Star Wars, Marvel, World Capitals, Art, Movies and more.
You can also have weekly trivia days like Trivia Tuesday or Icebreaker Fridays or a game jam with your team. Play trivia contests, picture quizzes and ice-breaker games on Slack. Once the contest ends, your score will be posted in the real-time leaderboard. Co-workers can compete with each other to try and beat the high score. Teams can gamify Ricotta Trivia further by attaching a prize like an Amazon Gift card or a free coffee for the winner!
Ricotta Games and Trivia also offers 20+ fun games that you can play right on Slack. With word social games like Hangman, Word Building, Story Building and Word Chain and 2-player games like Rock Paper Scissors, Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect4, you are bound to fall in love with Ricotta on Slack.
Check out our compilation of US Trivia, 90s Trivia, Disney Trivia and more!
Time - 10-15 minutes
This one’s a winner! What’s a better way to bond with fellow co-workers than striking up a conversation about our furry babies?
Create a chat channel on Slack or Teams just for sharing images, memes, GIFs or stories about your pets. This channel is really simple and takes very little effort, but the team building and conversations are big in terms of engagement and fun.
We guarantee 100% engagement on this soon-to-be-most-busy-and-fun-Slack-channel on your workspace!
Check out some fun Slack channels you must have.
Time - 30 to 60 minutes
Want to break the ice and have a team building session? This game can really help co-workers understand each other’s team innovation and teamwork skills better.
To play, simply divide your team into even groups and imagine that aliens have landed on Earth and want to learn about the company. The aliens don’t understand English or gestures, and so you need to explain using five symbols and pictures.
Each participant draws five simple images that describe your company culture or product in a shared document. The team can then talk through common themes (or try to guess what each person’s drawing represents).
Boxes for team building? Yes, you heard that right! With Caroo (formerly SnackNation), you can send well-curated wellness boxes to your co-workers.
The boxes are customizable, and you can choose from healthy snacks, team activities, electronics and more for your co-workers. And the best part? Each delivery donates meals to families in need.
Time - 30 to 45 minutes
This virtual team building game helps co-workers to understand each other’s story and where they come from. This can get really interesting.
Print a world map and upload it to a shared folder. At the beginning of the activity, ask everyone to mark or pin their birthplace and then start the discussion. Ask your team members to share a story about their most prized memory and what they love the most about that place. This activity shows the varied cultures and values of the employees and can help strike some meaningful conversations.
Time - 10 to 15 minutes
Icebreaker activities are a great way to get your team members talking, or simply for onboarding new employees. Just divide your team equally and let the conversation flow with these 120+ icebreaker game questions. Whenever you’re looking for fun team activities or just have some fun and laughs, don’t forget to ask some fun ice-breakers!
Let’s look at some Icebreaker fun questions examples:
If you want to make this easy, then what you need is a fun online team building software like Ricotta Trivia if you use Slack. No need to form teams or do any prep at all! Select your favorite icebreaker game - This or That, 2 Truths & a Lie, Never Have I Ever, Most Likely to, How well do you know your co-workers or team icebreaker questions. Just post on your desired channel and start playing!
Check out our list of icebreaker questions for added fun at work.
Time: 2-3 minutes
This activity is super fun and is a great stress buster. Time for some healthy competition! You can use a free tool like typingtest.com and ask your team to do the challenge for a minute each. Then, have each person post their result on Slack or any other platform.
Before you start, do make sure that everyone is referring to the same speed test for consistent results. You can also form teams and have them post the cumulative score for some extra fun! This challenge is a sure shot way for your team to have some fun bonding time.
Time: 10-15 minutes
Host an online meeting with your team to discuss each other’s bucket list - what are the things that they would love to do in their lifetime? Let everyone share their list and talk about their bucket list.
You can even pair up people with similar bucket list ideas and motivate them to strike it off their list together! This is a great team building exercise that can help understand each other’s interests better and may even help in ticking things off their bucket list!
Time: 10-15 minutes
This activity is easy-peasy and loads of fun! Host a video meeting on Zoom or Google Meet and ask each co-worker to tell three truths and make up one lie about themselves.
Remember to keep the lie realistic to make it even more engaging. The other co-workers have to guess which one is the lie, and the person who answers correctly gets the points. To play Two Truths & a Lie on Slack, you can add Ricotta Trivia on Slack and play the free ice-breaker games!
Time: 10 minutes
This activity is very simple and effective! Ask your co-workers to share their childhood pictures with you only. Keep all the childhood pictures in a private folder (don’t forget to name them correctly). Simply share one childhood photo every week and ask everyone in the team to guess who it is!
Then ask the person who guesses correctly to share their funniest childhood story. Get ready for some real fun and laughter.
Time: 60-90 minutes
What’s the best way to bond with your team, but also make sure that everyone is involved? Have a dedicated Game Jam day every week to play games, but here’s where it gets interesting - have people form clubs of their choice and allot a club leader. The leader is responsible for conducting games and activities like movie night for the movie club, virtual book club reading for the book club or remote karaoke for the music club. Sounds fun, right?
You can have a fun rewards system for every club like Amazon Gift Cards for increased engagement.
Time: 15 minutes
Until a few years ago, using emojis in conversations were only considered appropriate when talking to friends or family in a non-professional environment. However, with changing times, emojis are now considered to be work-appropriate and are widely used in everyday communication at work. So much so, that you can also create custom emojis for everyday use, especially on Slack.
So how about using emojis to create a fun remote work game that can be fun and challenging. You can choose to do this on a Zoom call or creating a channel #emoji-game on Slack to begin.
Find free emoji pictionary templates here.
Time: 30-60 minutes
Yes, we all look forward to Fridays throughout the work week. We love the feeling of closing our laptops to start the weekend on Friday evenings. So how about ending Fridays with fun meetings that also result in extra team bonding!
These weekly meetings can be used to do everything positive and cheerful. Starting with fun pre-planned activities, drinking games and a weekly employee recognition session to end the week on a high note. This would keep spirits high and employees will have something to look forward to every week.
Time: 30-60 minutes
Choices games are always a lot of fun. Most choice games give you a deeper insight into the other person’s life. It can be great way for teams to bond together and ultimately become friends. You can also pick a particular type or category of these choice games like funny, introspection-type, or something more general like food, music or movies-related.
The most popular choice games are Would You Rather and This or That and you can divide your large time into smaller groups to play. You can also play rapid fire rounds with a timer for a bit of a twist.
Some fun This or That question examples are:
Time: 15-30 minutes
This one’s a fun and classic game that is also a great conversation starter. Would you rather (or This or That) involves basically giving two options to your team, and they can select the option they like more.
With Ricotta Games & Trivia, your team can play free icebreaker games such as This or That, How well do you know your co-workers and more.
Here are a few ‘Would You Rather’ questions that can help you get a fair idea of how it works:
Here is our list of Would You Rather Questions
Time: 60 - 90 minutes
With offices shifting their work setting to remote or hybrid, team lunches have become more rare and difficult to conduct. Nothing can beat in-person lunches on a work day but we have an exciting solution.
How about a virtual remote team lunch in the middle of a busy work week?
Time: Starts from 90 minutes
A lot of people have talents outside of work and it can be fun for teams to show off their talents to their colleagues. Organize a fun DIY art, craft or a cooking session with your team. You can also hire an expert to do virtual dumpling or pasta making sessions.
To get a sense of everyone’s interests and hobbies outside work, you can do a quick poll on Slack or whichever instant messaging platform you use. Once you compile all the responses, you can pick out the Top 5 most common answers and conduct weekly sessions on a rotational basis. Having different DIY sessions can help include everyone in the activity and keep everyone engaged.
Time: 15 minutes
Sometimes we all need to unwind and relax when things get too stressful at work. Whether your team is stretching at work for a short term project or fails to take breaks during day-to-day work, relieving stress and taking breaks can prove to be helpful. Companies have to increasingly take measures to ensure their employees mental well-being, especially during the pandemic.
Make group meditations, a routine activity in your workplace. Get all your employees together and have meditation sessions during a fixed time everyday. If you want to conduct a one-time guided session, you can send care packages to your employees with scented candles, a calming Spotify playlist and some herbal tea beforehand. You can hire a professional or do it using a YouTube video over a video call.
Time: 90 minutes
Who said field trips are only meant for school children? Let’s bring out the child inside us and do virtual filed trips together. This can be a great way to unwind and take a break from work.
You can divide your team into smaller groups so that they can attend unique virtual field trips like a visit to the Taj Mahal, walk the streets of Barcelona or go for an African safari. This can be a lot of fun, especially for people who have not been able to travel and see new places during the pandemic.
Book your virtual field trip here
Time: 15 minutes
We all miss watercooler chats during our tea and coffee breaks. So what’s the best way to have virtual coffee breaks while working remote? Taking virtual coffee breaks that are 15-20 minutes long can prove to be very helpful in building community and getting to know your coworkers better. You can choose to use apps like Disco and Hallway that match you to a random person and invite you to have a virtual get-to-know-you meeting with them.
On these video calls, people can pair up and talk about anything that they would like. They can also indulge in activities that they enjoy like play online games, watch a TV show, share music playlists, exchange recipes or discuss a book. It can help like-minded people connect and do things that they enjoy together.
Time: 30-90 minutes
When playing a game of Most Likely To, you have to ask a question that includes the same phrase “Who is most likely to” in a sentence. Next, you have to name the person who fits the description perfectly. For example “Who is most likely to get into trouble while doing something mundane.” The game is a great way for people to have a laugh and get to know each other even better.
Some examples of Most Likely To questions include:
Check out this complete list of most likely to questions.
Time: 90+ minutes
Everyone loves parties but how about a virtual 60s party? After all, theme parties are even better. Dress up like it’s the 60s, get your hands on some 60s snacks, groove to The Beatles, John Lennon and Led Zeppelin.
You can also watch some 60s movies together and play some 60s trivia to add to the fun. This will give a chance to everyone to dress up and unwind at home.
Time: One day to several days
Remember the “The Office” episode where Micheal presents a commercial for Dunder Mifflin to corporate? The commercial wasn’t chosen in the end, but that’s not the point.
How fun would it be if everyone gets together to create an office ad? You can do this by dividing everyone into small groups, giving each group a name and setting a theme for the ad. This will give everyone a chance to work with people they’ve never interacted with before. This can be a long team building activity, spanning several days or you could also ask the team to finish it in a day.
The teams can then present their final videos over a group call and ultimately have a laugh together. You can also give out prizes and post it on your official social media platforms for everyone to see.
This makes for an excellent team building activity.
Time: Depends on how much you want the employees to be involved
Creating a company culture book might sound like a daunting task at first, however, you could make a team building activity out of it for making it seem more authentic. When employees work on the culture book together, it will give everyone a chance to speak up about their views and also participate in representing your company’s culture in the true sense. You can ask everyone to submit images and quotes for the culture book.
To take it up a notch, you can create pulse surveys to understand what employees have to say about the company culture. Finally, all the responses can be compiled and you can together work on creating the best culture book.
Find an example of a company culture book here
Time: 30 minutes
We’ve all seen and praised Pinterest-worthy work desks, but we all know that is far from the reality. Work desks are full of chaos, coffee stains and paper scribbles in reality. So how about we celebrate the authenticity of our work desks? Ask everyone to submit their work desk photos on a Slack channel or a shared drive. You can take it up a notch by awarding the messiest desk a prize for some extra laughs.
Time: 120 minutes
Yes, you read that right! You can have a virtual karaoke on Zoom easily. Have everyone submit their preferred Karaoke songs through a shared survey. Compile all the results and once you have the list ready, you can use a platform like Watch2gether to play music together.
Send a Zoom invite to everyone and have a blast singing Karaoke songs together. You can ask people to form groups or pairs so that everyone can participate, even the ones who are too shy to sing.
Time: Asynchronous
This is a great way to bond with your team. To play this game, create a channel in a workspace like #photostory, or you can use an existing channel like #random.
Simply ask your team to post an embarrassing or funny photo on the channel. You can also ask them to share the story behind the photo. If you want this to be an ongoing game, you can pick out 5 people every week to share their photo!
Time: 60 to 90 minutes
Pictionary is an amazing way to let creative, quick thinking, and non-verbal communication skills come out. You can choose to play Pictionary virtually over Zoom or in-person.
Time: 60 to 90 minutes
Dumb Charades is another fun and different way for teams to communicate non-verbally and develop more complex skills around friendship and social engagement.
Time: 60 minutes
A scavenger hunt is a great way to help in team building, it brings out problem-solving skills, general knowledge, and collaboration between the team.
Time: 60 minutes
Studies have found that practicing appreciation can improve relationships and motivate employees. It also helps the wellness of the team and decreases the stress of the team members. In short, regular appreciation will uplift the morale of the team members, boost performance and collaboration, but also improve a team member’s health and well-being.
You can end the team-building activity with the circle of appreciation where the other team members will tell others about the good qualities, they have observed about other team members.
Time: 120 minutes
Role-playing is a useful tool for team building in social learning situations. It requires a minimum of two people, which makes it suitable for small groups. This type of team-building exercise allows the team members to examine situations from different points of view and prepare for different situations that they will face in the real world.
Time: 60 minutes
This is a great way to improve communication skills, creativity, and collaboration among team members. This can be easily played over a Zoom call.
Time: 30 to 60 minutes
When Millennials and Gen-Z play video games like Counter-Strike, DOTA 2, Call of Duty, you can observe the way they communicate with each other, describing the situation in the shortest and precise manner. Playing strategic video games requires high communication skills, quick thinking, fast reactions, planning strategies, etc. Playing video games is a great way to bring a team together.
You can play video games together in teams while working remotely on phone and on pc using Steam, Epic Games, Riot Games, etc.
Time: 20-30 minutes
Everyone has a favorite superhero, and everyone has thought about what kind of superpowers they would like to have, if they ever get the opportunity. This activity helps in collaboration, and is also a great way for the team to know each other better.
Time: 2 minutes (asynchronous)
One very popular game is “Never Have I Ever” and it is the ultimate party pleaser to form bonds with your coworkers and get to know each other. Most versions of ‘dirty never have I ever questions’ are preferred at parties, however, a ‘clean never have I ever’ game can be equally fun.
A work friendly game can also be played where a question is asked and all players can raise their hand indicating “I have”.
Love “Never Have I Ever”? Ricotta lets you play work-appropriate never have I ever right on Slack or Microsoft Teams with your team.
Time: 2 minutes (asynchronous)
A quick and fun game of Party, Prank, Picture involves choosing a celebrity for every category. You will see 3 celebrity names per round and you simply have to choose whom you would like to Party with, Prank and take a picture with.
Everyone can pick out their options and submit it on Slack. Everyone’s results can be seen right in Slack on opening the thread. It is a great way to add some fun to a work day and break the ice amongst coworkers.
Play Party, Prank, Picture in Slack with Ricotta.
Time: 15 minutes
Who doesn’t love GIFs and a game of Charades? When you combine both, you get the best of both worlds — GIF Charades! It involves picking a movie and then sharing GIFs that give clues about the movie. The team members have to guess the movie based on the GIFs.
To play GIF charades on Slack or Microsoft Teams, you can take turns to send out GIFs on your chat channel of choice. The GIFs have to give clues about the movie and should not be of the movie itself to make the guessing game more challenging. Sounds fun, isn’t it?
Time: 15 minutes (asynchronous)
We all know how fun a game of Connect4 can be. Connect Four is originally a childhood favourite board game wherein players pick out a colour and play using circular discs (of yellow and red colour). It is a two player game that is played by dropping discs starting the bottom-most row in the slot of a 7x6 grid.
The main objective of the game is to form a horizontal, vertical or diagonal pattern using four discs in a row. The first player to get the formation using the four discs wins the game. If the grid fills up before either player gets four in a row, the game is considered a draw.
A game of Connect4 can be played virtually as well! Refer to our list of online websites for Connect4.
Time: 15 to 30 minutes (asynchronous)
Word chain is a fun game for large groups and can be played at the start or end of a meeting. It includes coming up with words that start with the last letter of the previous word. It’s super easy and fun to play with your friends and coworkers. One player speaks out a word and the the other player must come up with a word containing the last letter of the word as the first letter.
For instance, if Player A comes up with the word ‘intelligent’, Player B must come up with a word starting from the letter ‘T’ like Train. Next, Player A must come up with a word starting with letter ‘N’ and so on.
You can also play Word Chain on Slack.
Time: 30 minutes
Jeopardy is the most popular virtual game show and is a fantastic game for testing knowledge and memory recall.
Jeopardy is a fun teamwork game that requires only 30-40 minutes of virtual team building time. It can be played on Zoom, Webex or any other video conferencing tool with 5 to 10 teams of 2 to 4 individuals per team.
This team-building activity is ideal for large groups wherein you want to play trivia in a custom game show format. It can also be used as a custom training quiz or a custom virtual trivia night quiz.
To play a game of Jeopardy, simply visit this link and select ‘Create a game’. This online tool allows you to add 25 custom questions and answers. You can simply share your screen with your team to play a customised version of jeopardy.
Time: 60 minutes
Pancakes vs Waffles is a great teamwork game wherein you make decisions together as a team. It involves making choices together.
To play the game, the team needs to collectively decide if everyone in the world will decide to keep pancakes or waffles. The option that is not chosen will cease to exist. Ultimately the decision can be arrived at by taking a vote.
Once the first option is eliminated, a new contender needs to bring in a new contender. For example, the next contender may be Crepes and the game will turn to Waffles vs Crepes. The game can quickly take a new direction with Crepes becoming pizza and then become Pizza vs Tacos and so on.
The game can completely shift to a new category and keeps getting more and more interesting as the game progresses. This is a great team building exercise since it can help teams become closer and also understand everyone’s likes, dislikes and perspectives.
Facing low engagement on the virtual team building activities that you are conducting at work? Sometimes people may opt out of virtual team bonding sessions simply because they are not interested in the activity, they are too shy or have an overlapping meeting or engagement. This can drop your engagement levels and lead to a low turnout.
There are a few things that managers can do to make sure that their virtual activity is a success and everyone looks forward to these sessions, instead of dreading them.
Try out these 7 tips to increase your engagement.
This can be tricky to do if you are conducting virtual engagement activities during meetings on Zoom. However, you can use specialised apps and platforms that apart from offering virtual engagement games, also offer a way to track engagement numbers. Most apps have an engagement dashboard wherein you can find information like how many people engaged in which activities.
The HR team can then, over time, align these numbers to the overall productivity and bigger employee engagement goals. Make sure to share these engagement numbers with the team frequently to make them feel more involved and understand how these virtual sessions are helping them. You can also send out monthly reports with summary and analysis so that more people join into these activities.
A very foolproof way to make sure everyone participates in these activities is to fix a day for virtual team building. You can send a weekly calendar invite to the entire team so that they are informed about the activity beforehand.
Also, the team members will know when the activity has to take place and can plan their entire week’s work accordingly. This can help your team to show up after better planning their work and not miss these fun sessions by working or taking meetings instead.
Sometimes it’s good to add a personal touch to these activities. You can compliment virtual team activities by sending a customised parcel to your team. A great way to make them more engaged is by sending props or things that are complimentary to the activity. For example, for a virtual murder mystery session , you could send costumes to each team member or order a fun lunch for a virtual lunch meeting. To make this even more interesting, you can ask them to guess the activity through the content of the package by sending it a day or two in advance.
You can also send surprise care packages with food, stationery and tech gadgets to make them feel valued and more engaged.
While having virtual team activities for large groups might seem like the way to go, sometimes it is more engaging to conduct these activities in small groups.
This can make more people join in the fun, especially in a smaller close-knit group. Sometimes people can be shy and might want to skip the activity altogether. A small group activity can help people come out of their shell and give a chance for everyone to participate. It can sometimes also be helpful to break the ice and get to know people better in a small team.
A very big reason why many people opt out of these sessions is because the activity simply does not interest them. It is best to keep everyone’s personal interests and preferences in mind so that more people join the activities.
A great way to plan these activities is to conduct company-wide polls and understand everyone’s individual preferences. It is also a good idea to keep switching and mixing things up. It might not be very ideal to conduct niche activities and game sessions in a large group and are ideal for small groups with similar interests.
A great way to maximise engagement is to give out prizes and rewards. At the end of every session, you can pick out Top 3 or Top 5 scores, depending on the size of the group and reward them with an Amazon gift card. These prizes can motivate more people to participate and take interest in these activities. It can also add a healthy bit of competition to these virtual game sessions.
Sometimes quick virtual activity sessions can be just as effective, if not more than a pre-planned virtual activity dat. It can be very rewarding for employees to start or end meetings with some virtual team building activities and games. You can have these meetings on Zoom, Webex or Google meet and follow them with a 10-minute games round. You can include activities like icebreakers and quick trivia just to break the ice and get everyone energised.
You can also play games like bingo, circle of appreciation or scavenger hunt during a meeting. You will find a lot of inspiration in this blog!
If you’re new to planning and organising a virtual team building activity session, especially for large groups, you can always turn to the experts. There are many reputed team building platforms that offer services that your team will enjoy. You can pick out the games and activities that your team will enjoy and then leave it to them to plan and organise.
If you have a tight budget, you can always book something more cost-effective like a virtual Airbnb experience. This can be a great option for small to medium sized groups.
With many companies choosing to go fully remote or hybrid, it becomes necessary for companies to find ways to keep teams connected and happy.
With one of the most popular collaboration tool being Slack, it makes sense to find ways to engage in virtual team building activities on the platform itself. There are many bots and apps and integrations on the Slack app directory that are social and fun with trivia, games, icebreakers and appreciation apps. These apps can help break the monotony of work and engage with co-workers to have fun and hassle-free virtual team bonding sessions on Slack channels and threads.
Let’s look at the list of 16+ best Slack apps for your virtual team bonding.
Ricotta Games & Trivia is a fun Trivia, icebreakers and social games app on Slack. It lets you play games and trivia contests asynchronously with its scheduling feature. You can choose from 15+ games and 25+ fun categories like Star Wars, World Capitals, Marvel, Friends etc. and compete with your team. Weekly Trivia contests are posted every Wednesday for some super fun bonding time! You can also play icebreaker games like This or That, Two Truths and a Lie and co-worker icebreaker questions or engage in weekly icebreakers posted every week.
Don’t forget to check out Ricotta’s social word games like Hangman, Word Building and Word of the Day (inspired by Wordle, Jotto and Lingo) and 2-player games like Rock Paper Scissors, Connect4 and Tic-Tac-Toe.
Donut is an icebreaker app that helps team members bond virtually through chat channels with different themes. It pairs two random team members 1 on 1 and prompts them to start conversations and introduce each other. You can choose from a variety of different programs such as virtual coffee meetups, cross department introductions or onboarding new employees.
Teams can have asynchronous conversations in the Slack channels with pre-made prompts that you can choose or make your own. You can also customize team sizes, time of the meetings and messages. Donut also integrates with Slack, Google Calendar and Zoom. What a great way to bond!
Lunch Train is a simple and effective app to break the ice! Want to make lunch plans with your co-workers? Simply use the command /lunchtrain, type in your destination and select a lunchtime in the channel of your choice. The members of that channel will choose to ‘board the train’ to join you for lunch. It also sends out reminders, an option to cancel or delay the lunch. What a great way to break the ice, isn’t it?
Hallway creates a break-room like setting for co-workers by sending a reminder to take a break for 10 minutes. You can set the channel of your preference, the schedule of the breaks and the frequency.
Other Hallway features include posting video breaks on demand by using /hallway break, real-time updates on who has joined in the thread, a timer and the option to track your team’s usage. Sounds better than Zoom calls, isn’t it?
Friday is an all-in-one asynchronous remote operating system.
It helps teams stay connected by staying on track with personal and team tasks, automated updates for reducing the need for too many meetings, getting to know co-workers with their icebreaker games! It also has a kudos feature in the app.
The app can be connected to Slack, with Slack channel updates to keep your tasks, routines and icebreakers organized for the entire team.
HeyTaco is simple and effective! It takes the kudos feature one step forward - by attaching a value to every Taco and gamifying it. Every team member has 5 tacos to give out every day in a channel. Whenever you'd like to appreciate a co-worker, simply give them a Taco using the Taco emoji, include a nice message and mention their username.
You can also view the activity, leaderboard and redeem your tacos for rewards in the HeyTaco dashboard. Clever, right?
Keep track of birthdays and anniversaries in your team using the Birthday Bot. This is a super handy tool to have in large teams to avoid missing out on your co-worker’s special day.
The bot automatically collects the birthdays of all the members in the workspace. BirthdayBot will notify you via DM before each birthday and post a congratulations message in the channel. You can also reward your co-worker with a gift card on birthdays and create wish lists so that it’s easier to pick out a gift!
Disco is a great tool for value-driven work and showing appreciation and recognition for each other.
You can give and receive kudos, engage in value-based nominations and conduct pulse surveys. There is also an automated raffle system to give kudos for incentives, with a dashboard to track engagement.
Disco’s asynchronous reward system is crucial to build your team’s morale for better efficiency and productivity while working remote.
With Slack having an amazing feature of creating custom emojis, every team needs to up their emoji game. Emojis are a fun and interactive way to communicate, even at a professional level. You can play your own emoji game like ‘decode the emoji’ or ‘emoji charades’.
You can also create a channel for emojis and talk or play games via custom emojis. Moreover, you can find many emojis at Slackmojis to add custom emojis to your workspace. FUN!
With Giphy, you can communicate with your team in a fun way using the /giphy command. Respond to your team with a GIF to express how you’re feeling.
Search from the world’s largest library of animated GIFs on Slack and let the GIF wars begin!
A very useful app to get feedback from your team especially while working remote. With Polly, you can send out instant polls with /polly command, using your own poll or templates. Get instant results with an option to get visual reports that you can easily download.
You can get targeted results using Polly by posting on a specific channel. You can also use it to break the ice with your team members by creating fun quiz questions!
Assembly is a free employee recognition app on Slack. It helps boost morale and employee productivity at the workspace.
You can measure engagement, give recognition and celebrate milestones and birthdays of your employees to break the ice. This app encourages growth and makes them feel important and appreciated at work.
TINYPulse is a tool used for feedback and surveys that encourages teams to express themselves.
This is great for individuals to share their thoughts about a specific question, or offer anonymous suggestions. It is also used to give kudos to a team member.
Working remotely can be challenging at times, and everyone needs a casual break to unwind and interact with their co-workers. Such icebreaker games and apps on Slack can help your team de-stress for hours of work.
Get started with these fun apps on your workspace to give a little sprucing up to your daily routine and reinvent your work culture. You will be sure to see some promising results with the motivation and productivity levels of your team.
Hosting these fun virtual activities and games can be a huge success, and you will ultimately see the benefits of these social activities. If conducted regularly, these virtual activity sessions can make your remote workers even more happy and engaged. Here are some benefits of remote team bonding:
These activities help teams to boost creativity and improve cohesiveness among teams. Online team building icebreakers and games can also facilitate strong bonds, especially during remote work for new employees. These activities are great for improving your employee lifecycle, making onboarding more effective and meeting more fun. So what are you waiting for? Let the team bonding begin!
Looking for some fun virtual team building games to play at work?
Check out Ricotta Games & Trivia on Slack and Microsoft Teams!
These are the commonly asked questions about virtual team bonding for remote workers.
Virtual team building entails conducting virtual sessions with remote and hybrid team employees. These sessions can be done over a call, on a chat platform or choosing an external party to conduct them for the company. These virtual activities, if done regularly, can result in better team bonding and collaboration. It helps employees feel more engaged and ultimately leads to higher productivity and morale.
Virtual team building can be done by planning some games and activities together. Whether you are conducting these sessions on Zoom, Slack or through an event planner, they are bound to make your employees have fun and get to know each other better.
Some of the most popular team building activities are icebreaker questions like This or That, Would You Rather and Most Likely To. Some games like virtual scavenger hunts, virtual coffee roulette and trivia nights are also very commonly preferred by companies.
These activities are great for both small and large groups and can help employees interact with people whom they’ve never worked with before.
The type of team building activity depends on how much time you can devote to team building as well as the team size. To get specific responses from your team, you can conduct pulse surveys to learn about their preferences. After all, the main motive is for employees to be engaged in these activities fully and not feel forced or embarrassed to participate.
The best way to make virtual meetings fun is by starting meetings with icebreaker games. Games like Would You Rather, This or That and Co-worker icebreakers can help make a meeting less tiresome and avoid feeling of Zoom fatigue. Some other quick games you can play are Rock Paper Scissors, Bingo or Truth and Dare.
If you use Slack, you can try Trivia, Icebreakers and fun games on Ricotta Games & Trivia. It is super fun and easy to use with 15+ fun games to choose from. The main benefit of Ricotta on Slack is that you can play asynchronously and will not face any work disruption. Schedule your games in advance to keep your employees engaged throughout the week. The added benefit is the weekly icebreakers that are posted every Friday as well as the Weekly Trivia quiz that is posted every Wednesday.
You can also use some Zoom apps if you prefer virtual meetings sometimes.
Some common challenges that you might face during a virtual team building session could be lack of participation, difficulty scheduling events due to different timezones, employees not showing interest or engaging in the activity or finding an activity that everyone will enjoy.
Employees not showing up for these virtual activities can be a major challenge. It is easier to miss these activities when done virtually and you would always see a bigger turnout during in-person events. However, this shouldn’t stop you from hosting these virtual team building activities. A few full-proof ways to ensure engagement are:
13 Fun Question Games to Enjoy With Friends and Coworkers
5 Fun and Innovative Teamwork Games Your Employees Will Love
500+ Funny and Clever Team Names for Your Workplace
9 Tips to Help You Manage a Team of Remote Workers
10+ leadership Games to Play as a Team Building Activity at Work
Have any thoughts or feedback? Email us at cheese@ricotta.team to get in touch with us.
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