Virtual team building is a method to bring remote teams together and create a work environment that mimics a co-located office environment. It allows the entire team to become familiar with one another and create meaningful relationships that leave all members feeling more valued and satisfied.
Team building activities allow virtual team leaders and managers to become familiar with each employee’s talents and skills, making for more efficient task delegation. Managing remote teams can sometimes be tough for virtual team leaders. Want to improve the way you run your remote team?
45+ Virtual Team Building Activities for Remote Teams in 2022
1.Pair Discussions
This is a really great way to foster those ad hoc conversations that seem to happen so naturally in the office. When people are just going through their day to get a chance to bump into one another and get to know them on a personal level in ways that you just don’t seem to do remotely. But this is a way to deliberately cause those interactions to still happen.
The way these work is that every week you want to randomly pair people together and encourage them to have a call and get to know one another. There is a great plugin to Slack called ‘Donut’ that does all of this automatically. It does the pairing and makes sure that people are not meeting the same people week after week.
It encourages people to meet that actually bumps them along throughout the week and ask them if they have scheduled their call yet. It will randomly choose one of the two to schedule the call. It does a lot of great things to encourage people to actually meet.
At the end of the week it will pull in the stat of everybody who did meet and who didn’t, and share that with the team to help encourage everybody to continue following through with their meetings. Pair discussions are a really great substitute to encourage those conversations that happen so naturally in the office.
2.Guess who?
This activity is an ice breaker that you are gonna do at the start of the meeting. So as the meeting organises you are going to email everyone ahead of time before the meeting and ask them to send you one interesting fact about themselves that other people may not know.
When you start the meeting you are going to share one fact at a time and everybody guesses who that fact is about. It is just a fun little activity to get to know people and maybe there are some things that you get to learn about them.
3.Virtual Game Night
This can be a great way to lure people to have conversations that might shy away from those pair discussions mentioned above. Introverts especially have a hard time carrying a conversation one-on-one. So this can be a great way to have them come in, give them something else to focus on like the game that they are playing. But still have those conversations happen naturally around the game.
There are lots of different ways and lots of different games that you can facilitate game time with. You can play Jackbox TV, board games or card games and counter-strike etc.
4.Proud Moment
This is another icebreaker exercise that you can do at the start of a meeting. This activity doesn’t require any prep work. What you as a meeting organiser is at the start of the meeting asks everyone to think about a proud moment or accomplishment in their life and why that moment means so much to them.
You can take turns going around and sharing one at a time that proud moment and why that’s so important to them. This is a great exercise that helps you, prime people, because they are in a great mood when they are thinking about their accomplishments or their big successes in their life.
It also helps you understand and get to know what people value in life and interesting things about people.
5.Virtual Happy Hour
This is a really great thing to do on a Friday at the end of the day to kick off a weekend and get people together on a call, mix up their favourite drinks and start to have conversations and get to know one another. People will talk about their favourite drinks, how they made it, their recipes, what they are going to do on the weekend.
It’s really natural to have those conversations and get to know your virtual colleague in that kind of a setting. It can be a little bit difficult depending on the size of your group to do it remotely. So if you do have a larger group, think about starting in a big call and then splitting people off into smaller groups to have their own mini happy hours together.
6. 3 Truths and 1 Lies
This one is another icebreaker that you can do at the start of the meeting or you can do this as a fun activity with a big group of people. You ask everybody to write down four facts about themselves. Three of them should be true facts and one of them should be a lie. Then you go around sharing the four facts and everybody guesses which one is the lie.
This is a fun activity that helps you get to know things about people and helps you identify people’s sense of humor.
7.Slack Channels
This is another great way to facilitate those conversations that allow people to get to know one another is to create a bunch of slack channels for topics that people at your company are really interested in.
If your colleagues have pets then you can create a pet channel for pet parents to chat and bond over the ridiculous, loveable, annoying and weird things that our pets love to do.
8.Rose, Thorn and Bud
This is an interesting activity when a rose means any positive thing that the member has experienced. May it be a highlight of his life or something to celebrate. As long as it is any positive that makes them happy or grateful, it can represent a rose.
Second to share is the thorn which means a challenge that they have faced in the past or currently facing. Lastly, it is the bud which is something that they are looking forward to. Remind everyone that the rose, thorn or bud can be work or non-work related.
9. 10 Common Things
This is good for brainstorming. In remote teams as it gets them realizing that they are similar. Divide your team into small groups and ask them to come up with a list of 10 they have in common.
If you are doing it in zoom, you can easily assign them into breakout rooms. While in the breakout room they can put those 10 common things in a shared document or an online whiteboard to generate the list quickly.
10.Recognition Session
It is a simple activity to get each and every member of the team to see the best in themselves and in others. That’s exactly why we love it because all too often we forget the contribution we make to our work and we need a gentle reminder from either ourselves or from our workmates.
At the beginning of the virtual staff meeting, get every team member to share two shoutouts. One for something amazing they did in that week and one for something amazing that another team member did. I tell you the shoutouts do not need to be huge.
It can be as simple as they are proud of themselves for being able to respond to all their emails or for being nice about matters outside work.
11.Whose Office Is It?
Ask each team member to take a picture of his or her “office” and get them to upload it in a shareable file. When taking the picture, ask the participants to leave the desk as it is. This will give a realistic or true representation of them. Get everyone to try and guess whose desk is whose.
12.Cutie Pie
This virtual team building activity is all around fun. If you are the meeting facilitator, ask everyone who is going to be attending to send to you in advance, pictures of them when they were babies. When the team members come in the meeting, you inteject them in the PowerPoint, so you take little snippets where everyone gets their own page, so that you can forward the PowerPoint to each person.
When you start the meeting, tell them about the baby pictures they have sent you and ask them to guess who is who. Put up the pictures and people can shout out who is who. You can even put a messenger portion or chat rooms where they can answer.
This is a great way to start the meeting which leads to open up other conversations.
13.Once Upon A Time
This one is an excellent activity when you want to bring creativity to people. As a facilitator, let the team know the ground rules. Ask everyone to build a fictional story and make sure you do this in a round-robin fashion so that everyone gets a chance to build the story.
The key is that you have to build a story and have it come to a conclusion by the time it reaches the last person. So you don’t want to leave that last person hanging where they are scrambling to finish up the story. You only have one sentence to express. It is just a great way to bring about creativity and a virtual brainstorming session.
14.Last Word Response
The purpose of this virtual team building activity is to practice active listening because we all know in meetings we get distracted. Sometimes we are not focused on what people are saying.
You can pick any topic like ‘How was your weekend?; or ‘What are you going to be working on?’ and the person speaks. The person next to them is supposed to take in the last sentence, or the last few words, depending on how it’s said, and integrate that into their story.
15.Draw This
In this game everyone needs a pencil and paper. Ask everyone to draw something specific like yourself or the superpower or your favourite emoji. Ask some drawing questions like – If you had a superpower, what would it be?, Or Draw your favourite emoji, Or Draw your best one word to describe yourself.
When you are done just make sure that you follow up and just pick people to explain why they chose to do what they did. This brings up communications and facts that you might not have known otherwise.
16.Where Would You Go?
Ask everyone to take 3 minutes to find an image of a location that they want to travel to and be prepared to talk about it. Create breakout groups and ask everyone to share. Then ask them to select a volunteer to share with the larger group.
You will have a great time with this activity as you explore and learn more about your teammates, friends or employees.
17.Meme Your Feelings
Ask teams to find a meme that best describes how they feel. You will have a great time with this activity. Ask team members to change the background to an appropriate meme. Create breakout groups and have them discuss it with their peers.
Team members will start to get to know more about each other and you will build more connections within your virtual teams.
18.Desert Island Scenario
This is a great virtual team building activity because you don’t have to do any participation from a participant’s perspective. But as a facilitator, you have to do some preparations, so that you can welcome everyone to the meeting by telling them that you all are going on a trip and you have just got dropped on a desert island.
In your presentation, you are going to write down 10-15 things that are key to them on that desert island. Ask them to pick three items that they find critical and important to survive. Give them two minutes to pick it and give everyone turns to explain why they chose that particular item.
Those items could be rope, tent, lighter fluid, matches etc. This game will let you know about their thought process and bring some conversations and additional insight.
19.Favourite Things
It’s a simple activity, but a great way to break the ice. Likewise, if people are shy or generally don’t like speaking on Zoom calls, this is one of less anxiety-inducing team building exercises.
All you have to do is to create a ‘favourite things’ topic. Some examples could include ‘favourite singer’ or ‘favourite things about working for the company’. How specific you get is up to you!
Give everyone a chance to answer, and you will probably learn something new about everyone you work with.
20.Birth Map
It’s another activity for learning more about others. First, open Google Maps or a similar collaborative map and share it with the group chat. Then, invite everyone to put a pin for their place of birth. From there, have everyone share stories about their hometown.
This will bring some personal and interesting conversations about people’s past, struggles and achievements. You never know if someday you find yourself visiting some of those places and you will have a guide for it!
21.Fun Fact Guessing Games
If you want a low effort virtual team building exercise, there’s always fun fact guessing games. Have everyone write down a fact about themselves and send them privately to the game leader. Then, either at a separate time or at the end of a work meeting, read the facts one-by-one. Let everyone guess whose facts are whose.
You will get to know interesting things about your virtual colleague and you could find many common things between you and them and become really good friends.
22.Movie Night
Another popular activity is to stream a movie together. Holding a monthly or quarterly movie night will give the team some structured time together that is not focused on work.
For this to work, it’s best for you to create a list of potential movies to watch (with suggestions from team members) and have everyone vote on one. Then, decide on a time and stream it through a conference call or you can do this through Netflix by using Netflix Party.
It synchronizes video playback and adds a group chat for you to chat in. Netflix Party is free, but it only works in Desktop Chrome. So if that doesn’t work for you, there’s options like Kastle.
23.Mystery Singer
Ask players to change their names or leave and enter zoom with a different name or alias and then stop their video. This game will ask players to sing a song and allow players to guess who is singing the song. To play this game all players of the judges should have their cameras off and create rounds for players to try to guess who is the mask or mystery singer.
In order to play mystery singers, you may need about 15-30 minutes, depending on the number of people playing the game. One really good way that we have done this game is that you use a voice modifier and you can get a number of free voice modifiers such as Clownfish, Voicemod, MorphVOX etc, which adds another level of difficulty.
24.Charades
Charades asks players to act out various items without making a word. Divide players into teams, create a list of charades questions. You can find them online fairly easily.
Make sure you have a moderator who provides work privately to the one acting after three minutes with sides and continue to have fun. You can create two big teams or breakout rooms with smaller teams. Use the spotlight feature on Zoom or ask players to set their screen to the person acting.
25.Zoom Trivia
In the main room a host will provide a question in chat. Players will then be asked to go to the breakout room with their teams and figure out the answer. The first player who states the right answer wins the round.
You can have multiple rounds when playing this game to have fun. Explain the game first by modeling and providing a sample question. You can connect the questions around your organisation or your relationship with these individuals. You can ask players to go to their breakout room first and send the question via text box.
26.Category Race
In this virtual team building activity you can pick a category such as- candy bars, cereals, Disney Characters, or whatever you find interesting. Set a timer and each team has a certain amount of time to write down as many things to think of that category.
Create a Google Doc to track these responses in real time. Make sure to create a list of core topics. Create breakout rooms or if you have a smaller group to stay on the main group. The purpose is for each player or team to identify as many words as possible in that category.
For example- For the topic Disneyland, you would use words such as Minnie Mouse or Mickey Mouse.
27.Clap That Song
Create breakout rooms for this activity, containing an even number so you can have balanced teams. Ask players to think about a song and practice it for 3-5 minutes. Divide the team and allow the players to clap their songs in Zoom.
Ask players to go to Youtube and locate a Karaoke version of the song of their choice or just a regular version. Ask players to practice their song first for 3-5 minutes. You can assign teams, however, as long as the person clapping the song has the song on mute.
If you want to help then the moderator can allow a 2-5 seconds of the song by unmuting the clapper.
28.Guess That Movie
Ask players to guess a particular movie. You want to first play a clip for 10-30 seconds. Then allow players to guess that particular movie by typing in a chat. The first person who types in chat that particular movie wins the match.
In order to play this game ask players to go on mute. As the moderator you don’t need breakout rooms for this activity. You can have a large group play this game without smaller groups.
Go to Youtube and create a list of movies. The goal is to play a movie clip and players are typing in chat to guess what that movie clip is. If the players are struggling, you can provide a hint.
29.Virtual Lunch Meetup
Lunch ideas with colleagues is a productive option to strengthen bonds and results in higher productivity during an online environment as well. It could consist of a few colleagues joining together to have lunch and exchange updates of the whole week.
One benefit of such activity is the get-together of remote workers associated with different departments that you do not regularly meet. When people meet for lunch it becomes easier to share ideas, plan other important activities and focus on learning from each other.
30.Online Book Meetups
Online book meetups help remote employees connect on a social level, interact in constructive thoughts and exchange valuable ideas. You can discuss a book with the remote team and exchange your opinions and reviews.
It’s good to share why you like the book or what you learned from it. This helps to enhance your communication ability and worker interaction. Moreover, learning is always fun and productive, especially when it’s about books.
31.Clue Murder Mystery
Clue murder mystery is an online team building game that revolves around a mysterious murder. You have to figure out the cause behind Davidson’s murder. Your virtual team and you will have to do an online collabotation to investigate the murder.
Some people like games and some people like mysteries, thrillers and suspense. The fact that it includes all these things is amazing.
32.Game Show Extravaganza
This show is an interactive and fun activity which you can play with your virtual team remotely. It’s a trivia game that makes employees excited and they enjoy replying to continuous questions.
The questions may vary from politics, sports and culture etc. I am sure everyone loves game shows and quizzes. So this is the best thing to go for.
33.Code Break
This team building activity is ideal for you in case your team enjoys mind games. Your teams will have to solve puzzles, trivia questions and riddles with their co-workers. It is an effective and fun way to make different groups compete with each other and play difficult brain games.
As you all know sometimes brainstorming sessions can be boring but this activity is a kind of brainstorming activity. The fact that this helps in creating bonds and team spirit is just cherry on the cake.
34.Team Pursuit
This is one of the digital team-building activities that helps colleagues more about each other. It consists of several mental, physical and challenge based activities for employees.
During these activities, you can polish your communication skills and explore other skills as well.
35.Tiny Campfire
Tiny campfire is an authentic online campfire for remote teams. It’s an adventurous experience that includes icebreaker activities, contests, and horror stories about ghosts.
This is the most popular and fun virtual campfire by far. As the activity is about to begin, your team arranges necessary things including matchsticks and candles. After the activity the team can rejoice in good memories, great online worker interaction and a productive experience.
36.Cooking Channel
So many people are cooking at home these days. They are experimenting with different recipes and learning new things everyday. So to create a slack channel for employees who are interested in cooking where they can come together.
They can share their experience trying new recipes, swapping recipes, tips and tricks on how to do certain things. This creates a really good environment for people to bond over this similar interest. The best part about this activity would be the sharing the pictures of their creations and appreciating one another.
37.Exercise Channel
This virtual team building activity includes making an exercise channel on slack. With everyone making all these cooking recipes, some of us are looking for balance by including exercises in our routines.
So create a space for people to share some ideas for home workouts. Tips, workout videos or ideas for exercise or just a space for people to help each other accountable to their daily workouts.
38.Kahoot Quiz
This activity can be done with the help of an application. You can open it on a browser as well. This application is called Kahoot on which you can play a quiz. The organizer can design this quiz. It can be a funny quiz about Hollywood, Tech, or anything which you want.
It has a great colourful display and it is a sort of ‘fastest finger first’ scenario. So whosoever chooses the right option will be the winner.
39.I Spy
The purpose of this activity is having fun, improving communications and visual skills. No materials are needed for this game other than a zoom account or links where people can go and participate in chat.
Make sure you take an opportunity to scan through the chat and look for things in the environment or background of your colleague’s video and make a note of it. Now you will start saying ‘I spy’ someone with a weird plant or ‘I spy’ someone with a unique sweater. Now allow the group members to call out which person is the person with that item.
40.Hidden Talents
The purpose of this game is to have fun while finding hidden talents. You would want to make sure that you are showing off a unique talent that you may have whether it’s drawing, singing or something unique.
Make sure that you select one or two individuals to show off their talents. You may want to pre-select people in advance. This is very helpful in developing bonds and creating a safe space for people who might be introverted.
41.Music Channel
I am sure you have quite a few music lovers in your company and you can create a Slack channel for your colleagues to discuss their shared love of music. People are genuinely interested in what everyone else is listening to as you can see people would talk to each other about it.
If you are a music lover you would start to wonder ‘What kind of music is so and so is into?’ or ‘What DJ does so and so listen to?’. So having a place for everyone to just come and discuss this is a lot of fun.
42.Virtual Scavenger Hunt
This one’s a classic game where the main goal is for you to identify items and staff members to go retrieve them before the other person shows it on camera. It is simple and easy.
You can start by creating a list of items and be prepared to communicate it. Individual teams must then begin the process of locating them by having the facilitator call out the item.
Teams and individuals with the most points will win. The winning person of the team will then be provided with a prize.
43.Change That Background
The purpose of this activity is to engage staff members in conversations and also to give staff members and employees an opportunity to get to know each other.
Ask employees to change their background and be prepared to talk about it. In this activity, you want to make sure that you take one or two minutes to show employees how to change the background in zoom.
Give everyone two minutes to finally change the background and select individuals to share.
44.Rock, Papers, Scissors
This is going to be a fun one. Rock, paper, scissors is one of those classic games that people still play to this day.The main idea is that you will create teams and teams will play rock, paper, scissors until you identify a winner.
In this game, make sure you create breakout groups and then teams can play whether best out of three or best out of one. You can decide what you want to do and then they will compete with each other until they identify the winner.
45.Be Nice Game
This game is connected with respect. In Be Nice Game, we have employees engaged in the process of saying something nice to employees. It’s a really fun and engaging game.
You would start the game by creating breakout games. Ask employees to take one or two minutes to write down one word for each person in the group and explain it. Then ask employees to read what they have written or what someone thinks about them openly.
