Remote employees can feel very lonely. That’s why it’s necessary for the team leader to strive to keep team members motivated.
In a regular office, healthy interactions between team members are very common. But for remote employees, the story is a lot different. They don’t enjoy moments of relaxation with their co-workers and this can lead to a growing sense of isolation.
This is one of the biggest disadvantages of virtual teams. Although these minor interactions may seem trivial, they have a strong impact on team performance.
Related: How to Become a Virtual CEO: Work With a Remote Team
But don’t worry, here are the 4 best team building activities you can use to build trust among your team members and increase the level of cohesion among co-workers:
- 1. ALLOW SMALL TALK IN MEETINGS
Virtual team members don’t have the opportunity to do small talk with their colleagues. And it is precisely this type of talk that helps employees to know each other better and establish bonds of trust and friendship.
Remote teams must make the time to build trust and the bonds that unite them. That's why you need to allow a few minutes of small talk before starting the meeting.
You can ask your team members to comment on their personal activities, their holiday plans and even ask them to send some personal photos to make a slideshow and show them to the rest of the team.
2. LET TEAM MEMBERS TELL LITTLE FACTS ABOUT THEMSELVES
You can propose a game. The goal is to connect with your team members on a personal level.
This activity is very good to get the members of your team to open up and learn things about each person's personal background.
You can ask each of the members of your team to send 3 personal facts only to you, the facilitator of the game. You should have all the information consolidated a few days before the meeting.
To make it more fun, ask your team that to send facts that have nothing to do with your current job, things that other team members don’t know.
On the day of the meeting share your screen with the data of each and ask them to guess which fact belongs to who.
At the end of the game, share the results with the team to see who got the highest number of correct answers.
3. REPLY ALL
The idea of this activity is to send an email to all members of your team once a week with some personal or fun questions. Ask them to respond to reply all, so each week the team has the opportunity to get to know each other a little more personally.
The type of questions are up to you. They can be personal, fun or in related to their work activities.
Be sure to reply all to messages sent to groups in general.
4. THE PICTURE GAME
The goal of this activity is to share visual images with the members of your team.
Ask everyone to share fun pictures of their personal activities, family or hobbies. Spend 10 minutes talking about the pictures. Encourage team members to ask questions to know more about each other.
You can also designate a meeting for each member and dedicate 5 or 10 minutes to talk about their photos. The next team member will have to share their photos at the next meeting and so on.
This is one of the activities that have the most impact on the teams since the visual memory is fantastic to remember facts about each other.
Keeping a motivated and happy team is critical to their performance. If your team works remotely you will have to work harder to maintain good bonds of trust between them all.
Each of these activities aims to increase virtual team communication and collaboration. With these team building ice breakers we are sure you will strengthen the relationships and bonds within your virtual team.
Related: 3 Essential Keys to Achieve Virtual CEO Success
Want to know more about virtual teams management? Download the Reality of Virtual Teams Infographic to find out!
