38 Best Virtual Team Building Activities in 2022 Ranked

You can use popular platforms such as Skype or Zoom or use a more streamlined channel like Slack or Microsoft Teams. It gives your remote team a single platform to access all resources and collaborate efficiently. Managing employees who are new to remote work will undoubtedly be challenging for you. But when handled well, remote teams can be equally efficient and productive, if not more, than their office-based counterparts. As a manager, it’s your responsibility to ensure that your team is not delayed by the fact that a team member cannot accomplish their tasks due to technical problems.

Icebreakers are easy to include in virtual meetings and virtual happy hours. With remote teams especially, it’s a good idea to provide your team with regular updates about the impact their work is having. This messaging doesn’t have to be for direct impact, as long as it is related and true. Flight of the Navigator is one of the better movies that came out of 1986, and today plays double duty in the realm of online team building games. Typing speed races are a free online team building activity that you can start right now.

Their product is basically a robust visual whiteboard for planning meetings and creating deliverables, both of which are crucial for remote employees. From vision boards to icebreaker photo collages, anything you’d want to do with Post-its and a whiteboard in a conference room can be done online with teammates from around the world. Hybrid Teams – In a hybrid teams, some people are centralized, while others are remote – working at a distance from each other. Most commonly, hybrid teams exist when the leader and part of the team are co-located, and the rest are not.

Handling https://globalcloudteam.com/s is challenging at the outset, but it can be done effectively. In the same way that you can hold virtual meetings with your remote team, you can also do virtual team-building activities. One way of encouraging employees to know each other and feel less socially isolated is for you, as the manager, to find opportunities for collaboration. Instead of having one employee work on one project on their own, determine ways to make remote workers accomplish projects in small teams. With the above challenges in mind, here are our tips for effectively managing remote teams. To help you adjust to the new normal, we’ve put together 27 tips for successfully managing remote teams.

By keeping in touch with chat apps like Slack, your team can quickly and accurately stay up-to-speed – not just with work, but with each other’s lives. Today’s employees are increasingly prioritizing work-life balance, and expect that remote work will help them achieve it. In fact, many employees have found that working from home actually means working around the clock due to the blurring of lines between the personal and the professional. Research shows that while employee enthusiasm peaks at the beginning of a new job, it drops by 22% shortly after. Your onboarding program should also build in frequent opportunities for employees to feel valued and heard.

It keeps your files safe, synced, and makes it easy to share anything. IDoneThis lets you document your daily achievements, collects them from every teammate, and sends out a morning recap of all the team’s happenings in your inbox. Tracking your progress is as rewarding as staying in touch with your remote team. There are very real professional and personal benefits unlocked by remote work. Identify the benefits you can find with working remotely and help your team members do the same.

Make precise standards for remote work productivity

To grant access to project documents, you can utilize cloud-based storage systems. Dropbox and Google Drive, for instance, are useful for sharing big files. They can also keep files organized and are instantly accessible to any authorized team member. Our specialists will help you determine which qualities are most important for your prospective employees to have. This calls on you to be deliberate when it comes to providing feedback and provide it often and clearly.

This game is smart, fun, wildly different and perfect for remote teams. Remote coworking is a real thing, and it might help your team be more productive. To set up a session for your team, simply create a Slack channel called #coworking. The first person who’s online for the day can create a video call that’s open for anyone to join, with the understanding that the purpose of the channel and call is to get work done.

Even though it may be exciting in the beginning, over time remote workers may start to feel isolated and lonely. If the manager has not devised methods on how to deal with this, it could become debilitating. With more employees working remotely, managers are left wondering how they’re supposed to properly manage people they rarely see in person. Dynamic, growing remote environments can make you feel how to hire a remote team like you have to handle everything yourself, which can lead to burnout if not managed properly. But it’s not only your burnout you need to think about — your employees could be stressing out and feeling overworked as well if work and life get too intertwined. In a remote office, conflict will rarely happen because of personal issues – work and misunderstandings are usually the cause of the problem.

Lack of holistic communication due to loss of non-verbal communication

Use a good task management or project management system so everyone knows where they are and what they have to do. Accept that a remote worker’s schedule may differ but that they will still get work done. Allowing your team the autonomy to work when it suits them best, has proven to show greater quality and productivity. You need to know how to maintain employee engagement—no matter where they’re located. There are a few primary issues you may want to consider right at the start. Provides you with an ideal solution regardless of the size and nature of your remote team.

These quick catch-up meetings are also an opportunity for everyone to get a better sense of what their teammates are working on. We understand that communication and team collaboration may have taken big hits in your organization during the pandemic. Keeping track of the various schedules and continuous IT problems had most companies spread very thin. In fact, there are things you can do to keep your remote employees on track. The following tools and resources will help promote successful virtual team building. This virtual team building event is part video game, part whodunnit, and one heck of a good time.

The ultimate guide to remote meetings in 2020 – Slack’s guide to running successful remote meetings. – National Geographic’s resource on how to understand your remote team’s interaction with Zoom. How to Manage a Remote Team – Guide by Zapier CEO, Wade Foster, on how to manage a remote team.

Typically the longer you play, the more intense the conversation gets and the more team members will share their values. Remote teams are hard to get right, and it’s hardly ever just about the Wi-Fi connection. It’s about the right leadership, the right team, and the communication between them. To make it easier for their remote workers, many companies are implementing new tools and resources to replace the office touch points with technology. In the wake of the global pandemic, when SMBs are in full crisis management mode, many people fortunate enough to maintain their employment will be working from home. Managing remote teams requires a different skill set than managing direct reports in an office setting.

Remote Team Best Practices – Tips & Tools For Successful Remote Teams

Museum Hack tour guides are world class conveyors of stories and information. We’ve honed the craft leading thousands of renegade tours, and refined a framework for telling stories and training these skills. This system includes the Five Elements of a Hack, story shortening and more fun team activities. One of the major benefits of petri is that scheduling is off your hands. With virtual events already on the calendar, you don’t have to worry about time-zones, who may or may not attend and what everyone is interested in.

You can also find a way of aligning your company values with employees’ values by selecting new employees based on your values as a company. Productivity in any workplace depends on predictability and structures. It’s easy to disconnect when employees work in different locations.

Support

It’s the kind of incentive that is not only viewed positively by employees, but also encourages them to prove their value to the company in order to keep it. With SHRM estimating that the average cost of onboarding a new employee is around 6-9 months’ salary, a commitment to talent retention isn’t anything to sneeze at. No matter which route you decide to take, there are plenty of business benefits that will come as a result of allowing your team to work remotely. Businesses that implement remote work policies see increased productivity, efficiency, and fulfillment from their employees.

• Toggl is a simple online timer with a powerful timesheet calculator.
• Finally, onboard a remote or hybrid worker as you would anyone else.
• They can also keep files organized and are instantly accessible to any authorized team member.
• Acknowledging these obstacles is also a way of demonstrating support and empathy to your employees.
• This initiative creates a more relaxed environment for new people to get first-hand insight into all company practices, culture, and general atmosphere.

Having a company culture will unify your distributed team and enable you to achieve goals and objectives in solidarity. By making sure everyone is on the same roadmap as you equip them with the right tools to stay on course. Keep in mind that engaged employees are invested in their roles and contribute to the success of your organization. Your stack will be different to ours, but we use a combo of Slite for docmentation, Airtable for project management, Slack and Gmail for comms and then an HRMS for HR stuff.

Collaboration Templates

Let them express their concerns, while you try to clarify or find a compromise. Once the team members reach an agreement, the deal is sent via email to all sides for future reference. We have recurrent updates with the whole company where we show where we stand financially and discuss what our company goals are. When we attend WordCamps, WordPress Meetups or any other professional events we want our team to be proud to represent us. We achieve this by supporting each other and showing respect to everyone who works at the company. The team functions when people make friends within that team, and it’s highly unlikely anyone will make a friend if they’re only talking about work.

Resources to build high-performance teams

Remote employees are also more productive thanks to their ability to structure deep work time. They are no longer trying to fill an eight hour block of time with work, but rather make meaningful progress on the projects that they’re working on when they are feeling most productive. Because of this, they are less likely to schedule meetings for topics that could have been discussed over email or a quick Slack message. Efficiency is everything to a remote employee – which means they’re spending less time on redundant communication and more time getting work done for your business. When it comes to getting work done, a bevy of collaboration tools are now available to help you stay on top of what everyone is working on. Trello and Confluence, for example, are two project management and content creation tools made by Atlassian that help remote teams work together, track project progress, and meet deadlines.

Hire a balanced team consisting of people of different upbringings, experiences, and ages, in order to bring a wide array of viewpoints to the table. Re-engaging and exciting members of your team could be as simple as setting up an additional, casual check-in via video call. You can provide support, and your employee has the opportunity to voice ideas or discuss issues that are interfering with their productivity or morale. “Out of sight, out of mind,” should not apply when it comes to managing remote employees. Defining project scopes and setting deliverables in a workspace that can be accessed by your entire team is a great start. Plotting a team member’s to-do list into a project management calendar tells them exactly what they need to be working on for the week, as well as when their tasks need to be completed.

As a manager, before you can hope to determine what is expected of others within a changing environment, you will need to start by looking at what is expected of you. The fact that employees are part of your team means that you trust them. If there are employees that you do not trust, then it may mean that your hiring systems need to be improved. It might take time and money to develop all procedures, and it will definitely take time for your employees to get used to the new rules.

When you’re looking to hire remotely, you should be aware that not everyone works well in such an environment. If you’re taking your first steps into remote work, we recommend that you try and hire someone who already has experience working remotely. This will take some of the uncertainty out of making your first remote hires.

I am continuously impressed with the level of professionalism that is shown on a daily basis

Finally, colleague relations and cross-team communication are some of the key factors that affect employee turnover rate. Reports show employees are 24% more likely to quit their jobs if the company culture doesn’t feel right. Ultimately, organizations that foster better connection and communication are more likely to reduce employee turnover and retain top talent. Connected teams, having a strong sense of belonging to a group and working as a part of a team, are more likely to experience better communication between managers and employees. The money that you save by not spending on office space and utilities for your employees? Put that aside and use it to sponsor in-person meet-ups at least once a year.