5 Fresh Team-Building Activities for Remote Workers

If you’re managing a remote team, you may be grappling with how best to help them develop the same sort of cohesion as an onsite team. This is particularly true in 2020, when many people are new to the remote workforce, and distractions abound. Though team-building may sound trivial to some people, it is anything but: actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. $450 billion to $550 billion in lost productivity per year!

Fortunately, bringing your remote team together may be easier than you think.

5 Fresh Team-Building Activities for Remote Workers

These fun and fresh team-building activities have been known to draw teams together and boost engagement.

Virtual Coffee Breaks

These virtual coffee breaks don’t need to be time-consuming in order to be effective. Coming together for about fifteen or twenty minutes a day to catch up, unwind, and shoot the breeze with a beverage of your choice can come close to replicating the sort of bonding that happens in break rooms or around the water cooler with onsite teams. The only danger here, especially if the team doesn’t know one another well already, is that they may be tempted to slip into work talk to ease the tension. Do your best to pull them out of that tendency, keeping the conversation light, breezy, and non-work-related.

Bucket List Rundowns

Learning what items are on one another’s bucket lists not only helps your team see each other as fully-developed individuals with wishes, hopes, and dreams; but it also allows them to find areas of commonality and build connections around shared interests.

Community Book Club

This option is an especially good choice if your team is brand new to one another. By giving them a focused topic of discussion (the book), you’re allowing them to open up and engage with one another without feeling that they have to talk about themselves and their own lives right away. It’s a great way to help people scope out one another’s thoughts, opinions, and personalities in a low-risk environment. The only downside here is that unlike the virtual coffee breaks listed above, you can only host sessions of the community book club once a month or so since you need to allow people time to read the source material.

If your team isn’t really a group of readers, you can always pivot to movies, podcasts, TV shows, or whatever you like. As long as you get them engaging with stories and with one another, this activity is a success.

Tiny Campfire

This tiny, virtual campfire activity is fun, festive, and (best of all) requires you to do very little by way of preparation. Simply sign up via the link provided, and everything is prepared for you and your team in advance.

The event is a virtual campfire, that includes historic ghost stories, icebreaker games, little competitions and real s’more making. It’s all the fun of a real camp night, with no mosquito repellent required.

Snapshots

This inventive team-building experience is low-risk, low-preparation, and high-reward. In advance of your next online gathering, ask your team members to take a picture of something in their home that is out of sight of their computer cameras but would help the rest of the team know them better as a person.

These snapshots may include:

Their pets
Their bookshelves
Their family members
The contents of their refrigerator
Their elaborate coffee nooks
Their high school trophies

The great thing about this challenge is that your team members can decide just how much they want to reveal about themselves.

Whichever of these activities you choose, the relationships built as a result can help foster connection, combat loneliness, and increase productivity among your team.