span style=”font-weight: 400;”>In these uncertain times, keeping your remote workers together as a team can be a challenging task to tackle. This is because when you’re not together in your company’s offices, the all-important elements of proper communication, joint goals, support, and fun, can get lost. Your job as a team leader or business owner is to make sure to keep these essential elements alive and kicking while working remotely.
Sophisticated, modern-day managers of remote teams must constantly lead new ways and techniques to engage and connect their remote workforce. This includes creating and maintaining healthy relationships within the group, no matter where they physically are.
Well, if you’re interested in building better company culture through fun, remote team-building activities for your employees, you’re at the right place. Below, you can find the four best online team-building ideas to motivate your employees and lead your company to success. But before we get into the activities you shall incorporate within your working environment, let’s see why these activities are essential for the well-being of your employees and the future of your business.
Why Is Remote Team-Building So Important?
For the sake of productivity, morale, engagement, and overall results, remote team-building is the effort of building connections between remote workers to mimic physical teams. These activities are essential for the success of each company that employs remote-working policies because:
- When workers know their coworkers and their strengths, they can collaborate better and achieve excellent results as a team.
- Since remote working is undoubtedly isolating and lonely at times, fostering a sense of togetherness can help boost the employees’ morale and happiness.
- When employees know that they have a strong team around them, an automatic support system is created. This way, they’ll be empowered to share their ideas if they know who’s listening on the other end.
- Team building plays a vital role in developing a solid company culture. Having such a culture, mainly when working remotely, can help you improve external and internal communication.
4 Remote Team-Building Activities to Try
Create a Virtual Break Room
Perhaps the most significant difference between in-house and remote teams is those mid-work little chats usually happen on the office floor or near the water-cooler tank. While these chats take place quite naturally in the office, you might not think much of them, but they’re actually big team-building blocks.
Luckily, you can recreate this atmosphere remotely, too, as there are a couple of options to facilitate this kind. Perhaps the best one is to create a virtual break room which will be a place where your personnel can log in and join over a lunch or a virtual coffee break to catch up with their coworkers as they would in a physical environment.
Start Holding Virtual Company Events
Companies feel like a team the most when everyone comes together for company-wide meetings and events. For that reason, you need to ensure that you don’t miss these out from your remote schedule as well.
With these kinds of events, you should ensure that you run them in the same manner as a physical event. Have a host, an agenda, different speakers, and allow your employees to ask questions. The only significant difference should be that everyone would join over video instead of in person.
Set Friendly Remote Challenges
As the old saying goes: a little competition never hurts anyone or any team, and in fact, can bring teams closer together. So, consider setting up friendly remote challenges for your teams to give them a group goal to work towards. For example, a great friendly remote challenge is the fitness challenge. Not only will it bring some fun rivalry between different teams, but it also boosts your workers’ well-being—a win-win situation for everyone!
Bring That Friday Feeling to the Entire Team
After a long, arduous working week, by the time it gets to Friday, most of your remote employees will just want to kick back with a cold beer and relax. So, why not drink that beer together? Host this last thing each Friday, so it’s still technically working time, and ensure that all of your remote workers are around to socialize. This will help end the week on a high and give everyone a chance to connect before calling it quits for the weekend.
Final Words
It doesn’t matter whether your company has a physical office or not; company culture is extremely important. Having a sense of team spirit will guarantee that your remote-working personnel can combine their strengths and talents and trust each other. For remote employees, team-building activities are even more critical because they significantly contribute to efficient communication and joint goals between team members.
