This game uses mechanics of escape rooms, puzzles and problem solving and so encourages your team to work together. This murder mystery also has an interesting twist; the murder is actually a real mystery from ancient Egypt, and after your teams make their guess, our master storytelling will share the big reveal. Murder in Ancient Egypt is a 90 minute, fully-facilitated event. We provide an energetic host to keep your team engaged, and a co-host that manages the technical aspects. The event is fun, challenging and perfect for groups that want to work both collaboratively and competitively.
Learn more about Murder in Ancient Egypt. War of the Wizards is a collaborative storytelling game of wisdom and magic. The story goes that a group of wizards have been at war since ages past, and no-one even quite remembers why. For example, you may develop a strategy to leap over a wide chasm, or challenge an ogre to a battle of wits. War of the Wizards is a little nerdy, and a whole lot of fun. The group games last for 90 minutes, and are facilitated over video conference by our talented host.
Learn more about War of the Wizards. You can play the game multiplayer, with three to 10 players or more if you are feeling audacious. Click image to view the game board. To play Spreadsheet Battleship, each player needs two things: a game board and the placement of ships. You can use graph paper labelled with letters and numbers for the game board, and either randomly assign battleship placement or let each player choose where to place the ships.
Here is a Google Sheets game board you can use. Spreadsheet Battleship game mechanics are a little like Go Fish. The next player then goes in sequence, which could be in order of age or geographic location. Scavenger Hunts can be a fun way for your people to work together. Virtual scavenger hunts are more difficult to find that team spirit with.
You might have game mechanics that have your team searching Google, Wikipedia, YouTube and other sites, without really working together. The solution for successful online scavenger hunts is to throw away the normal and adopt a lightning version instead. For Lightning Scavenger Hunts, fire off a rapid series of clues that have your team members dashing to find objects, solve clues and win points. For example, you could have everyone grab their favorite mug and award points to the best mug story.
The fast paced nature of Lightning Scavenger Hunts is what makes it work for team building online. Here are more virtual scavenger hunt templates. Lexulous is one of several free team games online that is modelled after Scrabble. The main difference is that Lexulous has eight tiles in play at a time, and the value assigned to each letter is a little different. You can easily include Lexulous in your options for online games to play with coworkers. You can keep track of points and total scores over a month, and award a Lexulous champion at the end.
Your refrigerator may be different. A fun game we could play together is Guess the Refrigerator. To play this game, everyone submits a photo of the inside of their refrigerator to one point of contact. That organizer then posts the photos to a channel where all participants can study the contents and make best guesses at which refrigerator belongs to who.
The players submit answers to the organizer, who then tallies up the scores and announces a winner. Sharing an inside view of your refrigerator takes a degree of vulnerability, which is a factor that contributes to the success of great online games for virtual teams.
To play, name one person as the Describer and the other players as Artists. The Describer must explain to the Artists how to draw an item like a sunflower, kite or calculator using only geometric terms. You can play each round for as long as you like, and three minutes is usually sufficient. At the end of each round, the Describer gets one point for each Artist that guesses the object correctly, and each Artist that guesses correctly also gets one point.
Tally up points and award cool prizes to the winner. Five Clicks Away is a logic game for online team building. To play, you select a starting topic and an ending topic, which you can decide on your own or randomly generate. For example, the starting point could be Blackbeard the Pirate and the endpoint could be grilled cheese sandwiches. Each player must start on the Wikipedia page for the starting point, and in no-more than five clicks reach the end point.
The idea is that Wikipedia has so many internal links that you should be able to follow a chain to reach the end point in less than five clicks. One of my favorite online team building games is a Typing Speed Race with friendly competition.
For the Typing Speed Race, you can use a free tool like typingtest. Then, each person posts their test results to Slack, email or another platform. The Typing Speed Race is a great way to encourage friendly competition with remote teams. You can make the experience more collaborative by doing a Typing Speed Relay, which requires forming your people into teams and then adding the cumulative score from each person to create a team total.
With the Typing Speed Race, everyone wins because typing quickly is an important skill for remote work. Chair Up! The game is played over email, messenger or conference call, and is specifically meant to counter the doom and gloom that sometimes guides conversations.
For example, you could do yoga sun-salutations, clap your hands, laugh or have a small dance party. When you work from home, taking care of your health and fitness is especially important.
You can do squats and eat well, and also make sure you drink enough water. Water Shots is a game meant to fortify your team around healthy hydration.
Virtual team building games that focus on building healthy habits are a great way to support company culture and development with remote teams. However, one thing will secretly unify your people regardless of category: they love getting praise.
Start a praise train where each person compliments each others work in succession and watch the employee engagement take off. For example, you could praise someone on their work ethic, and that person could praise a colleague on a successful client call, and that person could praise someone for writing a great blog article and so on. Mister Rogers Calls are one of the best virtual team building activities during quarantine. The name comes from the goal: to get to know your remote work neighbors.
We have been doing Mister Rogers Calls for years, and follow a simple format. First, we use the Donut app to randomly assign conversation partners every two weeks.
The call itself should be 30 minutes, over video, and avoid work topics. Encourage your coworkers to talk about hobbies and interests outside of the job. For example, you can talk about how long you can keep a houseplant alive. This post has themes and topics for virtual coffee chats. Minesweeper is a virtual game you can play on online via Google. Challenge your remote employees to a cutthroat round of the classic online game, and time your scores to see if you can beat each other and me. You can organize an epic Minesweeper tournament for your people and see who can race through the game quickest.
This online team building activity takes patience, precision and thoughtful risk taking; which are all good attributes to develop for remote teams. I recently finished a round in four seconds, unsuccessfully, so the bar is both high and pretty darn low.
The Price is Almost Right is a game where the host of a virtual conference call holds up household objects and other attendees shout out prices.
The first person to guess within five cents of the actual retail price without going over gets 1 point for their team. If you guess over the retail price then you are out for that round, but your team members may continue. The Longest Word is a quick virtual activity you can do on video chats and conference calls. To play, arrange your people into teams and challenge them to spell a very long word.
For example, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is as hard to say as it is to spell. The team that gets closest to the correct spelling, judged by an arbitrary eyeing, wins. The winning team can then bet double or nothing by guessing the meaning of the word too. This list has more vocabulary activities for teams.
In high school, I joined the Debate Club and attended weekly meetings. For the entire year, we had exactly one debate with another school. As your Debate Club grows in sophistication, invite more team members to join. The experience will help develop important communication skills and relationships.
The other team members guess which country the person is describing to earn points. At the end of the game, the player with the most correct guesses wins! You can assign countries to team members using a random country generator.
Virtual Team Trivia is a facilitated trivia session built specifically for team building online. Virtual Trivia sessions are 60 minute virtual team events over video. You can choose from themes like Rock-and-Roll and Interstellar. If you prefer, you can host your own virtual trivia too. Learn more: Virtual Team Trivia. For example, popular virtual team building events include birthday parties and online fundraisers.
Virtual happy hours are video meetings dedicated to fun virtual team games and activities, and may be part of the work day or at the end of it. For example, you might include a round of icebreaker questions and then do virtual team trivia. Most people include drinks as well. Check out our list of virtual happy hour ideas for more inspiration. Virtual coffee breaks are usually one-on-one or small group sessions, and are conducted for 15 to 30 minutes during the work day.
The purpose of these breaks is to help build relationships and community among coworkers. See our list of virtual coffee break ideas and topics. If you have a large team, then planning virtual birthday parties may become redundant.
Instead, you can unite the April babies around the shared birthday month, and the same for the other 11 groups too. Here is a list of ideas for virtual birthday parties. These parties generally occur during work hours, and include video team building games and activities. Learn more about virtual retirement parties. Virtual field trips are excellent virtual team building activities for teachers, students and kids, especially during quarantine.
Check out our list of virtual field trips. One way to build morale with employees is to choose a meaningful cause and raise funds or donations for it. For example, many offices are familiar with doing a food drive or a community sponsorship.
I recommend partnering with a donation platform to help facilitate the transactions and add credibility to the collections. For the cause, anything that resonates with your team can be a good fit. Here is a list of virtual fundraising ideas. Virtual team building activities are a great way to make virtual meetings fun, boost morale and build community.
These virtual activities include free and paid options, and can take anywhere from 1 minute to several hours. Next, check out our lists of virtual event ideas , virtual game night ideas , and this one with virtual games to play on Zoom with coworkers.
Virtual team building is the process of forming bonds and collaboration skills with remote employees. These efforts can include team building activities for conference calls, scheduling virtual team events and similar. The goal of these activities is to improve skills like communication and collaboration, while also boosting engagement and job satisfaction.
Team building virtually is relatively easy. Like in-person, you need to plan fun games and activities for your group. You can use an event planner, or host your own virtual team building events.
An easy activity to get started with team building online is icebreaker questions. The practice includes creating private Slack channels where each employee can share thoughts and questions that develop throughout the day. The first point goes toward employee engagement, and the second helps create system improvements that benefit the entire team and organization.
That direct action and impact is also an excellent way to quick engage an employee with your larger scope and mission. The small-wins channel is a place on Slack, email or other messaging platforms to celebrate modest size wins for the company.
For example, you could include a press mention, a nice blog comment, a business milestone, or a celebrity following you on Twitter. The only guideline for small-wins is to keep the scope small. When you keep the scope small, you connect your team with the nuances of customer, audience and market interactions.
Those connections are a powerful boost to employee engagement. One of our most successful virtual employee engagement activities is publishing a company yearbook.
We have published a yearbook three years in a row, and either distribute it at company retreats or send it by mail. We have a culture committee that assembles the yearbook on Shutterfly and includes pictures of all team members organized by department, plus photos of team activities we did throughout the year.
If we send the yearbooks by mail then we have our leadership write a thoughtful note in each book first. Company yearbooks are a big win for work from home engagement activities. You can include employee appreciation quotes in your signatures. Part of working from home is feeling like you are always on the clock. Especially when it comes to connecting with colleagues, the time you spend in virtual meetings and on video conferences calls is highly structured.
This constant agenda can ware remote workers down, and lead to burnout and disengagement. Ironically, you can combat structured time burnout by scheduling unstructured time into your calendar too. Give your people time to just hang out on virtual conference calls and talk about whatever they damn please. The feeling of relief of not having to be productive all the time will contribute to remote employee engagement and job satisfaction. You can learn from these speeches and others, and plan your own to help motivate and engage your virtual team.
A simple framework for delivering in inspiration speech is to go from big to small. Talk about the wide market your company serves, or even the state of humanity, then narrow down to the specifics of what your people do and how it impacts things.
Speak with integrity, passion and transparency. When you get an inspirational speech right, you will rally your team around the message and massively increase engagement. When you get an inspirational speech wrong, there are pretty much no consequences. Try it. Your first one is a practice round.
Here is a list of inspirational quotes of the day for work. A very quick way to increase virtual employee engagement is to call your people and talk about life. You can ask:. And other work-friendly topics. When you work remotely, getting call request from your boss can be nerve-wracking because it feels very serious. Calling to have a casual conversation is a good way to balance that feeling with something more positive. If you have a large team, then most days may be a work anniversary for someone.
You can celebrate these work anniversaries by making a quick post recognizing the team member. See our post on virtual work anniversaries for more ideas. When you work in an office, birthday parties mean cupcakes and good cheer in the lunch room. When you work in a virtual office, you can make a few small substitutes to have a similar quality celebration.
Here are some virtual birthday party ideas to get you started. Pro tip: You can adjust your birthday cheer to match the recipient of the message. For example, I am happy to ignore my birthday and okay with a brief mention. Soon after I joined the startup world, the company I worked for hit a major milestone. We celebrated with a small party to get everyone together.
Receiving a small bonus gift card, combined with the expression of gratitude was a powerful motivator. I felt appreciated, engaged and ready to continue the battle.
You can create that same motivation with awarding bonuses and sharing gratitude online. You can easily send digital gift cards or one in the mail. Try this engagement technique once, and you will see how powerful it can be. Another great way to give bonuses is with an employee referral program. Check out our list of virtual icebreaker questions for more inspiration, plus recommendations on how to effectively use these prompts in a virtual meeting.
Your team will solve puzzles and uncover clues, in an ultimate challenge to find out who the murderer was. Then, our expert storyteller will reveal what really happened a few centuries ago. In recent years, escape rooms have become a popular group activity worldwide. Now, even during work from home you can do fun and challenging virtual escape rooms too.
These online escape rooms are a rate to remote employees by encouraging problem solving and teamwork. There are free and paid virtual escape rooms available. Investing in virtual employee engagement activities is an important part of virtual team building, improving company culture , and ensuring job satisfaction while working from home.
Even allocating five minutes at the beginning of a conference call can make a big difference. We also have a list of online drinking games for Zoom to play with remote teams, and this one with virtual game night ideas.
Virtual engagement is both a qualitative and quantitative measurement of the relationship between a remote organization and its employees. For example, you may consider job satisfaction scores, retention and productivity. There are various methods to keep virtual employees engaged.
Those relationships have a strong correlation with virtual employee engagement. You can also provide recognition through verbal and written praise, and financial compensation. Virtual employee engagement activities are any activities, games and initiatives designed to intentionally influence remote employee engagement during work from home.
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