Help your remote team bond and strengthen their professional relationships with these creative virtual team-building activities, and take more than a few steps toward a more engaged and confident remote team.
Virtual Team Building Activities (Perfect for Remote Teams)
Fun Virtual Team Building Activities
1. Host a Pizza Meeting
Eating together is a great way to bond. It’s possible to have lunch together even when you’re all in different locations.
Order takeaway pizzas for the whole team and agree on a date and time to enjoy the food together over Skype, Zoom, or Teams.
2. Have Fun with Recipe Swap
Do you and your team love food? Then why not ask the team to share their favorite recipes. It could be a dish they love cooking or a treat they bake regularly.
Ask everyone to share their favorite recipe and talk a bit about any tweaks they might have made.
3. Have a Virtual Coffee Break
You also don’t need to organize a coffee break face-to-face. Get together for just five to ten minutes a day and drink a cup of coffee together.
Drink coffee or tea from your favorite cups and share the best stories from the day.
4. Try a Virtual Escape Room
You can find virtual escape room experiences to play with remote teams of any size. For example, this Murder Mystery Escape Room Game on Airbnb Experiences is available for teams of up to 200 people!
The virtual escape room experience is similar to a real escape room and bound to help the team bond together.
5. Take Personality Tests
Personality tests can help you get to know each other online. You can send team members the same personality test they can take on their own time. You can then share results when meeting online or via a group chat.
It’ll be an exciting way to see which team members are alike and how all the other dynamics within the team play out.
Free Virtual Team Building Activities
6. Share a Picture of the Day
Seeing the world through other people’s eyes is always interesting. Your team could start sharing a ‘picture of the day’ and give others a glimpse of things they see and do throughout the day.
The picture could have a theme or simply be whatever the person wants it to be. You can create a special folder or group chat for the photos.
Browsing through people’s photos will tell you a lot about how they see the world.
7. Give Your News of the Day
Have you ever dreamed of being a newsreader? Well, here is your chance! Make everyone introduce themselves at the start of an online meeting as a newsreader.
For example, they can say, “Good morning, this is Kate reporting from Brooklyn, New York. The weather is currently sunny with light rain expected later. Today’s news highlights include my cat stealing my toast this morning. Back to you, John.” It is a simple yet fun way to share the news with the team.
8. Organize a Healthy Habit Challenge
You could nurture a healthier lifestyle among the remote teams with a monthly challenge.
You can have the team decide on an activity they want to challenge themselves to do. It could be to drink a certain amount of water or limit screen time.
9. Start a Praise Train
We tend to give negative or constructive feedback more often than positive praise. But focusing on the good stuff can be perfect for a morale boost.
Start a praise train at the start of a meeting where everyone has to give a single compliment (preferably about work) to another random person.
You always need to pick someone different and make it so people don’t need to respond to the praise with anything other than thank you – so no deflecting!
10. Ask the Famous Desert Island Question
Thinking about the three items you’d bring with you on a desert island is a classic team-building activity.
Each member of the team should have a few minutes to think about the items and the reasoning behind each item.
You can then have everyone share what items they’d bring with them.
Icebreaker Virtual Team Building Activities
11. ‘Share’ the Morning Commute
Have your virtual team share their morning ‘commute’. You can take a snapshot of something you see on the way to the office or other work location, or simply tell the team what your morning routine looks like. The main idea is to have everyone share how and where they prepare for the day.
12. Play ‘Two Truths and a Lie’
Two truths and a lie is a classic icebreaker that works remotely, too. The idea is simple: everyone should share three statements about themselves and two of these need to be true and one a lie.
Other team members can then guess which one is the lie. The activity can bring people together and teach you something new.
13. Find Something in Common
Divide your virtual team into smaller groups. Once everyone is in their group, have them discuss and find something they all have in common.
It could be that they all love drinking coffee or they’ve been to Italy. If you want to make it harder, remove broad topics such as foods, movies, and books.
14. Ask What, Where, and When?
Ask three simple questions to start an online meeting and have the team respond. The questions can be similar to the following:
- What is the last thing you ate? What is your favorite song?
- Where did you eat it? Where did you last hear it?
- When did you eat it? When did you hear it the first time?
You’ll learn more about team members and hear interesting stories in the process!
15. Create a Seven-Word Memoir
Have each of your team members write a seven-word memoir. It can be a single seven-word sentence or just seven words that represent the person’s life story so far. Everyone can then share their ‘memoir’.
Afterward, your team can discuss what they think the life story tells of each person. People need to use their creative thinking while learning more about their colleagues.
Quick Virtual Team Building Activities
16. Play ‘Rose & Thorn’
A rose and a thorn challenge is a quick way to get a meeting started in a fun way. Every member of the team should share a positive thing that happened (a rose) that day and a challenge they faced (a thorn).
It can be work- or non-work-related. For example, a rose could be positive customer feedback on a successful sale, while a thorn could have been a hectic morning commute.
17. Play “One Word, And I’m In”
Get your team hyped about the meeting by having everyone play “one word and I’m in”. The premise is simple: everyone needs to say a fitting adjective and “I’m in!”. For example, they can say “I’m excited and I’m in” or “I’m happy and I’m in”.
18. Host a Typing Speed Race
You can have a bit of a laugh with a friendly typing competition. Give each team member the same text to test their skills. Reward the winner with a voucher!
19. Relax with a Guided Meditation
Getting together to relax and unwind can be a great bonding experience. You can boost your team’s spirits by having everyone take part in a guided meditation. Schedule it at the end of a hectic week.
Find a guided meditation video and ask everyone to light some candles to set the mood right. Guided meditations are often quick, so you won’t need to spend a lot of time with this simple activity.
Funny Virtual Team Building Activities
20. Guess the Emoji Song
Create a few popular song titles with emojis. A fun example would be ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ by using these emotes: 🙋♀️🙏4️⃣🌲👆. You can display the emojis and then have people guess the song before a timer runs out.
21. Talk about Me in a Meme
Memes can be super funny and often very accurate. Have everyone in the team share an online meme that best describes them. The meme doesn’t have to be funny – it can be serious as well. Just make sure everyone keeps it family-friendly and suitable for work!
22. Share Your Favorite Joke
If you have a small team that’s relatively comfortable with each other, you could host a comedy night. Everyone could share their favorite joke. They can say it themselves or show a video clip.
You should however keep it somewhat suitable for work, especially if people aren’t that familiar with each other yet!
23. Play Online Pictionary
You can play Pictionary online on platforms like Skribbl. Get the team online and take turns drawing and guessing what the pictures represent. Drawing online is a lot of fun and you’re bound to share many laughs with the team.
24. Guess Whose Office Is It?
Ask each member of the team to take a picture of their home office or work desk. You should then display the pictures in a group chat or during a conference call. Other members should guess which office or work desk belongs to who.
Virtual Team Building Activities for Small Groups
25. Pick Between Pancakes or Waffles
This fun team-building activity is perfect for small groups. Divide the group into two and have each group pick a side over which one should be removed from existence: pancakes or waffles.
Teams then need to argue their side with everyone voting at the end for the winner. The winning team then gets to pick a new contender. For example, the next debate could be over pancakes and pizza.
26. Ask What Would You Do?
You can split your team into pairs or discuss the topics individually, as this game is flexible. The idea is to come up with different ‘What Would You Do?’- scenarios.
For example, you could pose a hypothetical question like ‘what would you do if you witnessed a robbery?’, or ‘what would you do if you had only 3 days to live?’
27. Host a Movie Night
It can be fun to watch a movie together with a small team. You could all agree on the film and then watch it together while hanging out on Zoom or Skype.
Each member of the team could prepare their favorite snacks, and you can talk about the movie afterward.
Virtual Team Building Activities for Large Groups
28. Check the Most Used Emojis
Ever wondered what emojis people use the most? Ask your large group to share emojis via Slack or email. It could be the top three most recently used emojis or all-time favorites. It’ll be fun to see what emojis people share!
29. Play Virtual Family Feud
You could divide a larger group into two and play a virtual family feud. The game works like the famous TV show – people guess the top answers and try to earn points for their teams. The game is fast-paced and lots of fun.
30. Create a Virtual Birth Map
Knowing where team members were born can be a great virtual-building activity. You can create a collaborative map via Google Maps and have team members share the place they were born. It’ll be a great way to learn a bit more about each member of the team.
Team morale is so vital to everyone feeling respected, comfortable, and productive at work. However, online, without the physical presence, office camaraderie, and fabled ‘water cooler’ moments, it can be challenging to get a team to bond and grow together.
These virtual team-building activities should give you plenty of ideas to help your virtual team interact with each other outside of a purely professional capacity.
That way, everyone can get to know each other beyond work, and start to learn from each other, get to know each other better, and grow as a team together.
Keep these virtual team-building activities on hand by sharing this infographic to one of your social feeds or pinning it to one of your Pinterest boards.
