Driving trust, fun, and inclusion within distributed teams or a remote workforce can be challenging. But, if you want to increase engagement and business results within virtual teams you must have a deliberate plan to enable location inclusion, and that relies on activity creativity.
Activity creativity is a method that leaders can employ to help build team culture across distance and combat isolation. Whether that is including others located in different offices across the world or fully remote workers, activity creativity is a technique that can directly impact the success of remote and distributed teams.
This could be as simple as pairing people up for virtual coffee chats or could go as far as holding virtual dance parties. The trick is to try something that is authentic to your personality and your team’s culture. Once you find an activity that works for your team, be sure to include it regularly to enhance team bonding and engagement.
Activities To Try:
Here are some examples of fun, creative activities that will help build trust and location inclusion:
1. Online “Office” Games
An Olympic style competition whereby remote workers can form teams and set small challenges for one another. This can range from origami folding to burpees or even typing speed races. Teams can keep track of points and agree on a prize for the winning team. ~ courtesy of teambuilding.com
2. Show & Tell
Ask remote workers to bring an item to the video call. It can be sentimental, a personal story, or have no connection at all. Ask them to tell you a story about this item in less than five minutes. ~ courtesy of teambuilding.com
3. Remote Lunch & Learn
Ask one team member each month to host a lunch & learn whereby they pick an activity of their choice and teach other members in the team about it. ~ courtesy of teambuilding.com
4. “Name That Throwback”
Ask team members to recall one of their favorite childhood songs and play less than a minute-long clip for the group. See which of your team members are the most musically knowledgeable and ask them to recall the names of the songs being played. ~ courtesy of cityhunt.com
5. “Who Is It”
Ask team members to email in a fun fact about themselves before the meeting. The facilitator should read these facts out and the teams can guess which person it is about. This is a great way for new and old teams to get to know more about each other. ~ courtesy of cityhunt.com
Remote and distributed teams can be successful across all types of industries, it simply requires a proactive plan to engage your teams differently than you would in-person. At Virtual Work Insider we believe there’s so much potential in remote work, you just need some creativity to harness it.
Contact us to bring our Building Culture in Distributed Teams workshop to your organization. All workshops are given virtually via video conference.