Each week, team leaders ask thought-provoking, reflective, or fun questions that encourage employees to engage in meaningful dialogue and share personal insights. This approach fosters a stronger sense of community and belonging, helping employees feel more connected to the team, despite working from different locations. Remember, the goal of virtual team building is to have fun, but it’s also to improve the company culture and strengthen your remote workforce. By measuring its impact, you can easily determine if your virtual team building activity was a success and make adjustments for future events if you don’t see the results you want. Confetti’s menu of holiday-themed virtual team building games offers a ton of fun and festive ways for your remote teams to celebrate the season together.
Activities like virtual lunches, leadership chats, and wellness check-ins create a workplace culture where remote workers feel supported and engaged, leading to greater job satisfaction and team success. Implementing meaningful remote employee engagement strategies helps bridge the gap by fostering trust, collaboration, and a strong sense of belonging. These activities are more than just “nice-to-haves”—they are critical to ensuring remote teams feel valued, supported, and aligned with organizational goals. Creating opportunities for connection and recognition helps remote employees feel like an integral part of the organization.
If someone on your team is passionate about a specific topic, ask if they would speak about it during a team meeting, or invite an external expert to present. It can be over a breakfast or lunch meeting, it’s up to your organization, but the important factor is the interaction between the team. You can add a quick quiz at the end and provide small awards for the winners, depending on your budget.
It’s a form of online trivia game your team will be eager to be a part of. This is the virtual team-building activity you didn’t know your team needed. Present a real business challenge your team is facing—improving a customer touchpoint, streamlining an internal process, and enhancing team communication. Divide participants into small groups of 3-5 people on a video call and create 4-5 rounds of questions with different themes. Use breakout rooms for team discussions, then have teams submit answers via Google Forms or in chat.
- Split everyone into two teams, then privately message a word to the first drawer.
- After each session, add the recording and any resources to a shared folder so people can reference it later.
- Perfect for virtual or hybrid teams, this fast-paced game features an onscreen host, lively visuals, and all the nostalgic sights and sounds of the original show.
Virtual Coworking
This tangible act of reliance makes it one of the most direct activities that build teamwork by creating a powerful metaphor for psychological safety and mutual support within a team. Have everyone on your team share one goal (work-related or personal) that they would like to accomplish that day or make a challenge to another colleague. By sharing common purposes, your employees will learn more about each other and their drives.
Virtual Learning And Development Programs
Understanding these impacts helps organizations make the most of their remote work practices. Virtual talent shows or open mic sessions are performance-based events where team members voluntarily showcase their unique skills. This can include singing, playing an instrument, stand-up comedy, poetry, magic tricks, or any other creative talent. These events celebrate individual creativity, build personal connections, and foster a culture of appreciation for the diverse abilities within the team. By focusing on employee feedback and carving out time to implement their requests, you demonstrate care and invite a more equitable work environment. When employees feel seen and heard, there’s more room for real authentic connection.
This is one of the most effective virtual team engagement activities for creating a vibrant and connected remote culture. You can discover more ideas in this detailed guide to virtual employee engagement activities. Additionally, fostering a sense of support within a virtual team can be challenging, as the absence of in-person connection may lead to feelings of isolation or loneliness. And without proactive team-building efforts, the lack of shared physical space often reduces the natural opportunities for bonding, impacting both engagement and morale.
For MatchTruly reviews many, COVID-19 shone a spotlight on taken-for-granted elements of their facilitation practice. Throughout, we explored how community-engaged practitioners drew on ethical commitments as anchors to adapt their community-engaged facilitation practice online during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is in keeping with Gaztambide-Fernández and Matute (2013)’s understanding of pedagogy as always informed by an ethical imperative. These Zoom team-building games or Microsoft Teams bonding exercises help remote teams overcome isolation, improve communication skills, and boost employee morale—all while having genuine fun together.
Special acknowledgement to other team members, Naima Raza, Angie Aranda, Heather Hermant, Eva Hellreich, Jennifer Esmail, and June Larkin for their contributions. Thank you to partners Neighbourhood Arts Network, the Youth Research Lab, the Centre for Community Partnerships Office, and Gendering Adolescent AIDS Prevention at New College, University of Toronto. Labour issues were compounded by unique privacy, confidentiality, and safety issues. The blurred boundaries between private and public spheres created ethical challenges for practitioners and participants alike, especially for those with children at home.