The remote work culture seems a new thing due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But in reality, it has been in existence for a long time. Even before the industrial revolution, the remote work regime had entered the genre but was not this popular. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of leading companies have enabled remote work for a specific tenure to boost productivity and manage the workforce properly. But the pandemic has made it a mandatory thing. Without any doubt, the remote work process brings a lot of benefits to a business organization but also there are some cons as well. In order to shed these cons, many organizations are focusing more on the best virtual team building activities.
While running a workforce remotely, a lot of organizations suffer from poor employee engagement and lack of productivity. Even after enabling the best hrm software, employee management software, it feels something is missing and employees are not feeling refreshed to connect virtually day by day. In order to solve such a suffocating situation, experts suggest trying the best virtual team building activities. This is a small yet super effective attempt to keep employees engaged and boost their relationships with each other.
Maybe you are thinking about how these activities can help you when you are enabling big things to make all employees well balanced with your requirements. So, explore the benefits of virtual team building activities to make everything digestible.
Benefits of virtual team building activities
Regular virtual team building activities are truly helpful in adapting new remote work lifestyles easily. It effectively eliminates the negative impact of online remote work culture such as messing work time with personal time, loneliness, and added stress due to the ongoing global health crisis.
According to Gallup, virtual team building activities help in many ways to boost employee performance. It can reduce employee absenteeism to 41% and let an organization get up to 21% of increased profitability.
- Employee morale boost
If you constantly remind your team to work and obey the deadline, after a time, it can cause disengagement and burnout. Instead of simply reminding them about their tasks or warning them to follow deadlines, it will be better if you encourage them. Inspiration, employee engagement, and proper guidance go a long way and make the team function cohesively. In order to make all team members perform properly and stay engaged, HRs and team leaders go for various virtual team building activities. Activities like online meetings, group discussions, casual meetups, and so many other things are there to empower the team members with positive reinforcement and make everyone feel valued.
In this way, employees gain mutual respect for each other and develop standard employee morale. Mutual respect and high employee morale easily remove all internal conflicts.
- Better workforce collaboration
In order to complete projects and get success, it is truly important to have combined team efforts. A project cannot be completed on time if there is no opportunity to collaborate with each other. Nearly most projects are interdependent and require solid collaboration between all resources. When employees are working in an office, it is easy to communicate with all teams and team members and do the needful to accelerate the project. But when everyone is working from home, there is a high chance of discrepancies in communication.
Via various team building activities, employees easily learn how to collaborate better with each other and do the needful according to the requirement of the time. When employees stay connected with coworkers, they discuss and share ideas and work cohesively. In a team, everyone knows who is able to, i.e. strengths and weaknesses of each employee will be known by all, and task distribution will be easier for the team leader and project manager. When tasks get distributed properly and proper employee collaboration takes place, saving time, cost, effort becomes easier than ever while maintaining a high quality of the work.
- Room for innovation management
Innovation is the master key to gain a competitive advantage in an industry. Virtual team building activities are really effective in bringing all team members under a single roof. It promotes creativity, brainstorming ability, and fosters innovation. When employees are under a single roof, they will share as well as discuss ideas and it can generate a breakthrough innovation for a firm.
A truly organized innovation management strategy is really helpful in boosting team collaboration and allows people to better interact, share, and receive constructive feedback. In this way, you will make all your employees look via the lens of innovation, and automatically, they will become more involved in achieving the defined goals of your organization.
- Increased productivity and versatility
If all teams cannot collaborate rightly, there is a high chance of lower productivity as employees do not get clear directions to achieve defined goals. Via virtual team building activities, it is really easy to explain everything with more clarity.
When your employees will get a sense of purpose, it will motivate them to go the miles extra in order to achieve goals. It will also help in improving the resource pool’s performance and you do not need to face any unnecessary employee burnout.
Apart from this, having a versatile workforce is effective in responding quickly to development changes that take place over time. Best virtual team building activities are helpful in enhancing resource skills and expertise. It also creates a safe zone for employees where they can take new challenges and make mistakes without fearing repercussions.
- Positive work culture development
The best virtual team building activities actually help in ensuring that all employees have truly clear insights and visibility of all ongoing work. Apart from this, it is also helpful in making all employees truly accountable and as a result, they offer quality work.
Routine-wise catch-ups and work-related discussions leave a significant influence on employees. And as a result, creating a positive environment becomes possible. Positive work culture is effective in keeping employees engaged, productive, and increasing the employee retention rate.
When the best virtual team building activities bring these many benefits, why not know some exciting team building activities now! There are a lot of amazing team-building activities that you can play with your virtual teams. We have chosen some best virtual team building activities that you can enjoy with your teams without investing a lot of time.
Best virtual team building activities for business organizations
- Online office games
There are various types of interesting online games that you can play with your team. Quiz, truth and false, scavenger hunts, and so many virtual games are there. According to your team preferences and available time, you can choose the best virtual team building game.
Without any doubt, online office games are truly energetic and competitive. These games produce better collaboration between all employees. Many virtual game participants accept that these games are really helpful in keeping employees engaged as well as refreshed. While having a video conferencing call, you can play these games. Most games are free and easy to access.
- An online lunch date
This is a real-time fun game that you can play with your team. No added tool is required in order to play this game. Just a video conferencing call is enough to have fun with your entire team. During lunchtime, you can have a video conference with your entire team and chit-chat. Employees can join from their favorite cafe or from home and spend a good time with their workmates.
- Memorable picture sharing
Great employee engagement starts with knowing teammates better. But when you run an organization virtually, there is little chance of knowing each other. But good relationships with each other are truly important to boost the strengths and eliminate weaknesses over time.
You can ask your employees to share their memorable pictures with the rest of the team. You can have some conversation regarding that image. In this way, each one of the team will know better about that person.
This is basically a small task that requires zero to little effort. When employees want to know more about each other, automatically the entire team remains connected.
- Two truths and one lie
This is another interesting game that nearly all employees will like. Just a video conference call is enough to play this game with the team. You can set the time span according to your choice and engage all employees.
In this game, each member has to provide three statements about them. Two statements will be true and one will be wrong. The rest of the members will find out the wrong statement. Such a game actually helps in knowing each employee better. It will also reveal who knows other teammates better. When they know each other better and have a fun time, they stay more engaged, refreshed, and more productive.
- Healthy lifestyle challenge
The remote work process brings a lot of benefits for both employees and employers. But it also brings certain problems such as prolonged sitting, messing with personal and private life, poor sleep, disturbance to the biological clock, and so many other things. On the other hand, previously employees used to walk and use vehicles to reach their workplaces but now they are joining the office from home. All these things are simply ruining the daily life of employees and affecting their health.
Many companies are taking initiatives in order to keep their employees healthy and super productive. Healthy employees take less sick leaves and stay maximum productive. There are various free and paid health tracking tools that you can ask your employees to check their health conditions. You can ask them to follow some healthy habits such as drinking required water to stay hydrated, eating vegetables, walking for a specific time, and so on. There will be a calendar where everything will be noted and whoever follows all the best practices, should get a reward from the organization.
- Typing speed race
There are various typing speed checkers that you can actually use for fun. You can ask all your teammates to join in the typing speed test race. You can select a specific time. After finishing the race, each team member will share their score in a group and you can easily find the winner of the typing speed race.
The typing speed race will not require a lot of time. Just 5 to 10 minutes is enough to engage all team members and see the winner. Participants will post their typing speed score screenshot in the group and the winner will be decided instantly.
- Virtual shows and discussion
It is true that nearly all ideas are available on the internet. If you want to do something unique, you have to discuss it with your team. You can schedule virtual shows to have detailed discussions about their wellbeing. There, you can discuss new virtual team building ideas to keep your entire team engaged.
When team members will discuss together, they will surely find some unique ideas for better team building. Playing something new is always helpful in keeping employees refreshed, motivated, and engaged.
These are the best virtual team building activities that any remote organization can follow to keep their employees truly engaged and motivated all time. Choosing the most effective virtual team building ideas is tough as it starts with deeply understanding your own team and market trends while keeping a close eye on the emerging changes.
Conclusion
Only collecting the best virtual team building ideas is not going to help you until you organize everything properly. You should ensure that all your team members are enjoying virtual team building activities and getting engaged. Apart from this, we can say that if you are enabling some games, there should be a reward too. The reward policy is really effective to keep your team members interested in joining in these team building activities. The remote work regime is effective in many ways but the constant threat of the pandemic is making the situation more complicated. And that’s why it will be better if you handle it with added care.