Employees are working from their homes and they are staying far from their teammates. The fun they used to have in the offices, they are simply missing that when they are working remotely. Since 2020, we do not have any better solution than working from home due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe they are productive but what employers are missing is employee engagement. Without the best employee engagement, there is no way to boost the growth of an organization. In order to boost the employee engagement rate and to properly motivate all employees, many HRs and employers are focusing on virtual team-building games.
You may know that every team prefers to rely on meaningful interaction. This interaction actually helps organizations in strengthening relationships with the employees, build trust, and support the personal wellbeing of each employee. Modern organizations prefer to have employees and team members who are more than just coworkers so that organizations can have great support as well as a positive remote work environment.
But creating such a bond or work environment is challenging especially when all employees are working remotely. In order to develop such a bond or work environment, more organizations are concentrating on remote socializing using virtual team-building games.
What is this virtual team building?
Virtual team building is actually an organizational practice that is all about organizing online games and activities. These games and activities are designed to provide remote employees an opportunity to properly socialize and communicate with their co-workers who rarely meet in person.
People who are working from home generally do not get the opportunities that employees get in the offices. Without the scope of work, they cannot communicate with each other. And this is creating much confusion, dissatisfaction, poor employee engagement, and so on. All these things are actually roadblocks in the growth path of an organization.
Why is remote socializing important in 2021?
Remote employees are facing many challenges as their scope of direct communication with other co-workers has reduced. They are not getting the in-office feel while performing their tasks. According to research, today’s remote employees are having weaker relationships with their colleagues in comparison with workers who work in-house. And now the majority of employees do not even have a group bonding session.
Being the HR manager or an employer, now it is your responsibility to make your remote teams engage in regular team socializing. In this way, you will be able to develop a genuine human connection with all remote workers and have better trust as well as inclusion. When employees will be involved as well as engaged, it will help you to create a better company culture. all your employees will feel valued and they will be more careful about their performance. So, now you can understand that you have to prepare schedules to socialize with all your employees without interrupting their workflow.
For successful remote socializing, HRs and employers are tending to virtual team-building games. When you too will design the same, you should remember that the games should revolve around actual activities instead of just a ‘chit-chat’ session. It will help you to focus on more eh employee properly and each one will be more involved. It is also effective in reducing the stress and work pressure of employees.
Best virtual team building games you can actually play with your remote teams
- Revealing Quiz- It will be the easiest game creation for an HR. All you need to do is just prepare a list of questions and answers via a PPT (so that you can present one by one later). You can explore the top current affairs sites, general knowledge sites, sports, and so on. You should prepare the quiz list with a variety of questions so that all your employees get something of their interest. After making a PPT type file in this way, you can use that while playing online. You can conduct a video conference, play, and decide and declare the winner. They should be gifts for the winners so that they get interested as well as motivation to join the game even the next time.
In order to play this game with all your employees, you may have to spend a maximum of 15-20 minutes. So, based on their break schedules and by considering other facts, you should schedule the quiz game and have fun with all.
- Photo of life– Now nearly everyone captures pictures using their smartphones. Some people also have a passion for photography and the amazing equipment for that. You can ask your employees to share their favorite pictures and you can set a topic also otherwise selecting the best picture will be tough for you. You can also ask your employees to provide a short story for each picture and it will also be more engaging for them. In this way, you will actually provide them an opportunity to share their favorite moments or passion with the office buddies. When a person can express more about themselves in an environment, that environment becomes a comfort zone for him/her.
It will also help in knowing each other better. Newly hired employees will be most benefited when old ones will know about them and vice versa.
- Coffee meeting- Maybe you already know the benefits of scrum meetings. It is the most important thing in scrum project management. In order to maintain the standard of the work, you have to follow the agile ceremony. In order to play this game or meeting, you do not need prior preparation or a lot of budgets. Just ask the group of teams or team members to have the morning coffee and join the meeting. You can do a little chit-chat, know who is going to do what on that day, motivate all, and start the work. Here, you should well take care of the time; you should not spend a lot of time on this game or meeting.
- Words with friends- The ‘Words with Friends’ game is popular all across the world. Even there is an app available in the market. You can take the help of that app and you can organize everything on your own. It is a pretty simple task. You can easily organize team matches, grouping your colleagues, and let them collaborate perfectly. In this way, everyone will be in touch with each other and fully concentrate on the work and they will forget about their work stress.
- Code break- If you know that your team prefers to play brain games, this type of game can be their favorite. You can let your teams solve trivia, riddles, puzzles, and so on. If you know that your teams prefer to play Virtual team-building Games and they and competitive enough, you can easily conduct code break games and play with a group of teams or with just one team.
- Virtual games- due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the popularity of Virtual team-building Games has reached the sky. There are a lot of new and old virtual games that you can actually play in order to boost your employee engagement especially when they are working from home. But while choosing the Virtual team-building games, you should be a bit choosy. It is not that all types of Virtual team-building games are best for your organization. Before selecting the games, you should read the details and analyze that the game will be a perfect fit for your teams or not. There are some games that leading organizations prefer to play online such as Pictionary, Draw the picture, Charades, and so on. You can prepare the game list according to your choice and have amazing virtual gaming time with your staff.
- 3 truths and a lie- The team leader or the human resource management professional can conduct a video conference and ask all employees to participate. Here, each employee will tell three truths and one lie. The lie should be realistic so that it can become hard for everyone to guess. Other employees will identify which one is a ‘lie’ among the four statements of each employee.
This game is truly light and fun and here you will not even require any tool. It is actually an opportunity for all your employees to help each other a bit better. Newcomers will know more about the old ones and the old ones will express their bond with each other and automatically create a comfortable environment for the newly joined employees.
- Movie night- there are a lot of organizations that used to take employees on vacation, dine-outs, and so on in order to keep all employees truly engaged as well as satisfied. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no such opportunity. But you can surely arrange a movie night for all your employees. You can collect the top move names and ask for votes from your employees.
You can stream the movie based on the vote using video conference calls and keep all your employees rightly engaged and entertained. While watching the movie, the users should also get an instant messaging option so that they can do some chit-chat with other employees even without losing interest in the movie.
This is one of the extremely helpful Virtual team-building Games or bond-building practices that has helped many organizations during this pandemic period to stay positive, connected, and relaxed.
- Donut conversation- In order to play this game with all your employees, you will not even require a lot of time. It is a Slack extension game. It is effective in pairing team members for one to two weeks so that employees can have one-to-one conversations out of the work. They will get some ways to know their co-workers better and stay relaxed.
It helps employees to have some conversation out of work. Employees do not love to discuss work only. Some fun and other conversations will help them to laugh together and spend amazing virtual time together. It will nourish the relationship between employees and the organization will enjoy more employee engagement.
- Share a memorable experience- this is one of the easiest Virtual team-building Games that any HR can conduct without taking the help of any additional tool. Just via a video conferencing call, you can take all team members online and spend some time together virtually.
Each member of the team will share one memorable experience of their life and others will listen. They can have some discussion. In order to play some games online, you have to spend a bit more time. So, when the team has less work pressure and team members have free time, you can conduct such a game session and keep everyone truly engaged.
By playing such a game, your employees will also be happy. They will feel that your organization is really excited to listen to their experiences, they will feel more valued at your place.
You can play these top office team-building games in 2021 as the pandemic is not over and when the rest of the world will be normal life before is still unknown to us. Many companies have decided to continue the remote work regime even when the pandemic will be over. If you too are planning to do the same you should prepare a long list of games that you can play around the year. For now, these 10 fun activities for employees working from home will work the best.
These Virtual team-building Games are amazing to boost employee engagement and employee retention rate. For overall hr management, you can take the help of any HR management software such as HRMWARE. Enabling HRMWARE is easy; all you need to do is just enable a subscription plan and get the benefits from the next minute. HRMWARE is also available free of cost for organizations that are running with up to ten employees. From now small companies and startups can do better employee management with advanced HRMS software named HRMWARE.