Team building Essentials: A Wide Variety of Events You Better Know

Do you miss the time when you could grab a drink with your colleagues after work for trivia nights? You didn't talk about work, you just had fun and found out about each other's lives.

What about the time when your team went on a field trip in nature? You could escape from the environment you spend everyday life in and go somewhere else. You and your colleagues could naturally bond with each other through adventurous and shared experiences.

With this unprecedented pandemic, these team building activities are taking a pause now.

After talking to different people working remotely, 98% of companies are not doing in-person team building activities anymore. And many people say that they don't interact with colleagues at all except for meetings or work conversations.

We feel disappointed to hear that. It is more important than ever to build your team culture, collaborate, and have a healthy work environment. Cheer up y'all! You can still build a fun digital work environment starting here!

We've discovered different kinds of events you can do so that your team starts feeling and functioning like one again.

Events that encourage communication

Zoom Debate

Having friendly arguments on critical topics to your business can help you understand your colleague's viewpoints, learn how to better communicate with them, and also practice giving opposite opinions or negative feedbacks that may happen at work. You can also host debate sessions with other teams for friendly competition.

Interactive Conversations

The first and last 5 minutes of any conference call is often the most important. This is when the socializing and team cohesion happens, so if you can't ask people to log in early, bake this into the call.

• Take turns to tell two truths and one lie and make the others guess the lie.
• Share one thing that one person appreciates about another colleague.
• Ask your colleagues questions "about me" like your favorite Mexican food or number of siblings you have, and get to know each other.

Above are the examples of interactive conversation games you could have to better understand more about your colleagues and to build bonds with each other.

Events that involve problem solving

Simulation

You can simply start by posting an imaginary problem and setting a few rules such as time restriction and goal. Since it is a simulation with zero real risks, your team can feel free to do anything and propose any fun results. Simulation of real-life problems, which can be related to business or day-to-day life, can spike collaboration, logical thinking, and decision-making abilities for your team.

Virtual Survival/Escape Games

Who says we can't do escape rooms or survival games in a virtual setting? There are tons of resources online that will help you organize a virtual game session for experiencing survival and escape games, which are the most interesting activities for team building. For instance, The Escape Room offers virtual escape rooms and Outback Team Building offers a virtual clue murder mystery activity.

Events that inspire creativity

Office Pictionary

It's always fun to play Pictionary games because you can see how different the mind of each of your colleagues can go for the same image and you can also inspire each other to be more creative.

• Split your team into half
• Write down a list of words.
• Let the first group draw and the other group guess.

Drawing is always an authentic way to stimulate creativity. With tools that have a whiteboard and drawing pen features, such as Piccles and Vibe, you can easily generate this activity for your team.

Improv Games

Improvisation can be very interesting for team building activities to bring laughter and fun into a team. Improv games can encourage you and your colleagues to step out of their comfort zone, to be freer of expressing themselves, and to improve creative thinking. The event host can assign different scenarios based on what your team likes and you can use famous movie scenarios as references as well!

We've discovered different kinds of events you can do so that your team starts feeling and functioning like one again.

• Don't organize events only for your team. Welcome, everyone else in the company to join and build a better connection.
• Provide treats or rewards for games you plan to do at these events to encourage participation and engagement!
• Treat these activities as real events. Have a clear agenda and plan for everything ahead of time!

How do these ideas sound to you? I hope that you find them fun and interesting and that you can't wait to adopt some of them soon! As we all know, a better team environment is crucial for work performance and success. Starting to invest in team-building events also shows the company's commitment to a better workplace. So, don't wait. Get started!?

Thank you for reading!