Ideas for Online Team Building Activities

Image credit: https://www.pexels.com/@matilda-wormwood

In the moment—and long afterward—the COVID-19 crisis brought several changes to the way the world lives and works.

What seemed like a temporary shift to working from home for many people turned into a much longer stint of working from wherever than anyone expected. Some teams hadn’t returned to the office at all after six months—and some may never return to the office. Further, some teams who have shifted back to working in an office setting have found their structure vastly different than what they’d experienced in the before-coronavirus days: Companies have spaced out personnel to improve distance and have decided to alternate employees’ days in the office and at home to reduce office density.

Whatever the new work order, teambuilding events that once took place in the office with everyone already assembled in one place—or even at locations not far from the office, including bars, restaurants, and event spaces—no longer have the same allure or even viability.

My company, FrogDog, shifted to a distributed workforce structure in 2018, long before the COVID-19 crisis. At that time and during the crisis, I fielded several questions from other business leaders about how to coordinate work and keep everyone connected when people work in different locations.

When it comes to more relaxed events designed for teambuilding and rapport creation, the FrogDog crew has had several opportunities over the years to find methods that bring us together and make us feel like a united front. Also, I’ve discovered several teambuilding ideas that other companies have developed in response to the COVID-19 crisis that I’ve kept in the back of my mind as possibilities for the future.

An important note: If you truly want to focus on teambuilding with members who work from different locations, you should avoid calling your team—and these teambuilding events—“remote,” “virtual,” or “distant.” Though this could feel like a word-choice quibble to you, language matters. When you call people or events by these terms, you by nature reduce their value, change the perception people have of themselves or the event, and contradict the idea of teambuilding. After all, do you want actual teambuilding or just “virtual” team building? For this reason, we prefer the term “distributed” at FrogDog—as do many other companies that have fully distributed workforces like ours.

Ready for the ideas already? Gotcha. Here are a few tried-and-tested fantastic options for teambuilding events and activities for distributed workforces:

Hold a Book Club

Even before the FrogDog crew transitioned to a fully distributed team, we held a quarterly book club that’s voluntary for anyone who wants to participate. Given the activity’s popularity, we kept it going via Microsoft Teams even after we moved to working from wherever.

Me prepping for the October 2019 FrogDog book club with tea and my book club read of the quarter. Lausanne, Switzerland. October 21, 2019.

The person choosing the book rotates through participants and the company buys the books (of course). For the FrogDog book club, the books suggested need to have relevance to business or marketing in some way.

A quarterly book club gives everyone in the company a chance to meet on a regular basis in an informal fashion, catch up, discuss ideas, and build rapport.

(Need a starting point for what to read? The FrogDog team shared a list of some of our favorite book-club books in our coronavirus-crisis center on the company website.)

Attend a Conference

Almost every conference that didn’t cancel during the COVID-19 crisis moved to an on-line format.

At FrogDog, we saw this shift to on-line events as a huge win. On-line conferences helped us extend our continuing education budget, even when the events kept their ticket prices the same. (After all, when you don’t have to buy airfare, pay for hotels and food, and all the rest, you can save money on peripherals and pay more for the education—or even do more educational events.)

For one teambuilding event during the crisis, the crew choose to attend a two-day industry conference. Everyone chose their own streams and sessions to attend, just as they would at any other conference. The week after the event, we had a Teams meeting with all attendees to share key learnings and discuss how to apply them to our work for the company and for our clients.

Me attending an on-line conference from home. The rest of the FrogDog team attended the same conference and we hobnobbed afterward over shared learnings. July 14, 2020.

Attending an on-line conference provides a learning opportunity for everyone, creates a team event in that everyone knows they’ve all joined the conference together (even if in different sessions), and breaks up the regular routine for something new, different, and mind-expanding. And the resulting ideas conversation and impressions-sharing session further helped build team and community.

Gather a Happy Hour

At FrogDog, we try to hold teambuilding events as much as possible during working hours, so that people don’t need to sacrifice family-and-friends time and general downtime for work-related functions. Also, given time zone differences between team members in our distributed workforce, happy hours haven’t really made sense.

That said, I know of many companies and teams that have held happy hours via Zoom and Teams and other platforms to great success. Some companies even have had everyone share their favorite cocktail recipe with the group. You could even swap the happy hour for a catch-session over coffee (or tea!) any time of the day.

Unstructured meetings like these can give everyone a breather and a bit of time to relax together.

Conduct a Lunch ‘n’ Learn

If you’d often bring in lunch to have someone on the team or a guest speaker give educational talks, kick off a new initiative with a presentation, or simply inform everyone on updates to operational matters—as we did at FrogDog when we all worked in our former shared office—you can maintain the lunch ‘n’ learn events even with everyone working from wherever.

Send lunches or snacks, depending on the time of day, to everyone in the meeting and encourage them to eat while the presenter gives her talk and shares her slides or video or whatever else would normally happen in a conference room. These days, you can get pretty much anything delivered to any given location. Further, if the presentation or discussion involves activities or handouts, you can easily deliver or conduct them via Zoom or Teams. These platforms have even made breaking the larger group into smaller teams for exercises easy.

Play a Game

We had game afternoons at FrogDog in our former office setting, and I know many other companies have played board and card games with their teams as well. You can continue these board-game traditions even with a distributed team.

Though many games haven’t yet developed viable options for people playing from different locations, some games work well via Teams or Zoom. Pictionary, given the whiteboards built into videoconferencing software, makes for a huge hit.

Also, I’ve heard of corporate teams playing on-line versions of mahjong and even poker. These two options may require a bit more know-how or training for everyone to play with confidence, yet if you have a team with the knowledge or the interest, why not give it a try?

Celebrate

If you used to hold parties to celebrate company wins and milestones or even team member birthdays, why stop just because everyone has moved to a distributed-work structure? You can still gather the group to celebrate via a Teams or Zoom meeting—and you can even send everyone a goodie bag, treat, or commemorative item.

We send shareable (with family, friends, or neighbors) birthday treats to each employee at his or her home address or work location and often have a Teams meeting to sing happy birthday or have a relaxed birthday chat on or around the birthday date. (I say “around the date” because some people—including me!—take a day off for a birthday present each year.)

For other celebrations, many companies have had boxes of silly fun or even commemorative items and certificates sent to team members to celebrate milestones, goals achieved, and beyond. You can even ask everyone not to open what they’ve received until the Zoom or Teams meeting, when everyone joins in and unveils their surprises together.

And if you need to take your party up a notch to truly honor a major milestone—or celebrate the end of the year and holiday season—check out my list of ideas for distributed-team celebrations.

More Ideas for Distributed Team Building Events?

Have you held a great teambuilding event for your distributed team?

We all need new ideas—including (and perhaps especially!) those of us who have worked in distributed structures for years. Please share!

P.S.—And if you’d like other how-to guidance and ideas for working within a distributed structure, I’ve created a repository of articles for distributed workforces.