5 Activities to Make a Virtual Office Fun

No matter where you work, your productivity will often rely on the people you work with. Teams are built to help individuals support one another, increase productivity, and maximise opportunities to generate revenue. At one point in our lives, we have all been part of a team, and understand each one is different from another. Some teams are fun and effective, many are mundane while others fall under more toxic and stressful categories. Whether you are leading or participating as a team member,everyone has a responsibility to make the team as cohesive and productive as possible.

Team cohesion is easier to achieve when you have all team members working closely with each other. In the common office setting, communication is quite natural, tasks are delegated with more efficiency, and completion of projects isusually achieved faster than when people work apart from each other.

In these changing times and facing a global crisis, most industries if not all have had to transition to a virtual setup, giving teams the opportunity to continue operating under ‘work from home’ situations. Personally, this set up has plenty of benefits, including a more relaxed environment. It helps individuals become more motivated and work more efficiently because of the reduced stress from traffic and the preparation time to reach the office. For the teams, however, this more relaxed set up can mean challenges in communication, effectivity, and overall success.

Since true success depends on how cohesive your team is, here are a few activities for team building you can do with your team while working remotely from each other!

1. Virtual Tours

An effective team is one where the members are comfortable working with one another. This activity aims to let team members show a part of themselves that the team do not normally see when working in the office.

Have each team member film a short video of themselves giving a virtual tour of their home office, bedroom, or house, showing off some of their favourites objects, pets or just places to relax and work.

This is an effective exercise because getting to know your teammates on a more personal level will let you feel more comfortable and increase motivation and productivity in the team.

2. Guessing Games

Since getting to know your teammates hugely helps in building camaraderie even in remote situations, guessing games will be a perfect addition to the list of activities you will be doing with your team.

Guessing personal facts are one of the most famous and easiest games to play. This will help team members learn what each other’s interested in outside of work.

You can do this by having each team member send you personal facts and have them compiled in a document that will be shared with everybody once completed. After that, each team member will try to guess which team member sent the fact in! This game can also be played through a group video chat, making it more fun since all the guesses and reactions will be seen real-time!

3. Meme time

It’s 2020, and one of the most common forms of quick entertainment come from memes on the internet. There is no better way to build team camaraderie and cohesion than making sure that every member is having fun!

Set aside a few minutes of each day to allow your team members to share their favorite memes. Aside from giving your team a fun time, this also allows everyone to learn something new about what everybody finds entertaining.

Allowing your team members to share a piece of their humour will let them become more comfortable with each other.

4. Storyline

Successful teams are ones who work with camaraderie and collaboration. This activity will fire up your team members’ collaborative spirits and help everyone get comfortable in brainstorming and sharing their ideas on projects in the long run.

Form a virtual circle for yourselves by listing down your team members in a random order, circling back to the first person. The activity’s goal is to have a story created equally by each team member. Every person in the circle will get to give one sentence each until the story comes to a full stop.

By the end of the story, each person will have given a part of the story, no matter how comprehensive it is or not!

The activity promotes collaboration and development of active listening skills that will be helpful in building effective communication within the team.

5. “That’s Right Bob”

A funny extension to the storyline activity, ‘That’s Right Bob’ is an activity to help your team get a bigger kick out of creating a comprehensive storyline.

This activity runs as if you are a team of newsroom anchors, telling the wildest and craziest story you can come up with. Similar to the storyline activity, form a virtual circle by randomly listing the order of people who will be giving their part of the news.

Begin the game by having one team member sharing a simple news headline with no more than a sentence or two. The next person will then respond with, “That’s right, (team member’s name)”, repeats the original line, and adds their twist to it.

You can play this game until the story runs unbearably long or when you feel that there should be a change in setting and call for a commercial break.

This activity is a wonderful way of letting your team tap into their creativity and engage them by allowing them to speak and share their ideas.

There are plenty more ways you can help build camaraderie and cohesion with your teammates, and they are not just limited to the activities listed above.

Let yourselves have fun with the activities and help each other avoid getting exhausted from your virtual office set up!Just doing activities like this can act as a real ice breaker or can help to breakdown any particular interpersonal  issues so the team can work effectively.

Leadership Coaching in Sydney, Carrie Benedet, can help guide you be a leader in a remote setting, send me a message if you need assistance.