Survey | Top 10 Virtual Team Building Events while Working FROM HOME
It’s strange times out there for company’s and colleagues across the world. You might be noticing a bit less energy on each virtual meeting you’re hosting with your team. We’re here to make these weird times at work, a little less weird.
We talked to 72 fast growing tech companies to check-in on how they’re implementing successful WFH employee engagement strategies. These teams range from startups with 50 employees to global companies with workforces based around the world.
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The general consensus was that Office Managers, Head of Culture, Head of People and HR executives around the world are trying to find unique activities to engage their workforce while working from home.(WFH)
If this is you, just know that you’re not alone! We’re all in this together and there are some really fun and easy ways to turn the energy and engagement up in the next 30 days of the Work From Home (WFH) mandate.
The top 10 Virtual Team Building Events for your Company
Click on one to jump to the event or browse through each below. As we work with more clients on customizing new games, we will be updating this page!
1. Lip Sync Music Video Challenge
2. Jail Break
3. Miles Away
4. Morning Meditation
5. Company Wide Rube Goldberg
6. Weekly Yoga Session
7. Kitchen Sink Cooking Class
8. Journaling Workshop
9. People Trivia
10. Scavenger Hunt
11. Awkward Family Photo
There they are. The top 10 list of engaging and awesome team building events you can run while your team is working remote.
We are executing these and many more with our clients from around the world. It’s beautiful to see how teams are coming together in competition and buying into these games.
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We will break down the details and execution of each game below:
1. Lip Sync Music Video Challenge
Split your team groups of no more than 9 people. Each team will pick a song and create a virtual music video to that song. Coordinated costumes and dance routines are highly recommended.
Each team member will lip sync to the song their group chose for atleast 20 seconds. A team captain will collect all of the video clips and then submit them to The Offsite Co.
Our team then assembles each groups video clips into a produced music video.
For the final session, we all meet at Happy Hour, crack a beer or glass of wine and watch each teams music video.
Bonus: Have someone from leadership or a client account join the Happy Hour session to judge the music videos and announce a winner!
2. Jail Break
A digital escape room. Split your team into groups of no more than 10 people. Now you can make this game as complicated as you wish. We like to design several landing pages as “Rooms” and assign roles to each team member. Some can’t talk, some can’t walk, some are stuck in a room until another team member unlocks that clue.
Use Google Forms to protect the clues and send teams from “room” to “room”.
The first team to get all team members out of jail wins!
Bonus: Work in fun clues from the company culture!
3. Miles Away
A week long challenge to get your team moving forward, in the right direction.
Split your team up into smaller groups. The team to log the most miles “traveled” that week wins the gold!
4. Morning Meditation
A simple event to offer morning meditation for your group. We work and support local small businesses to execute these weekly events.
5. Company Wide Rube Goldberg
We’re going to build a company-wide digital Rube Goldberg device. Give each team member a number. Team members must know how the person before them ends their device and must coordinate with the person after them for smooth transition.
Each team member videos their Rube Goldberg at their house and sends the video clip to The Offsite Co. Our team assembles each clip and creates one massive video of the company-wide Rube Goldberg.
6. Weekly Yoga Session
Support a local small business owner and run a Yoga class weekly for your team.
Recently we did “dog yoga” - think goat yoga but with people who owns dogs. It gets really funny and allows people to introduce their best friend at home.
7. Kitchen Sink Cooking Class
A common household items cooking class. That’s right, we’re going to dig deep into the cupboards for ingredients most everyone has. We work with one of our most amazing caterers to run an online cooking class for your team.
8. Journaling Workshop
A daily journal is a powerful thing. Work with our partner and journaling ambassador, Laura Rubin, to host a group journaling workshop for your team.
9. People Trivia
Send out a survey to your team and ask everyone to submit a crazy story or something really unique about themselves that they don’t think a lot of people know about them.
Run a trivia event where people have to guess who “did that thing”. Leave some time for story telling after a few of the answers because some of these really need to be shared!
10. Scavenger Hunt
An at-home scavenger hunt. Split the group up into smaller teams and provide a list of photos and videos the team has to acquire for the hunt.
The first team to collect and submit all win!
11. Awkward Family Photo
We’re going to split your team into small groups of 4 or 5 people. Each team will come up with a theme for their awkward family photo. Individuals will take their own photo at home and send it to The Offsite Co. and our team will photoshop each Family Portrait together. These will shared and printed and shipped(eventually) when mailing packaged is more safe!
In review, we would be remiss if we failed to address a few key points in response to how our clients are managing this global pandemic:
Why are Work From Home Retreats Important
It’s more challenging than ever for ambassadors of a company’s culture to drive engagement and satisfaction in the workplace. Every single person has their own set of unique challenges when working from home.
This also means that a thoughtful approach and seamless execution is as important than ever. Half baked team building events can do more harm than good while your employees are struggling in their own ways to be successful at home.
How to get engagement but avoid “Mandatory” verbiage
You’re not alone if you’re trying to figure out how to actually get meaningful enagement after you have picked and planned a virtual team building event for your team.
This is a conversation on every single project we’re taking on at the moment. It’s important to note some teams don’t have as much of a problem with engagement in these events as others.
We like to blame leadership and make sure everyone knows this is an important event that our company is INVESTING time and money into.
Aside from that, our team specializes in bringing the fun and energy to get your team to show-up and blow-up for the virtual team building event.
Plan Your Next Virtual Team Building Event
Those are the top 10 virtual team building events we are hearing from our clients today. Each of these can be customized for your team. We recommend picking 2-3 of these and scheduling them out over the next 4 weeks.
If you’d like to explore customizing and designing one these or something totally different with our team, don’t hesitate to get in touch! We love talking team building.
These are weird times and these kind of events can make them just a bit less weird.
Start Designing Your Virtual Team Building Event Today