#1 “Little Known Facts About Me” The objective of this game is to connect with your team members on a personal level. Most virtual teams don’t have a lot of time to mingle or chit-chat, so this game is great because your team members can open up and learn about each other’s backgrounds. Here’s how it works: Ask each team member to send 3 personal facts about them only to you as the facilitator. They should send this information to you a few days before the meeting so you have enough time to consolidate it. It is important to tell the team members that those facts should not be related to their current job (and preferably not known to other members of the team) to make it more fun. You will then enter those facts in a spreadsheet in random order. On the day of the meeting, you can then share the spreadsheet on a screen, and ask each team member to guess who that fact belongs to. The spreadsheet will look something like this (I’m showing only 3 team members here for simplicity):
You would start with fact 1 at the top by reading it aloud and asking each of the team members to guess who they think that fact belongs to by speaking up. You’ll then type those guesses in the spreadsheet while sharing it on a screen where everyone can see. Once that row is complete, you’ll move on to the next fact, and so on. After filling in all of the rows, you can start at the top again and start filling in the right answers in the “Correct Answer” column. Asking the person with the associated fact to speak to it a bit is always amusing. At the end, you as the facilitator can then tally up the scores of all the different team members to see who got the most guesses correctly. This is a lot more fun than it actually sounds, because as you go through the facts, the guesses by the team are hilarious. And the facts you find out would reveal quite a bit about each team member’s background. #2 “Video Roundtable” The objective of this game is to increase the level of intimacy among your virtual team members. Video conferencing is one of the least utilized features of remote teams, yet it is one of the most important to build trust. I think people shy away from using video because they are just generally uncomfortable with it, or they’re just too busy to “fix themselves up” to be camera ready (and prefer to keep working in their PJs – like me � ). However, video conferencing is a great way to increase the level of cohesion among your team. In the Pyramid of Communication (where the higher up the pyramid, the more intimate the team is), video conferencing is only a couple of levels below the best form of communication: face-to-face.
