The Ultimate List of Virtual Team Technology Tools

10. Virtual Team Games

Virtual team games that help increase trust and enhance communication  Prelude – a creative game that builds trust in virtual teams  VirtuWall –a competitive game that helps breaks down silos  QuizBreaker – an online icebreaker quiz game for remote teams  Water Cooler Trivia – weekly office trivia questions using email or Slack  3 Easy Games (Free) – a post I wrote about 3 fun and easy remote team building activities that you can implement today Hope you found this helpful! Please contact me to let me know if there are any other tools that I might have missed. March 15, 2020

3 Fun and Easy Virtual Team Building Activities

Virtual teams can feel very lonely.

Remote employees are typically focused on their own silo, and rarely interact informally with their peers and managers like they would in a regular office. Meetings in particular can feel very transactional and dry. This is one big disadvantage of virtual teams – you lose what’s called the “water cooler” effect in a regular office, where team members bump into each other at the water cooler and talk about things unrelated to work. Although such minor interactions can be trivial, their impact is quite significant on team performance. They have a tremendous positive effect on overall team morale and happiness. So as a team leader, you should put in a concerted effort to create activities that help increase those team bonding factors.

The objective of those team building games

The objective of those virtual team building activities and games is to help you:  build trust among your team members  increase the level of cohesion and intimacy among your co-workers  learn more about your team members on a personal and professional level The activities are very simple to implement, yet have a huge return on investment for you and your team.

Who are those virtual team building activities for?

The following activities and games are designed for virtual teams of 4 or more individuals that are either just starting out (i.e., in the forming stage of team development) or have been working together for a while on a collaborative project (i.e., in the storming stage or beyond). Those activities are especially helpful for teams that work closely together and interact multiple times throughout the week by using IM software, teleconferencing, and other virtual team tools. The activities are not very applicable however, to teams that are working on short contractual work, such as a small team you hire through Upwork to design a website for you.

What you need for the virtual team building activities

You will need the following before conducting the virtual team building activities:  Dedicated time: you need to dedicate some time either at the beginning or end of a virtual status meeting, or to set up a completely separate meeting focused on the activity itself  A screen-sharing/ collaboration tool: to share your screen where everyone can see what you’re presenting on  A conferencing tool: for folks to talk and listen in (like a regular phone teleconference or a web-based audio one)  A main facilitator/ leader: who will help moderate the activity. Ideally, this would be the virtual team manager or project manager of the team Tools such as Skype, WebEx, Zoom, and GoToMeeting all work great for screen sharing and teleconferencing.

3 Virtual Team Building Activities

Here are three fun and easy virtual team building activities and games: