Removing barriers: 5 team building activities for your distributed team

One of the few advantages of a brick and mortar workplace is that colleagues get multiple opportunities to interact with each other and form social bonds. It is natural to socialise at cafeterias and water coolers, social and cultural events. 

However, when your office is remote and meetings are virtual, team building requires a little more innovation than just foosball and monthly coffee meetings. According to this survey by Buffer, the top two challenges faced by remote workers include “barriers to communication & collaboration” and “loneliness”.

Luckily, the right team building activities can help solve both of these problems. When members of a distributed team participate in virtual team building activities, it builds bonds of trust and empathy between them. Team members understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. As a result, teams experience increased productivity, better collaboration, and a marked increase in employee engagement. 

Struggling to find an activity that will help erode the cultural and geographical barriers amongst your team members? Here’s a list of 5 universally popular team building activities: 

Virtual escape room

Clues, competition, and camaraderie; a virtual escape room is the perfect combination of all three. Participants are divided into teams, which must then compete against each other across a variety of challenges. The challenges mostly include solving puzzles and riddles. The team that is able to complete all the challenges in the least amount of time wins, or “escapes the room”. Here’s a list of some very popular virtual escape rooms.

Virtual pictionary

There’s something about poorly drawn illustrations that makes us inevitably smile. Much like real life pictionary, one team member tries to illustrate the word on the virtual paint board, while the others take turns guessing. Skribbl.io, Let’sDraw.It, and Brightful are all great multiplayer games.

Two truths and a lie

Here is one team building game that never fails to break the ice between members of a distributed team. Just as the name suggests, each member of the group introduces themselves by stating two truths and one lie about themselves. The rest of the participants then guess which statement is the lie. In addition to being a great alternative for the usual introduction, it also gives team members a brief insight into the personal lives of their team members. 

Gatheraround

What if you could find a way to make sharing easy and effortless? That’s exactly what Gatheraround does. The game lets team members answer random questions based on a particular theme. It’s USP lies in its easy to use interface and carefully curated questions. Gatheraround offers an entire list of themes to choose from, ranging from “All-Hands Social” to mixers for various communities.

Mad, glad, sad retrospective

Although a tool devised for the improvement of project management, the mad-glad-sad-retrospective exercise makes its way into our list due to its sheer simplicity. Team members take turns discussing 3 things in the previous sprint/work week; one that made them mad, one that made them glad, and one that made them sad. Apart from being a great way for team members to share their emotions, it also enables leaders to understand team dynamics.

Still wondering if there are any tangible benefits of investing into team building activities? According to this Gallup research, virtual team building activities lead to an increase in employee performance rate, resulting in 41% lower absenteeism and 21% higher profitability. So the next time you think about skipping that Fun Friday session, remember that it impacts your bottom line directly. 

Take your pick from our list of fun and easily executable team building activities. You can thank us later!

At Talent500, we help companies build, manage, and scale their distributed teams.  With our best-in-class benefits, managing a remote team becomes easy with us as your EOR. We leverage a host of community activities, learning and development initiatives, and many more methods to help bolster employee engagement. To know how we can help you achieve this goal, book a consultation online.