When was the last time you did something worthy of praise for your employees and not your business or clients? Most business owners tend to neglect the employees’ welfare, which eventually reflects in reduced productivity.
2020 has been one of the most disruptive years, and many organisations were forced to adopt the work-from-home model. How to keep remote teams connected is one of the biggest challenges in the modern era. It even gets harder when you want to come up with team building activities for your remote team.
To help you out, we decided to link up with our expert, Alex Lysak, to elaborate on work from home engagement activities you can consider.
How beneficial is it to work from home?
Going to a physical workplace to meet with your boss is no longer fashionable in a world where people are maintaining social distance. You may be in an industry that allows employees to work comfortably from anywhere. However, you are tasked with devising ways of managing remote workers.
However, as much as working at home is beneficial to both the company and the employees; as a business owner or manager, you may want to know how you can keep up with the traditional culture of engaging in team-building activities.
The following are some of the team building activities to try.
Dancing and singing sessions
You may have heard many people say that music has a way of healing. You are still able to have virtual dancing and singing sessions and enjoy benefits that come with such. You can pick one of the employees who is good at dancing and let him or her lead the sessions.
Even to have a professional lead the sessions. The second approach may come at a cost but it is worth it because physical team building sessions are mostly paid sessions.
Create online contests
Create either weekly or monthly contests that will enable your employees to compete against each other. As you do that, ensure that you only promote healthy competition between them. Doing that will also keep your employees bonded and motivated.
There are both premium and free tools that you can use to run online contests.
You can even invite the public to join the sessions. However, you must work with SEO experts such as Scanteam to ensure your contests are discoverable over the internet.
Do some quizzes online
Naturally, people solve complex tasks quickly when they are with other people than when they are themselves. The time taken to solve the task is also lower than when an individual decides to solve it alone.
Also, bring your team together and give them a task to solve the quizzes online. The main reason for that is that they mostly fail to engage in activities that detach them from the computer. You can either decide to give them the quiz individually or in a group.
To make it interesting for all of them, you can put aside rewards for those who finish the quiz first. Don’t forget to give them a reasonable time to solve it.
Game of trivia
Games bring special therapy to mind. Engaging your employees with practical games will help them go through their daily commitments when they are rejuvenated. Playing games will also make them solve complex tasks they meet as they go about their daily activities.
However, when selecting the best trivia games, ensure that you choose those related to their specialisation. For instance, if the team deals majorly with marketing, ensure that you select a game on marketing.
Pick on storytelling
Do you know anyone who does not like stories? If yes, then you will realise later that the person has a specific niche of stories they love. We human beings love stories and view them as a unifying factor.
Therefore, integrating them as part of your organisation’s culture can help in bringing your team together. It will also help the team find room to associate with each other and know each other better.
Stories also help in developing better communication skills. You will realise that once people start working from home, they become more introverted, thus inhibiting their communication skills.
You can create good stories for your team by coming up with specific words that they all understand. Then give each of them the words to create stories from. That way, you will make storytelling among your team members engaging.
Sharing pictures
Pictures help in sending different forms of messages home. Sharing pictures will make your employees remain lively. Also, some images are funny, thus will light them inside.
During that session, some may also share their childhood images. Other members will also see how far some of them have come to be where they are.
Perfect vacation destination
It’s another form that brings them together. Create time to play the game. When you want to play it, you should ensure that each employee picks a partner, gives each other a call, and tells them their perfect destination.
After some time, they should get together and let each of them tell the perfect destination that their partner talked about.
Truths and lies game
It’s a game where each member of the team present at least three sentences. Two of those should be true, while one should be false. From there, the members should determine the true statements and those that are false. The game is engaging thus will keep them active.
Image: Pexels
Book club
Professionals should frequently read to increase their library of knowledge. To make your employees do that, you can start a virtual book club that will see them getting engaged in reading.
For the club to be successful, you should assign each member what to read and the time to finish it. Doing that will keep you engaged and bonded as a team.
Knowledge sharing
You can make your team share knowledge about various topics they understand best. You only need to ensure that everybody is online and that they are all active to get started. Such sessions are perfect as they people to learn new skills. You may have someone who is really good at affiliate marketing.
In Summary
The choice of the interactive mode will depend on the activity that you select. For instance, storytelling is best done through video platforms such as Zoom and Skype. On the other hand, knowledge sharing does not have to be on video as people can exchange emails.
You must ensure that all the team members are connected before you start the team building sessions. Make it known to your remote that attending such sessions is mandatory but do not make it like a punishment.
The above illustrates how to keep remote teams connected. You can also engage in other activities, but the ones we have highlighted are some of the best.
About the Author
Alex Lysak is the CEO of ScanTeam. He has been working in online marketing since 2011, main areas of expertise are marketing research, social media marketing, and SEO. During 9 years of experience, he has helped many products and startups to develop marketing strategies and to implement them further.
