Team-building Activities and Games for Virtual Workers

Every team leader recognized the importance of bonds between team members. As an astute manager or a leader, you need to keep all members involved in all the team activities. You want them to be closer than coworkers. In other words, you want them to become positive supporters with a positive manner.

Team-building skills are also crucial for virtual workers because they do not have many chances to interact with colleagues every day. They are independent workers in their offices or desks.

They can do some tasks by themselves, but some projects require team-building skills. Therefore, leaders should give them a good environment to practice this skill through games or other activities.

Activities for virtual teams

Share culture
Share culture and having connected activities are essential to engage employees because these are the glue to increase employee’s productivity and their loyal spirits. These also improve interdependency and trust, as well as building open communication. All of those are necessary to keep a solid relationship between members of the teams; no matter they are remote workers or traditional ones.

Managers or team leaders can celebrate some culture sessions in the department or the entire company. Encourage all employees to attend these specific workshops, including virtual workers or part-time staff. You also give them some quizzes or small games about
the diverse culture in the world.

Provide opportunities for workers to communicate directly

For virtual teams, they always interact together over their smartphones, smart devices or technology platforms. They lack body language and prompt response, so they probably reduce their communication and interpersonal skills. This is the reason they do not understand each other and causing confusion.

Instead of voice calls, they should use video conferencing to help people seeing the body language in a conversation. Decrease digital communication and increase face-to-face interaction is more effective in the meeting and productivity.

Moreover, virtual teams need to work together once or twice a week, which possibly helps them foster their interpersonal skills. Team leaders, supervisors, and managers also create events or parties in the workplace in order to help them enhancing communication skills

Games for remote teams

Here are a couple of games for virtual teams that leaders should consider.

Cartoon Capers

Cartoon Capers is a humorous event of communication, planning, and creative things, which based on the production of a huge cartoon strip. All teams have to work together to make a funny story in a big storyboard or on a screen. They should apply their works of art to convey their thought through cartoons.

City Build

In this game, all members of a team can design one or two sections of a model city. The city should have many zones such as leisure, industrial, rails, roads, waterways, and so on.
Each member will do on their sections, but they need to make sure that their pieces are compatible with others. The game requires the team has to discuss and understand each other. If not, the whole picture will be bad.

The team can use a huge range of materials, so they will make a creative city that is beautiful and functional.

The leader should set the length of time to ensure that the team could do it. When the time is up, the team sends their works to the leader and their
description of their imaginative cities.

The Birth Map

The leader can upload a map of the world in an online whiteboard. In the meeting, the leader asks all members to get a sticker on the map (to show the place they were born).

Then, the leader encourages them to share a story about what they love and what they do not like most in their hometowns

Photography competition

In this game, you do not have to get fancy equipment. All members can use their smartphones to shot a lot of photos. The point is choosing the topic before taking pictures. The team needs to discuss the main topics. It could be their daily lives, nice sightseeing, etc.

The team leader also thinks of the prize for the winning team. The winner ought to receive a professional print of their shots, for instance.

Conclusion

Virtual teams will increase in the future. To get an effective team, all members should come together and understand their differences. Even if they live in a similar location or not, they still have many ways to connect. Team-building games and activities for them are also flexible, fun, and special.