Building trust is about building rapport with your boss, colleagues, and peers. Without it, teams can’t thrive, individuals are less likely to rise through the ranks if they’re perceived as untrustworthy, and in extreme circumstances, the entire company might go down.
A high degree of trust in the workplace leads to a better working environment for everyone involved. It also creates a more productive workplace where employees feel safe and valued.
But how can you create meaningful bonds when working in a remote or a hybrid environment? How can you earn credibility as a remote employee, and how can you establish trusting relationships with your managers?
This article will take you through eight remote team-building ideas you can use in your hybrid or remote workplace. So, be sure to stick around till the finish.
8 Ideas on How to Build a Team Remotely
1. Virtual Coffee Chats
Who doesn’t drink coffee (or a green tee or any other drink) at work? The majority of us do. Perhaps in the comfortable home environment nipping for a quick cuppa to sustain your focus and power through the workday is even more common.
So, why not turn this into a virtual ritual where everybody brings their favourite drink of choice, turns the camera on, and has an unstructured conversation about anything and everything. It’s a perfect way for remote workers to feel less isolated and chat about non-work matters.
2. Sharing of Pet Pictures
Working from home means unlimited hours spent with your animal friends. They became your trusted companions, uplifting your mood and always happy to receive cuddles. But as you spend more time with them, you catch them doing funny things or sleeping in weird positions.
People bond with other pet owners, so sharing pictures of your animals in a dedicated channel created, for example, on Slack or another group chat app, can be a low-effort way to foster team unity and promote a balanced work environment.
3. Virtual Productivity Challenges
Nothing unites virtual and hybrid teams more than a bit of competition, and if you can manage to link the challenge to a company’s KPI, however small – it’s a double bonus.
Let’s say you’re a SaaS provider and have multiple sales teams working to sell your product to other B2B businesses. Consider setting up a competition based on closed deals rate, total sales value, or any other metric you can easily quantify and watch your virtual teams’ motivation and productivity soar. Make sure to reward the winning team so they are even more committed to the challenge.
4. Messy Desk Photo Contest
Even your desks at home can get messy, but unlike in the physical office, your coworkers can’t see them. Sharing a picture of your home working space and how untidy and disorganised it gets over the week could be an excellent chatting point and a source of laughs and leg-pulling. It’s also a great activity for asynchronous teams, as the pictures can be shared anytime.
5. Boost Your Professional Skills with Learning Circles
Future-oriented organisations can only thrive and sustain consistently high performance by encouraging lifelong learning within their workforce. You always want to ensure that your employees are craving knowledge and want to improve their skills and working practices. However, doing so remotely can feel isolating and less appealing.
Virtual learning circles are a highly interactive way to learn or build a new skill in a group environment. Choose a topic or a skill you need to improve based on the challenges your group is facing, get together with the people experiencing the same issue and have a video conference or a presentation to work through it.
6. Host a Virtual Party in Metaverse
Hosting virtual events and parties worked wonders as an alternative to their face-to-face counterparts during the lockdown. However, this team-building activity shouldn’t be put on hiatus now that remote working is becoming a norm.
Virtual parties are a fantastic opportunity for work-from-home employees to socialise and get to know each other better. They have low entry barriers, as people can participate from the comfort of their home, so even more introverted personalities might be up for it.
Online parties can get monotonous. Few platforms can support extensive capabilities that will change the virtual event game. Going on the same old video conferencing tool and trying to make it fun could be challenging. But it doesn’t have to be anymore!
Thanks to the My Digital Office solution, you can bring an entertaining party to your peers and colleagues via an interactive virtual party room in the metaverse. The platform features a virtual party space with chairs, tables, and a swimming pool (think when was the last time you went to a work party with a swimming pool?). You can also hang out with your colleagues by the bar or at the table, chatting via a chat, video, or voice-only communications.
Start Your Free Trial and Host Your First Metaverse Party.
7. Live Remote Coworking
You’re always surrounded by your colleagues when you work in a physical office. Being in that environment makes you automatically more motivated and less likely to slack or not pull your weight.
Doing work remotely is slightly different due to numerous distractions around us. Thus, virtual coworking sessions allow you to engage in focused work with encouragement and support from your colleagues in the same boat. However, these sessions must be enjoyable, so simply hanging on a Zoom call might now appeal to everybody.
My Digital Office offers customizable virtual rooms and conference spaces to interact and collaborate with ease. Whether it’s a meeting room, a dining room, or an open office – you name it!
Find Out More.
8. Virtual Trivia Games
Virtual trivia games can be a fun activity that brings numerous benefits for remote teams, including better engagement, higher morale, decreased isolation, and an opportunity to get to know each other more closely. Everyone loves a live quiz due to its familiarity. It’s a great activity for everybody, even the team’s newest members.
Typically, as part of these quizzes, people are split into groups, meaning they might end up with colleagues they don’t normally interact with. This gives everybody a chance to find out more about one another and to talk and work together on solutions that don’t focus on the job.
Conclusion
Virtual team building must be built into the fabric of your remote culture. Frequently, most organisations are too preoccupied with completing projects and meeting deadlines to give team building the attention it deserves.
But it makes a difference on the organisational and an employee level; thus, we recommend you try one or two ideas and see how it goes!
