But over the years, we’ve learned that remote team building is much different than in-person team building. When your team is never in the same room together, you have to take a different approach to building your company culture.
Luckily, virtual team building activities can still be super effective in promoting employee happiness, retention, and productivity. And remote team building doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive, both in time and cost.
For this post, we’ve included 47+ of our favorite fun virtual team building activities for remote teams. We’ve scoured the internet for virtual hangout ideas and online team games and drawn on our own experience too. All of these remote team activities are easy to implement (some are automatic) and some are completely free.
Pro Tip: Press “Command + D” to bookmark this list – we update it often.
1. Online Office Games with teambuilding.com
Facilitating virtual team building has unique challenges, and so you may want to have another company do it for you. Our sister company, Team Building, is a 100% remote organization that offers virtual team building activities and online team building games as a service.
Here are some examples of the remote team building options available. First, Online Office Games, which is a series of online games including activities like typing-speed races, spreadsheet pixel-art and print-paper origami. You can also do remote employee engagement activities like storytelling workshops, virtual improv games, and training like “How to Manage Remote Teams” to learn best practices for communication, running meetings and giving feedback.
Follow this link to learn more about the virtual team building activities.
2. tiny campfire 🔥: 100% Virtual Campfire for Remote Teams
tiny campfire runs virtual campfires for remote teams. The experience includes haunted historic ghost stories, icebreakers, little competitions and even a real s’more making experience. It’s fun, wildly smart, and probably the best damn online camping experience in the world. No mosquito repellent needed.
Before your event, tiny campfire sends each person on your team a small package with materials like s’more ingredients, a small candle, matches and team colors. Getting stuff in the mail is awesome and your people will appreciate it. This event creates unique shared memories, good vibes and engagement at your organization.
Get started with your tiny campfire here.
3. Remote Storytelling Workshops & Training
Museum Hack tour guides are world class conveyors of stories and information. We’ve honed the craft leading thousands of renegade tours, and refined a framework for telling stories and training these skills. This system includes the Five Elements of a Hack, story shortening and more fun team activities.
Storytelling is a useful skill for a wide variety of roles, from marketers to sales reps, to HR, managers, leaders and more. These training workshops will empower your staff to higher levels of productivity and performance, and even give you remote team meeting ideas for your organization.
Read more about Museum Hack’s Online Storytelling Workshops.
4. Tea vs Coffee: Live Virtual Coffee + Tea Tasting Class
Built specifically for remote teams, Tea vs Coffee facilitates an exotic coffee and tea tasting experience with real beverages. A week or so before your event, the company sends each of your employees a care pack with a mix of four specialty teas, coffees and infusions. Each envelope is marked as “do not open” to save the big surprise for the day of the event.
On tasting day, your team logs into a virtual video-cafe, where the friendly barista will share stories, run games and lead a tasting ceremony for the tea and coffee. The event is fun, educational, and global minded. All teas and coffees are sustainably sourced from farms with Fair Trade practices.
Learn more about Tea vs Coffee.
5. “Can You Hear Me Now?”
More than just a sound check, Can You Hear Me Now is one of the best online games for virtual teams. You play this game in a virtual conference room, and nominate one person to be the speaker and the rest are artists. The speaker uses a random image generator you can find online to source a suitable image, and the goal is to describe that image in such a way that the artists can draw it successfully.
The one guideline that makes this task challenging is that you speaker must only use geometric shapes. For example, you could say “draw a large circle and then there equidistant triangles” but not “write the letter E.” By limiting instructions to geometric shapes and positions, the speaker needs to exercise extremely accurate communication skills, and the artists need to listen and interpret. This game is a proxy for effective online communication, and is also just really fun.
6. Spreadsheet Pixel Art
While most virtual teams are intimately familiar with Google Sheets, relatively few think of them as remote employee engagement activities. If you are a nerd like me then you likely enjoy developing complicated spreadsheet formulas and graphs. If you are both a nerd and an artist, then you will love doing Spreadsheet Pixel Art.
Essentially, Spreadsheet Pixel Art is when you add a little code to Sheets that will automatically replace numbers with a color fill for that cell. You can then use these colored cells to “paint the numbers” and create pictures of animals, landscapes and similar. For virtual team building activities, you can do a short-term or long-term competition to see who on your remote team produces the best work of art.
Here is a free template for Spreadsheet Pixel Art.
Bonus: If you comment on this post with your thoughts on virtual team building and include the hashtag #pixel we will send you another free Spreadsheet Pixel Art template.
7. MTV Cribs: Remote Team Edition
Throwback to the ’90s!
Because remote teams are distributed around the world, there’s a chance your team members might never meet face-to-face. However, that reality doesn’t mean they can’t open up their homes to one another and participate in some MTV style remote employee engagement activities.
Help Scout recently started an internal MTV Cribs-inspired video series, where team members show off their homes and personality in quick self-made videos a la the classic ’90s show.
It makes for both an interesting look into the personal lives of your co-workers and is also a hilarious way to get to know your entire team better.
8. Online Team Building Bingo
Online Team Building Bingo is a fun game you can play to engage remote workers. You start with a bingo board that has a number of action items or accomplishments on it. For example, when you hear someone say “sorry, I was on mute!” you can mark that spot off on your board, and similar for “wearing pajama bottoms to a video meeting.”
Bingo is a classic game that most people are familiar with, and the version for remote teams is a quick, easy and free way to get started with virtual team building.
Here is a template you can use for your first game:
9. Quarterly Christmas
Every December 26th, Carly starts counting down for Christmas. This countdown doesn’t have to be a long wait, and instead you can run Quarterly Christmas or Quarterly Care Package for your team. Basically, once every few months you surprise your team members with a package in the mail. Quarterly Christmas is effective team building for remote teams because getting a surprise package is like a little burst of sunshine in an otherwise cloudy day.
Examples of packages you can send include tech gadgets, coffee and tea samplers, chocolate and wine, and gift cards. If your remote workers have furry friends then you can send pet toys as well. We recommend a budget of about $25 per person per quarter, plus shipping.
10. petri: Online Social Engagement Platform for Remote Teams
petri is an online social engagement platform for remote teams. Each week, petri schedules a variety of online team building games, training seminars and fun virtual meetings. Each experience is led by an engaging host that makes sure all guests can participate and make connections in a way that feels good to them. Example events include pub trivia, guided meditation, language classes, coffee hangs, beat-box harmony and more. The goal is to give your people a fun and relaxing way to connect with remote work peers.
One of the major benefits of petri is that scheduling is off your hands. With virtual events already on the calendar, you don’t have to worry about time-zones, who may or may not attend and what everyone is interested in. Instead, team members can self-organize and choose activities that work with their interests and schedules. Your colleagues can join as a team to build stronger relationships or individually and meet new friends and business contacts.
Learn more about virtual team building with petri.
11. A Slack Channel To Post Cute Pictures of Pets
This one is a company favorite.
In March we made a Slack channel called #pets-of-museum-hack where we post pictures of our pets making funny faces and doing hilarious things.
This is a really simple channel and it takes very little effort/maintenance, but there’s a big payoff in the amount of team building and culture boosting it provides! Basically, this channel is a hit in the arena of quick and easy team building activities for telecommuters.
Here are some of our favorite pictures to date:
Let’s be honest, this post would be incomplete without a picture of our team’s dogs in blankets.
12. Make Video Recaps of In-Person Events
With remote teams especially, it’s a good idea to provide your team with regular updates about the impact their work is having. This messaging doesn’t have to be for direct impact: for example, a web developer might not have any involvement in the design of a trade show booth, but everyone in the company has contributed to keep all aspects of your organization working properly to make attending the trade show possible.
You want to remind your team “Oh yeah, this is why I do this” as much as possible. Without these reminders, morale can drop and team members can become disillusioned. An easy way to keep morale high is to record videos of any in-person, company-related activities. For example, a few of our team members recently hosted a booth at an industry trade show, and our CEO Nick Gray recorded a three-minute video recap of the experience for the entire team. This effort takes a real world experience and develops it into meaningful virtual team building.
Since your team is remote, they’re not always going to be able to see the real-world impact their work is having. Recording videos of in-person activities and events are great ways to keep the team connected to your company’s mission. These videos don’t even have to be long or well-produced — whether it’s a trade show recap, a post-call debrief with an important client, or just a Monday morning pep talk, videos are a quick, easy, and effective way to keep morale high and demonstrate to your team you want to keep them in the loop.
Bonus: during our research for this post, we came across another great video from Help Scout that demonstrates how video can replace weekly meetings. Not only is this medium an efficient way to deliver information, people are likely to enjoy it and absorb what is communicated.
13. Learn the NATO phonetic alphabet
Alfa, Tango, Foxtrot, is more than just a fun phrase that makes you feel more like a fighter pilot. It’s also representative of three code words of the NATO alphabet.
If you call anyone literally ever, than the NATO phonetic alphabet will help you have more clear and deliberate conversations. Instead of saying something like, “K as in Kyle” you can communicate in short-hand that is clear and readily understood.
For your team, you may not use the NATO alphabet together much. Still, the skill is fun to learn and when it does come up it will feel like a strong bonding element for your coworkers.
The 26 code words in the NATO phonetic alphabet are assigned to the 26 letters of the English alphabet as follows:
Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.
Source: Wikipedia
BTW, I call this the “Top Gun Alphabet”, which is wrong but fun.
14. Origami Zoo
Mail each of your team members a pack of origami paper, or have them cut squares from printer or notebook paper instead. Then, start building an origami zoo.
Each day or each week, the organizer can teach the team a new origami animal. For example, you make cranes, frogs, penguins, bears, and a host of others. Team members can place the origami animals on the work desk, and build up a replica zoo over a few weeks or months.
15. DIY Craft Challenge
The DIY Craft Challenge is a 30 minute surprise activity you can play with your team. To do the challenge, you bring everyone on a virtual call, share the rules and then start a 30 minute timer. Each person has half an hour to build something from materials available at home.
For example, a guy in my grade 8 class combined an old school egg beater with a fork to make an ultimate spaghetti twirling machine. You could make pasta art, an epic pillow fort or doodle a poetic harmony. The goal isn’t to build something museum-worthy; it is to spark creativity and give your team a fun way to interact together.
16. Typing Speed Race
Typing speed races are free virtual team building activities that you can start right now. To begin, take a typing test using typingtest.com or similar. Then, post your results on your company message board or by email. The more competitive members of your team will reply with results quickly and others will follow.
You can then up the challenge by hosting a typing speed relay, which is when you form squads and add up the cumulative scores to see which team wins.
Pro tip: make sure everyone is taking the same test! You can also give team members tips like “keep your fingers closer to the keys” or “if you miss a word, fix it quick and then power through.”
Typing speed races are ostensibly a fun little challenge to get everyone playing online team building games together. It is also great skill building; typing speed is incredibly important for remote workers.
17. Guess the Emoji Board 🤔
Up until a few years ago, emojis were a fun and quirky part of the internet that you weren’t quite sure if you should include in professional emails and messaging. Today, depending on your industry, it may be totally okay to send your colleagues emoji hearts, flames, cocktails and Christmas trees.
With more people using emojis more often, you now also have a fun new category: your most used emojis. You can snap a screenshot of your phone or desktop, and then upload the list for your remote team to see. Sharing which emojis you use and overuse can help create inside jokes. For example: why does Michael use the shrug so darn often?
With remote teams that work from home and are looking for virtual coffee break ideas, you can also play a quick online team building game like “Guess the Emoji Board.” Here is how you play:
- Create a list of players and distribute this to each player.
- Each person has up to five minutes to guess the five most used emojis by each person on the list.
- Reveal the answers and award points for accuracy, getting the emojis in the correct order and similar.
Prizes optional 🙂
Guess the Emoji Board is one of the quick games you can play virtually and will entertain your team for a quick amount of time. We recommend adding the game to an existing event or virtual call instead of making it the main event.
18. Recipe Roundup
In the last few months, sales of dumpling making ingredients in China have skyrocketed; people are cooking and eating at home more often. This love for cooking and eating is generally popular worldwide.
Invite your remote team to participate in a recipe roundup, which could have themes like “that one thing your grandma makes better than everyone else” and “rad cookie recipes.” Assemble the recipes in a Slack channel or a simple WordPress install, and if you like you can do a challenge where participants prepare the other recipes and post photos.
While these team activities are mostly meant to be fun, there is also a strong element of communication. When you prepare a recipe you need the foresight and clarity to know what the reader might have trouble following. Overcoming this challenge is a useful skill to build.
19. Werewolf
You may have played Werewolf at summer camp, in college or on a company retreat. Werewolf is a game of wits, deceit, and skilful manipulation as you seek to survive the night. The entire game is based on speaking, careful listening and voting, so you can run the experience in a virtual conference room like Zoom or Google Hangouts.
First, each player draws a card that indicates a role: werewolf, villager, medic or seer. For a remote game, you could use a random generation tool and send each person the role in a private message. Werewolves eat other players, villagers vote on who they think is a werewolf, medics can rescue a player from the jaws of near-death and seers can reveal a player’s status as wolf or not.
Once each one of your remote workers has a role, the game master announces that night has fallen, and everyone closes their eyes and does a pitter-patter drum roll for something fun to do and to mask other sounds. The game master then calls the werewolves to wake-up, select one victim, then go back to sleep. Next, the medic wakes up, points to a person to save and then sleeps again. Finally, the seer points to one person to reveal whether they are a wolf or not, and the game master nods yes or no to confirm. After all of the special roles have taken action, the game master then announces it is morning and reveals whether the wolves successfully ate a villager. Usually one villager dies in the night, with the exception of the occasional save by a medic.
The survivors debate who the werewolf is, and then vote to either eliminate someone or skip the round. Anyone that dies or is removed from the game becomes a silent ghost, and can no longer speak or otherwise participate in the game. Repeat this process until only villagers or wolves remain.
Werewolf is great for remote teams because it fuels a lot of discussion. Your team will love it.
20. Renegade Garden Collective
In college I discovered the life changing magic of planting leftover fruit seeds. I would plant apple seeds, watermelon, avocado and mango. The mango always died, but the rest brought me a surprising amount of joy every time a sprout popped up.
You can channel that joy into effective virtual team building. For a one-month competition, have your team members plant and cultivate a “scrappy garden” from scratch. The competitors can sow seeds from fruit snacks, propagate vegetables and otherwise do what it takes to grow a garden. By the end of the month, two things happen. First, you see who has got mad gardening skills, and second, you’ve made participants desks a little greener.
21. Icebreaker Questions for Virtual Team Building
Icebreaker questions are simple prompts that allow you to get to know your peers better. For example, you can start a remote meeting by having each attendee share their name, role and what they like to eat for breakfast. Icebreakers are a simple and effective way to build relationships with remote teams, and to increase the person connections between your people.
Icebreakers are easy to ingregrate as virtual happy hour activities or alongside other virtual coffee break ideas.
A few tips and ideas for great icebreakers:
- Unless you know each other extremely well, start with “green level” easy icebreaker questions. Some of your team member will be nervous to share, and so you can start with simple questions like “dream vacation” or “cats vs dogs?”
- Before any person shares the answer to your icebreaker prompt, announce who the next few people to share will be. This process helps create order and is especially important for online meetings where you don’t have as many visual cues.
- Go first. As the meeting organizer or leader, you can ask the question and then be the first to share as an example to others. By starting, you give your team members a little longer to think about answers, and also model what a great answer can be.
- Keep it short. We recommend no more than 30 seconds per person.
Integrating icebreakers into your meeting is a free way to do virtual team building for remote teams. For specific questions to ask, check out our epic list of icebreaker questions for all the inspiration you need.
22. Donut Calls
Even at a remote company, each member of your team can truly benefit from getting to know their co-workers. But since there aren’t opportunities for your team to randomly chit-chat at the water cooler, you have to be a little more deliberate in creating these virtual team building opportunities and virtual coffee break ideas instead.
That’s where Donut comes in!
Donut is a Slack extension that, once a week, automatically pairs everyone in your company up for a non-work-related 1-on-1 call. These are fun calls that give an opportunity for remote employees to get to know people they normally wouldn’t be working with on a daily basis. Generally these calls run anywhere from 15-30 minutes, and lots of fun is had.
