Fun team building activities for remote employees

This post contains 6 proven team building activities for remote teams. These are easy to organize, fun for participants, and effective at building stronger bonds between team members.

1. Give your team a health or fitness challenge

A fitness or health challenge is great for both team building and improving employees' health. By combining team building and health into one activity, you can kill two birds with one stone.

How to organize it

1. Ask your remote employees to do a physical or mental activity such as walking, running, pushups, yoga, or meditation and share a video or photo with the team. The easiest way is to create a social channel on Slack and let people post there.
2. Encourage participation by giving a small gift to the person who gets the most engagement on their post. Even a $10 Amazon gift card will motivate your team members to go the extra mile and get creative to catch attention.

The ideal duration for this activity is one week. People will lose interest in anything longer, while anything shorter won't build enough momentum.

Pro tip

• Prime the activity by talking to a couple of people who you know will love to do this. Seed the channel with some photos and comments. The initial posts and engagement build excitement and draw others in.
• Make it competitive by asking employees to share screen grabs from their fitness tracker every day, with a reward for the person with the most calories burned.

2. Build team bonding through quiz competitions

Quiz competitions are excellent team-building activities. Quizzes take people back to their college days, which is one reason they are so appealing even to older employees.

When people compete as a team, they develop emotional bonds with each other. They prepare, strategize, and compete together. Whether they win or lose, the experience of working together builds critical team skills.

How to organize it

1. Choose a topic — It could be work-related but is more fun if it's not.
2. Form teams — Ideal team size is 3-5 members. Don't let employees form their own teams. If you do, people will team up with folks they already know well. Your goal is to expose people to colleagues outside their close circle. This expands their social network and forces them to learn to work with new people.
3. Use video conferencing — Run the competition on Zoom or Teams. Choose a tool that allows private chat messaging so team members can coordinate their answers.

The one challenge with quizzes is scale. Unlike the fitness challenge, a quiz must be synchronous — everyone must take part at the same time. If you have too many participants, do multiple preliminary rounds where winners progress to the next round.

Pro tip

Invite all employees to join the live competition as spectators. A live audience makes the event more exciting and makes everyone feel part of a bigger family.

3. Watch a sports event or movie together

We all love watching live sports in a group. It makes the event more enjoyable.

Select a live sports event that most people on the team can watch, even with time zone differences. Another variant is watching a movie together over a video call. A movie session over the weekend is a fun way for employees to get together. They can chat, comment on the movie, and crack jokes. The openness of the session helps team members get closer and build a stronger team.

Pro tip

Select a popular comedy — it helps people de-stress and enjoy the experience together.

4. Organize an online brown-bag lunch session

A brown-bag lunch is a meeting where team members have their lunch together while discussing a professional topic of interest to the team. Each week, one team member shares their knowledge with the group.

It's a great way for team members to learn from each other in an informal and enjoyable setting.

How to organize it

1. Group by time zone — Organize your remote team into smaller groups that can get together at the same time. If people live in different time zones, build groups where members have enough overlap in work hours.
2. Let teams choose topics — It creates ownership and genuine interest.
3. Keep it informal — Don't create formal rules that make it feel like a mandate from management.

Pro tip

Gamify this activity to improve participation. Create a scorecard that awards teams points for each meeting and the percentage of team members who take part. Even without a reward, just the scorecard will create enough competition to ensure high participation.

5. Organize your own MasterChef event

MasterChef is a popular reality cooking show with national versions in many countries. You can organize your own MasterChef competition for your remote team.

How to organize it

1. Set a theme for the event — Thanksgiving, Indian cuisine, baking, etc.
2. Give everyone 60 minutes to cook a dish of their choice
3. Ask every participant to stream live using their computer or phone camera
4. Invite all team members to watch, even if they are not cooking — a live audience makes it more fun
5. At the end, ask the viewers to vote for their favorite dish

Pro tip

Get a professional MC to anchor the event. A professional MC can whip up excitement by getting the viewers involved.

6. Run a 1-minute video challenge

Short video platforms have proven how engaging brief, creative videos can be. You can run a similar 1-minute video challenge to draw out your team's creativity and entertain them at the same time.

How to organize it

1. Set some basic rules everyone needs to follow, like avoiding controversial topics
2. Set up a Slack channel for the challenge and ask team members to post their 1-minute videos. Ask everyone to like or vote on the videos.
3. At the end of the challenge, tally up the likes or votes to find your winner

Pro tip

Limit the video length to 1 minute or less. People are more likely to watch a short video than a long one.

Summary

All of these activities are tried and tested. Companies using them have seen great results in terms of better team bonding, increased productivity, and employee loyalty. And all of them can be done entirely online.