6 remote working teambuilding tips

Remote working is growing rapidly, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. But how do you maintain a good relationship with your employees and colleagues? And why Is teambuilding during remote working so important? In this blog we give you 6 teambuilding tips for remote working.

Why is teambuilding during remote working so important?

Teambuilding in general is very important, because it has a big impact on your workforce. It boosts your company culture, enables people to work together as a team more effectively and motivates your employees. And with more and more people working in different locations, the importance of teambuilding grows even further.

According a study by The Knowledge Institute for Mobility (KiM) on the effects on employees when working from home, 51% of the respondents say that they miss their colleagues during remote working and 52% have less contact with their colleagues. Many people are forced to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. With a more dispersed team and people getting used to their new situations, it’s even more vital to keep employees connected to each other and motivated.

With online teambuilding, you can involve the employees with the organisation and make sure that they stay in touch with their colleagues. By hosting online activities and coming up with team challenges you can still have some interaction between your colleagues.

Examples of tips for teambuilding

1. Host online meetings
2. Come up with team challenges
3. Play online games with the organisation
4. Schedule online creative sessions
5. Follow workshops
6. Host a Virtual lunch

Host online meetings

The first tip is to host online meetings. Seeing your colleagues every day will create more interaction between them. By starting the day with a meeting and a cup of coffee, you can go over the plans for the day together. Everyone gets the chance to tell what they want to do, and if they need help with something they can easily ask their colleagues. This way you start the day like you’re at the office. You can easily host an online meeting with Microsoft Teams or Zoom.

Come up with team challenges

What is more fun than a good challenge? Teams and departments can create challenges for themselves, perhaps related to their field, or company-wide challenges can be created to involve everyone. For instance, think of a marketing challenge where every team member creates a fun social video, in order to win a lunch or dinner at the company’s expense. Each team can create their own challenge in order to keep the employees motivated and creative during remote working. It helps them to activate their creative minds and come up with fun ideas.

Play online games with the organisation

BINGO! Host online games within the organisation like Bingo or Trivia. Set up a project team that will be responsible for organising online games for the organisation. Make sure that someone of each department or team is in this project team to make sure that each department feels involved. Come up with some fun Bingo games or make your own Trivia quiz about the company and the people who work in your company.

Schedule online creative sessions

When working remotely, you can miss out on spontaneous sparring sessions that happen on the work floor. Therefore, there are some organisations that host creative online sessions with a third party who guides the session, but you can also do it yourself. With the tool Mural you can create an online session with your team, and this tool enables you to use visuals and design thinking methods. This way, you can keep the team involved with the online creative sessions and they can work together on some new awesome ideas!

Follow workshops

One way to build up a team is to take on a challenge and learn something new together, for example in an online workshop. A sales team can follow workshops that will optimise your sales conversations and ensures better results, while a marketing team can follow a workshop by a professional in the marketing communication field to improve the creativity of your team. This way, the team does not only get a change to connect over learning something new, but get a chance to develop their professional skills at the same time.

Host a virtual lunch

While some people lunch with their families or pets, others may live alone and can feel lonely during their working days. By hosting a virtual lunch, you can lunch with your team and catch up on what they did on the weekends, or what they’ve been up to besides work. It is very important to maintain a social aspect to your work, and hosting a virtual lunch can contribute to this. In big teams, this may be a little difficult, however with the tool Lunch Roulette you can randomly put employees together to lunch. This is a fun way to connect colleagues of different teams with each other.

How can Workspace 365 help with teambuilding?

Within Workspace 365 you can integrate a social intranet like Yammer to stay connected to your colleagues. You can share announcements and polls in this intranet to find out who can be present to some teambuilding events and on which dates. Also, you can integrate social intranet elements in your digital workspace like the Announcement Center, the Birthdays live tile and your contacts. With the Announcement Center you can share team videos, pictures or give a shoutout to a colleague who achieved something. This way, you can combine your digital workspace and your social intranet in one adaptive workspace. Are you curious about Workspace 365? Request a demo!