With more and more teams now working remotely, some people complain that it can be hard to get the same sense of camaraderie as with teams who all work at the same location. Teams perform best when they know and trust each other and feel comfortable approaching and communicating with each other as they need to in order to get things done.

This is normally achieved through team building activities, and there's really no reason why equivalent types of team building sessions can't be organized for online teams to do together. While these suggestions are all fun, lighthearted activities that may not really seem like work at all, they are a great way for people to get to know each other and have some fun experiences to bond over. Think of them as the remote equivalent of going bowling or go-kart racing as a team - both popular choices for office-based teams as team building activities.

Play Word Games Online Together

Playing popular word games like Scrabble or Words With Friends together can be a fun way to add some mild competition into your team building while playing something most people are familiar with and ready to play. There are some tools that can lend a hand in this type of game if not everyone you're including in the game has English as their first language or if someone in your team suffers from dyslexia; for example, Unscramble, which, if you have a set of letters you need to form a word from for Scrabble, or are playing a game involving an anagram, will solve it quickly.

Word games are fun and easy to organize online over whatever software you use for meetings, but they can be especially good if your team is involved in documentation or communications, as it can even be a way to boost your vocabularies and get your brains ready to work.

Have a Team Minecraft Server

One unorthodox but very fun idea can be to set up a team Minecraft server, which you can all access and build things on. This is more a long-term team building exercise as you can all develop your shared world over time and talk about it and plan projects together. Yes, Minecraft can be pretty addictive, so it's best to just set aside a bit of time people can play each week, as well as allowing them to play on the shared server in their free time if they're enjoying it. You may be surprised just how into it some of your team might get!

Collaboration tools usually used for remote working may not be ideal for this, so it could be a good idea to learn how to set up a team Discord server and use that for the less work-focused team building games.

Quizzes

You may remember from the most restrictive parts of the pandemic that a lot of families and groups of friends were playing quizzes together over Zoom as a way to socialize. This can be an option for team building for your remote team, too. Quizzes can be found on all kinds of topics, so you can keep it related to your field of work, have a different theme each time, or choose something fun like music or movies. You can also consider setting your own questions, like a classic pub quiz, or having a different team member be the quizmaster each week.

Quizzes can be a good option if your team is made up of people who may not be interested in other types of gaming, or tech savvy enough to want to do things like play online games together, because they're easy for anyone to play even just over a webcam meeting without any special apps or software.

Competitions

Another thing you can do is have competitions between the team, which can be for all kinds of things. You can compete to come up with the funniest caption for an image, or to take the most interesting photo on a theme. You can have fun looking at each other's entries and voting for a winner. This can be done just for fun or incentivized with small prizes. You can even overlap this with work related tasks and use it as a way to do things like brainstorm names for products or new slogans for marketing.

It is really important to make sure your team spends some time having some fun together and getting to know more about each other than just their working roles. It promotes collaboration and creativity, and makes people feel happier to be working together, even if they rarely or never meet face to face. If you manage a team of remote workers, or your team has become remote since the pandemic, then why not try some of these ideas to help your people bond?