Boost Your Virtual Meetings with these Popular Virtual Team Activities
With the pandemic disrupting businesses all over the world, many teams have been forced to work from home since 2020. After over a year of remote work with minimal social interactions, you can bet that your team is ready to socialise and have some fun. This is where virtual team building comes in, with games and activities that are designed to bring more human interactions to help your team connect with each other, and make them feel like they’re actually part of a community. Essentially, a happier team leads to higher employee satisfaction and retention.
Besides virtual team building, these online activities can also be used as icebreakers or to add some excitement to virtual meetings or virtual events. As trivial as these online games and activities may appear, they actually have the power to make remote teams feel as tight-knit as on-site teams. Furthermore, these virtual meeting activities can remind them of all the amazing people they work with.
Here’s our favourite Top 10 activities for your next virtual team meeting or virtual team building that you can use to bring your remote team closer. We start off the list with 3 travel-related virtual meeting activities to provide some reprieve for those who misses the travel experience.
1. Virtual Team Hunt
This will be a highly interactive and engaging virtual team building activity whereby individuals work in a group from different locations or in-office to solve cryptic clues in a real time event. Teams or individual players compete to reach hunt locations, complete team tasks and solve riddles with clues given via Google Forms. Participants can use any laptop, tablet, PC and even mobile phone to participate in this interactive event from any location. This event will be fully facilitated by the FGNC Events Team.
2. Virtual Travel Experience: Icons Of Singapore
The Fun Empire presents the first Virtual Travel Experience based in Singapore. Embark on an exploration adventure that combines the 360° live clues, Treasure Hunt, Virtual Amazing Race and Virtual Escape Room Experiences to take you through the different eras of Singapore’s history. Participants will work together in online teams to solve fun and interactive puzzles while learning more about the country in an innovative and immersive virtual environment. Complete all the challenges to solve the exciting storyline! Best part is that you can connect teams from anywhere in the world and play together remotely.
3. Take Your Team on A Virtual Vacation!
Hawaiian shirts are encouraged for this one. We all know you aren’t travelling as much as you want to. So can we bring a vacation to you? Your energetic, quirky guide will get your team laughing and connecting, and working through fun challenges to problem solve, and get to know one another better. This virtual team activity involves fun icebreakers, get-to-know-you games, and collaborative challenges and activities that foster trust, teamwork, self-expression, and a bunch of laughs. It’s designed to be the perfect mix of activities to engage your whole team, from the typically introverted engineers to your most outgoing sales types.
4. Cards Against Humanity
Remember Cards Against Humanity? It was pretty much guaranteed to make you laugh, blush, and squirm. And now, it’s available online! Well, it’s not the original version, but it’s All Bad Cards offers a very similar game that you can play for free with your workgroup online.
The rules are simple: Every player gets a set of cards that have a word or short phrase on them. Then, one randomly chosen player (known as the Card Czar) picks a card that features a sentence with a blank word in it. Then, all the other players choose which of their words best fills in the blank in the sentence. This can be funny, gross, serious—the idea is to know what will play best with the person with the “fill-in-the-blank” card.
Why? Because once everyone has submitted their answers, the Card Czar will read all the answers aloud and pick their favourite. Then, whoever’s word is chosen as the winner keeps that word card, and the next person becomes the Card Czar. Whoever has the most word cards at the end of the game wins.
5. Read My Lips
Many of us have been in a virtual meeting when a presenter’s audio cut out or the speaker forgot to take the microphone off mute. Read my lips turns this awkward or frustrating situation into a fun game. To play, one participant will mute the mic and then speak a word or phrase. The other players must try to guess the word or phrase correctly. Players have one minute to figure out the message. The turn-taker can also give clues by using the chatbox, if necessary.
6. Blackout Truth or Dare
This is a fun virtual game to play with colleagues, and it’ll probably wind up with you finding out some hilarious facts about your professional peers.
Here’s how to play: First, you need to pick a “dare master.” The dare master will go to each player, asking whether they want a truth or a dare, then deciding what said truth or dare will be. If a player doesn’t want to respond or do the dare, they have to turn their camera off. Then, the dare master will move on to the next person.
The game continues for a certain number of rounds, or until only one player remains. Prompts can be personal or silly, and should be safe for work. For example: “change your display name to a childhood nickname,” or “sing Firework by Katy Perry.” The game goes on until only one camera remains on! Then, the winner becomes the new dare master.
7. Taboo
Another classic game that’s been turned into a free digital version is Taboo. If you’ve never played Taboo before, the rules are simple: you’ll need to identify a word by explaining what it is but without using the word itself or a number of related words.
To start, split your group up into two teams, take turns sharing screens, and choose someone each round to be a clue-giver. Each team will get a card that features one main word and five other words. The clue-giver will then have to guide their team to identifying the main word. Here’s where it gets interesting: you’ll only have 60 seconds to identify the word and you won’t be able to use any of the other words on the card to describe it. If you do, you’re disqualified!
Keep track of how many words each team guesses correctly and decide how many rounds you want to play. The team with the most points at the end of the game wins!
8. 21 Questions
If you’re looking for a virtual activity to play with your colleagues that will help you all get to know each other better, 21 Questions is great. To get things started, have everyone come up with a list of 21 questions. Once they’ve done that, roll a dice. Have the person with the lowest number answer first and the person with the highest number ask their questions first.
When you’re asking questions, start easy, then move on to the harder or more risqué questions. You can ask things like:
- You only get three words to describe yourself—what are they?
- What habit are you proudest of breaking?
- What’s the weirdest nickname you’ve ever had?
9. Virtual Dance Party
One of the quickest and easiest virtual team building activities is the Virtual Dance Party. You can either host your virtual dance as a standalone event or add it as a quick one-minute session during a meeting.
Important: You don’t need to bust fancy moves, just turn on a song and move to the beat! Dancing can help cure awkward silences, keep energy high, and inject fun and team building into your team calls.
Some of our favourite songs for a quick dance break are:
- Taylor Swift – Shake it Off
- Rihanna – Work
- Kenny Loggins – Footloose
- Whitney Houston – I Wanna Dance with Somebody
- The Beatles – Twist and Shout
10. Five Finger Showdown (Great for Large Groups)
Five finger showdown is a perfect icebreaker for large groups. For this game, everyone on your virtual meeting holds up one hand with five fingers extended. Then, either the host alone or team members taking turns list of specific and unusual life experiences. For example, you could say, “have visited a beach this year” or “speaks more than one language.”
Here are some more fun prompts:
- Adopted a dog
- Ate ice cream in the last 24 hours
- Visited three countries
- Knit something wearable
- Made pizza from scratch
- Can say thank you in at least five languages
If a team member has the mentioned life experiences, then they can put one finger down. Either the player that puts all fingers down first wins, or if you want a twist then the last player with fingers remaining up wins instead.
We hope that these online activities can help you incorporate some fun and excitement into your virtual team meetings or virtual team building and increase employee engagement. Do keep in mind that these virtual activities are an ongoing process of bringing remote teams together.
Ultimately, it’s to help your team achieve deeper bonds by creating a collaborative environment that’s similar to an in-office setting.