Building remote team cohesion is more challenging than in an office: you need to make an effort to help employees connect with each other, openly communicate, and build relationships informally. Establish Remote Work Opportunities. Quick links: sortable list, activity instructions, expert tips, more resources, FAQ. Ask every member of the team to join a shared document or an online meeting board before the meeting begins and post a picture of something from their life. You can get everyone communicating and sharing to get to know each other better. Have participants write down a word that they associate with it. Instruct them to tell their partner their entire life story at that time. The team at Hotjar hold coffee and learn sessions. Completing “X” number of pushups, squats, lunges. It’s also less anxiety-inducing than some other activities, as there’s no way to get a question about a person’s favorite thing wrong. In fact, the most engaged employees tend to be those who spend … Taking short breaks from work to meet up with colleagues has been proven to be effective for boosting employee engagement and productivity. Since the participants are all asked to name their favorite thing, there is no risk of getting the answer wrong. If you prefer to keep the topic more business oriented, limit the list to work or industry-related topics. Here are our favorite ice breaker games and trust-building activities to try with your employees for some good team bonding. One of the best things about working in-house is small talk and banter. Remote Work Statistics: 9 Stats That Show Telecommuting is the Future, Remote Hiring Guide: How to Find and Recruit the Best Remote Workers, How to Build Remote Work Culture & Why It's So Important, Foster Collaboration and Engagement in Your Remote Team to Boost Productivity, Remote Team Building: 15 Virtual Games & Activities to Build Team Cohesion, 15 remote team building activities and games, Remote Collaboration Best Practices & Tips for Teams, The Best Remote Work Tools and Software to Have. This corollary no more exists. Passing on some inspiration or wisdom via 25 effective employee engagement activities you can use: POPULAR EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT ACTIVITIES #1 The Masterchef Challenge. Virtual employee engagement doesn’t only make for a fun way to spend quarantine; it also provides the necessary little breaks for rejuvenation as we work hard. When employees are in the same location, it’s easier to form a connection to their colleagues. It can even be a great warm up before a brainstorm! Rock paper scissors tournament. You can use a shared document or an online whiteboard to keep all the lists. And according to The State of Remote Work for 2019, one of the top struggles for remote workers is loneliness. Remote working isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Side … Slack channels, team lunches, and games are a great way to do this. So, what do you do when your team is distributed across different locations? You can go for drinks on Thursday after work with your team. And according to The State of Remote Work for 2019, one of the top struggles for remote workers is loneliness. But this kind of casual conversation is a big part of what bonds teams and makes them more collaborative. Here are a few ideas on how you can celebrate Diwali 2020 while you work from home and increase employee engagement and keep the cultural environment more fun, creative, and interactive.. As one of the biggest and most auspicious festivals in India, Diwali has a huge significance as far as workplace celebrations go. Thunderdome proves you can design engaging employee activities around doing more work—work without restrictions and limits, work that lets employees connect secret passions and inventions to their day-to-day lives. Virtual Team Building Activities: Sortable List As well as attention to detail, it also encourages focus on consistency. The question you might then ask is, how to engage employees who work from home? Remote teams also miss the daily face-to-face interaction that allows for team-building in the office, so managers have to find new ways to help team members bond. Two people will square off, the winner goes on to play the next person on the team, and so on. Ask each participant to draw five simple images that best describe and communicate your company’s products and culture to a shared document/folder. It’s a great way to test people's reflexes, responsiveness, and encourage spontaneity. Many companies build initiatives around options like work from home, crèche, sabbaticals, etc to help employees attend to family responsibilities and hence feel engaged. With incredibly engaged teams, this is possible. Pros and Cons of Remote Work: Is it as Great as it Sounds? When you’re managing a virtual team, team building is a challenge—but it is far from impossible even if your team is distributed across multiple time zones, especially with video calls and virtual team building activities. The most forward-thinking organizations prioritize employee to employee engagement. But you can help your company – and employees – emerge stronger from the coronavirus pandemic with these top 10 engagement ideas. Employee Engagement Ideas for Remote Workers [+Tips on Following Through] Before we discuss the specific employee engagement ideas for remote workers, we recommend that you implement certain project management, HR, video conferencing, and team collaboration tools, to make telework interactions easier between and within teams. Of all the employee engagement activities you … 1 - Help your employees get to know each other better People emotionally invest in other people, not companies, so creating a strong bond between team members is critical. This game is good for starting a brainstorming session. Gamification. When your team members are remote, it can be a great idea to schedule an actual tour of each remote employee’s location. Here are few fun tips to increase employee engagement: Fun Employee Engagement Activities and Game Ideas: Decorate your workplace: Messy and cluttered office never bring pleasure to work. This exercise is useful because it can be adapted to align with the meeting goal, work environment or something more personal. This game allows everyone to share hesitations and expectations, then focus on the task ahead. Once a month, invite your team to order whatever lunch they want. Open up your favorite video conferencing software and try a virtual version of this classic game in real-time. Employee Engagement Activities at SBL for Building the Team During Work From Home - SBL Knowledge Services Ltd. Everyone can share personal anecdotes: whether it's an important task or an acknowledgement of something another co-worker did well, it's a great way to connect with your teammates. A simple way to encourage your peers to show off their unique personalities is through their home offices. They quiz each other on colleague fun facts and hold themed trivia sessions. People often enter meetings stressed about tasks they’re working on, or other issues. Remote team building games can be a fun way to refine goals and dissolve monotony in meetings. Make significant efforts to start with rolling out team engagement activities. Here are few activities and ideas that will help you to keep your work from home employees motivated and engaged resulting in more efficiency. You can grab a drink after work or take a break to play a game. This is a great exercise in listening, mirroring, and also helps team members learn about each others’ interests and build relationships. You can use a live streaming service or a social network like Snapchat or Instagram. Diwali has a huge significance as far as workplace celebrations go.. You can make it a part of your meetings and ask everyone to come prepared. Now plan something for your employees to make them stay happy and motivated. Since virtual employees are not physically around, engaging and connecting with them might seem like an insurmountable task. Then, get everyone on a call and have some candid conversations over Google Hangouts or Zoom. Do this over video conference with an app that allows screen sharing like Google Meet or Zoom, so the speaker can include video for the storytelling and everyone can connect the name, face and story. The team at Hubstaff recommends doing a round-robin at the beginning of the meeting. Happiness at work in an office-space is one thing – ensuring employee happiness while they work from home is quite another. But for distributed workers, it takes more creativity. It can encourage colleagues to pay close attention to personal traits and stories. For distributed teams, it can be hard to get to know your team members. Employee engagement and employee engagement strategies is not an isolated HR process. Everyone looks for flexibility and work-life balance. Another great way to host such virtual employee health challenges is through a corporate wellness platform. The demand for conferencing tools and collaboration software is very high, with educational institutions pivoting to video tools to … Allow time for each group of remote workers to share their list with the larger team on the online whiteboard. In addition to this, we shared one thing we learned recently. Below are the top 25 employee engagement activities to engage, retain and boost happiness among your employees: Regular Feedbacks. Here at High Fidelity, we take this a step further by using virtual reality to hold our meetings. Creating a team activity is a lot of work but the work it takes to replace a person, train and then managing performance is costlier than putting the effort to conducting a fun activity. At the office, coffee breaks tend to be spontaneous - people simply swing by their colleague’s desk and invite them for a quick coffee break. Before your next meeting, ask every remote employee to create an image or find a picture they can use to tell a unique story or fact about their lives. The team at Timely, for instance, uses video conferencing platforms to connect. Remote team building is the process of turning individual workers into a cohesive team that works cooperatively to meet your customer’s needs, all while workers are distributed across different locations. Final Thought. ‘Work from home’ has indeed gained mainstream currency. The diverse employee engagement activities kept us connected with each other during these testing times. Brian Scudamore, CEO of O2E Brands, asked his team to share a 101 Life Goals list. Each employee should present their image and a short description to the group. It's difficult to banter when you don't have a company water cooler to crowd around. Take a few minutes and look at all the images and talk through common themes. Workplace Parties. Try to get remote employees to come to these activities to increase team and employee cohesion. This works well for remote teams, because everyone can participate. It gets us face-to-face and in the same room. But apart from work, fun activities like virtual game nights, (online chess tournaments, card games, board games, etc), non-work related video conferencing, fun challenges, and celebrations are employee engagement ideas for work from home. It's much more challenging to do this remotely. Run for “X” Kms in a week. In a perfect world, your team churns out exceptional creative work. In this collaborative ice breaker game, everyone on the remote team is encouraged to name their favorite thing. When a correct guess is made, that person needs to share their story with the group. It will stir the participants’ imagination and creativity and makes an ideal springboard to brainstorming. For remote teams, building a great company culture is something to always work toward. Help Scout pulls this off exceptionally with their 'At Home With Help Scout' series. Ask team members to find an image online and upload it to a picture sharing site, shared drive or online whiteboard like Miro. These activities maximize employee passion by focusing on the aspects of work employees are most passionate about. Amir Salihefendic, the CEO of Doist and manager of an all-remote team, identifies isolation, depression, and anxiety as "significant problems when working remotely." Anna has written about experience design, product development, and workshop facilitation. Your employees spend half of their time at work, so they should never hate work. They can show their office space, guide the team through their home or a cool co-working space, or, if technology allows, livestream in the city and show the main tourist sights and secret spots. It can especially help people who might have different styles or don’t normally work together as a strong team. 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