10 Remote-friendly Activities That Build Teamwork In 2025

Your team should feel free to share their top hits, guilty pleasures, and their personal party bangers. Virtual Happy Hour provides a relaxed environment for team members to connect informally, share conversations, and build relationships outside of work-related interactions. In fact, Happy Hour is a strategic appreciation session disguised as a casual hangout and it’s one of TeamOut’s Best Gratitude Activities for the Office. It’s harder to keep everyone focused and engaged, particularly if you’re gathering big teams and are not sure what to bring to the table. These suggestions help everyone get involved and work perfectly with larger audiences. Virtual Charades transforms the popular party game into an online experience where participants act out words or phrases using only physical gestures while teammates attempt to guess the answer through a video call.

• These activities are more than just “nice-to-haves”—they are critical to ensuring remote teams feel valued, supported, and aligned with organizational goals.
• Remote facilitation is the art of guiding groups toward common goals in a virtual environment.
• This fast-paced activity challenges participants to convey ideas through simple sketches, fostering creativity and enhancing non-verbal communication skills.
• Team members are randomly matched for a 10-minute anonymous mentoring chat.
• Try using an icebreaker or energizer that encourages people to share, and use breakouts to have people speak in a more comfortable setting.

Smaller teams thrive when Charmychronicle ideas flow freely, and virtual brainstorming encourages collaboration and creativity. Trivia games promote friendly competition while encouraging teams to collaborate and think quickly. Group challenges encourage collaboration and strengthen bonds through shared goals.

Harvard Business Review advises against conflating brevity with clarity in communications. Create clear roles and expectations so everyone knows how to participate. Some people are more comfortable contributing in chat, others prefer verbal participation, and some shine when given specific tasks or leadership opportunities during activities. (Fun Facts Edition) is a game where team members share interesting tidbits about themselves anonymously, promoting curiosity and conversation as others try to identify who each fact belongs to. Emoji Quiz challenges participants to communicate movie titles, phrases, or concepts using only emoji sequences.

Strengthen Company Culture

And with countless tools for virtual team building, it has become easier than ever. One of the biggest elements that separate remote teams from in-house teams, are the simple chats that happen on the office floor. These happen so naturally in the office, you might think nothing of them at all – but they’re actually huge team-building blocks. Discover key strategies and learn how to navigate cultural differences, improve communication, and leverage diversity for innovation and team productivity.

Encouraging creativity, problem-solving, and connection brings teams closer together, even in a virtual environment. Whether you’re leading a small startup or a large organization, this guide will provide practical employee engagement ideas and insights to help you build a more engaged remote workforce. Together, we’ll explore how to empower employees, improve internal communication, and ensure your team feels connected—even in a virtual environment.

Enhanced Employee Retention

When performing online team building, simple activities are often the best strategy in ensuring participation and removing frustration. Follow the Leader is a great team building energiser suitable for online and offline teams. Simple tasks that require team focus, cohesion, and awareness are great for any group working on team building.

What Are The Benefits Of Employee Recognition In Remote Teams?

Foster psychological safety by encouraging questions, admitting mistakes openly, and celebrating both successes and learning opportunities. When leaders model vulnerability and openness, team members feel more comfortable being authentic themselves. Collaborative Playlist Creation allows team members to share their musical tastes and create a shared soundtrack that represents the group’s diversity.

Larger teams may require breakout rooms or rotating group activities to ensure everyone participates. Icebreakers work well for any size, but complex problem solving exercises often need smaller subteams for efficiency. Incorporate asynchronous exercises to accommodate different time zones and schedule regular sessions for continuous engagement. Consider team interests, personalities, and objectives when selecting activities.

Best and Worst asks each participant to ask one question about the best and worst thing they want to learn from the group. ” After putting all the questions in a hat and choosing a random pair, invite the group to share their answers and related stories. This method is adapted from the well-known icebreaker ‘Two Truths And A Lie’ to create an activity that you could return to throughout a meeting. An online yoga class is a virtual event where a yoga instructor leads the class, and team members participate from the comfort of their own homes. Team members could follow along with a professional mixologist as they demonstrate how to make custom cocktails based on the personalities of each employee. Virtual team-building activities can also be hands- on to boost team morale and bonding.

Have a plan B for EVERY single tool you’re using, because it’s not a question of if something will break, but a question of when. To avoid disruptions and the momentum fading, prepare for the worst-case scenario and have several backups ready. We’d  also recommend you build in WAY more breaks than you would in a normal workshop to keep the energy and momentum going.

Remote teams must create these learning opportunities deliberately through structured activities and consistent communication rituals. Virtual team building activities are group games, activities, challenges that take place using online platform like Google meet, Zoom, Microsoft team. Those activities are an excellent way to boost employee morale, enhance work relationship and improve communication. When virtual team building leads to in-person meetups, our guide covers activities for amazing company offsites that strengthen team connections and drive real results. Retrospectives are structured meetings where teams pause to reflect on a recent period of work, like a project or sprint. The goal is to openly discuss what went well, what challenges arose, and what can be improved in the future.

Waiting until halfway through a meeting to get other voices in the room can mean people are unwilling to speak up. Try using an icebreaker or energizer that encourages people to share, and use breakouts to have people speak in a more comfortable setting. We often try to set intentions at the start of every meeting to make sure we get off on the right foot and clear up any misconceptions. It’s also useful to check out effectively at the end of the session to ensure there is a shared understanding of what needs to come next. They do this by guiding groups through a process, helping to develop understanding, and by improving participation and collaboration along the way. By employing trusted facilitation techniques and methods, the best facilitators help teams move towards their desired outcomes in a structured manner.

This is in keeping with Gaztambide-Fernández and Matute (2013)’s understanding of pedagogy as always informed by an ethical imperative. During conversations, we explored how digital interfaces influence how we communicate, the language we use, and the ways in which relationships may be structured. After all, online environments are not empty containers to apply methods for dialogue, but rather are constitutive of what is possible between people in any interaction (Law & Urry, 2004).

Creative activities allow employees to relax and unleash their inner artist. Scavenger hunts are a fun and interactive way to get employees moving and participating. Virtual brainstorming encourages creativity and innovation while giving team members a platform to share ideas. Book clubs provide opportunities for growth and connection by allowing employees to explore new ideas together. Virtual escape rooms are interactive, problem-solving activities where teams work together to complete a challenge.

Whether through fun virtual games, professional development opportunities, or thoughtful recognition, every effort contributes to a stronger, more engaged workforce. Team-building activities are vital for creating trust, strengthening relationships, and improving communication within remote teams. When employees work remotely, team-building fosters connection and collaboration while breaking down physical and virtual barriers. In today’s increasingly digital world, remote employee engagement activities are essential for maintaining a connected, motivated, and thriving remote workforce. When employees work in isolation, they quickly feel disconnected from their colleagues, managers, and the company’s mission.

The Marshmallow Challenge was developed by Tom Wujec, who has done the activity with hundreds of groups around the world. This version has an extra debriefing question added with sample questions focusing on roles within the team. In eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow.