Ideas for having fun and informal team interaction while WFH

Covid-19 Pandemic has greatly influenced the world and the work culture of organizations. Several countries are under lockdown that eventually led many businesses to adopt and continue to work from home to keep their employees safe and workflow intact.

Unlike earlier, professionals are now working from home or any remote place which leads to the need for virtual team building activities which became popular amongst this pandemic situation. Every organization cares about the bond between team members as it improves the team progress and motivates individuals to be more productive.

Making and maintaining a happy and productive team requires a continuous effort on organic communications and chats that happen informally around the water cooler or the office. As of now, many organizations are turning into a new normal remote working mode which may lead to loneliness. The isolation from colleagues and the sudden conflation of work and home lives led to suffering from a mix of social isolation and disconnection from their team members.

There are several ways to build the team effectively during working from home. Let me share with you a few ideas for having fun and informal team interaction while working from home.

(1) Virtual Talent Show

Schedule a time (say, once in a month) for sharing hidden talents of your team members, however creative it can be. Be it musical, magical, or comical, presenting the talents of team members are always fun and an engaging way to highlight the common interests among the team members.

(2) Picture of your Life

Ask your colleagues to share their picture or picture of any interesting moment in their personal life. The picture can be their family portrait or their pet or it can be a picture from their vacation trip. It must reflect one of their interests, hobbies, or passions.

Ask everyone to share a picture during an online meeting. Each member will take their turn and discuss the picture as they wish to present. This is a great way to get people to share their important stuff without making them feel nervous.

For example, when you work remotely, you spend more time at home together with your beloved pets like cats or dogs. You can post pictures of our pets with funny faces and doing crazy things. It will develop more interactions between team members and gives an idea about your day-to-day life.

(3) Recipe Roundup and Team lunch

Some people in your team may be interested in cooking and prefers home food most of the days. It will be a good idea to make your team participate and share their most favorite and hit recipes..

This kind of activity also helps , team members, to cherish and remember the recipes that we have enjoyed during our office visit days and help us to add one more variety to our food habits.

Further, we can schedule a mealtime with our entire team through video conferencing channels. It will improve our virtual team building and will allow getting feedback about the recipes that were shared with others.

(4) Who you are?

It is a kind of Icebreaker that let you to get to know your team members better. It is a simple prompt to help build our relationships with colleagues and to increase the connections between team members.

During this meeting, each one of the team members can share their unique character, their own set of strengths and weaknesses, and their struggles and achievements. This kind of activity brings it all out in front of everyone to build a healthy and friendly relationship.

(5) Virtual “water cooler” space

One more thing that is not available in this remote working is the chance for casual interaction or some small talk with our colleagues in the water cooler space.

Though it may be personal, this kind of interaction is an essential part of each employee because it makes work stress-free, enjoyable and meaningful. These small talks provide opportunities for your team members to get to know each other better and have a healthy friendly relationship. This is why you should introduce virtual water cooler space!

How? – we can create a dedicated channel or space in our messaging apps like Slack or any other communication channel that we use. Encourage your colleagues to share updates, sites, non-work-related things. To make it more interactive, we can introduce a weekly or monthly question, theme, or activity in that channel.

(6) Create a Story

Humans are good at creating stories that can astonish anyone be it our friends or our HR managers. Here, we have another activity that creates more interaction among our team members.

In this activity, we can schedule about half an hour to one hour once or twice a month. It makes the employees have an engaging and fun team-building activity. The only thing that we need to do here is to give some random words or sentences to start with, for the story creation. This is going to be fun and make employees unfurl laughter with their stories.

(7) Team Health Challenges

All the above activities can create fun and enjoyable interactions. But there is one activity that is actually for people who are cautious about their health.

This activity is to encourage a healthy lifestyle amongst your remote team members. The current scenario in the new normal has shown us that employee wellbeing is more important than ever.

Every organization now desires to thrive with a healthy lifestyle for their team members. Also, they are now implementing corporate wellness programs in their workplaces. However, it becomes quite difficult in case your team members are working remotely. The most effective way to ensure the same is to associate health challenges as a part of your virtual team-building exercise.

Here, we can consider throwing tasks to our colleagues like:

To Walk about “X” number of steps, Kilometers

To-Do “X” number of pushups, squats, lunges

To Complete running for “X” Kms in a week

Else, we can have joint meditation sessions through video chatting to boost mental health.

(8) Friday close-off meetings

Finally, when we work on-site, leaving the office symbolizes the end of workday and during the weekend it symbolizes that we are having OFF. However, at remote working, when you are working and chilling at the same place, it isn’t so easy to maintain boundaries between working and resting.

This is a very serious problem because staying plugged in means, employees aren’t able to take a rest, which will eventually lead to burnout. To prevent this, a good recommendation is to conduct company-wide so-called Friday close-off meetings.

That is, at the end of the workday each Friday, gather team members for a short, half an hour video meeting. Use it to acknowledge their work during the week, celebrate their wins, and share plans for the weekend. This will create refreshing thoughts on how they are planning to spend their weekend and relax their time with their families or friends.

Above listed activities provide a way to fill the gap between remote working team members and bring them closer. We can either opt for organizing one or two activities or can combine a few of them to create an engaging virtual team-building program among the employees.

It will solve the biggest issue associated with remote working so that employees won’t feel disconnected. Also, engaging remote team will require innovative ways of thinking and conscious effort to replicate organic in-person interactions. Be sure to use a survey tool in place to consistently monitor employee engagement and well-being. Together, teams can make it through these tough times and potentially even become closer.