After a year of working remotely and social distancing, it might be time to reintroduce your employees to one another! Try to combine the best parts of social gatherings with morale-boosting challenges so they can reacquaint themselves with one another, reignite the desire to collaborate, and stay safe. Need a few unique ideas for team-building exercises? Get started with these!
Solve a Puzzle
Putting together a jigsaw puzzle is a classic way for friends and families to spend time together and work toward a fun goal. But to do that, you have to be gathered around a table, don’t you? Not necessarily. If you’re in the office, the puzzle can occupy an off to the side space, and employees can take turns approaching and putting the pieces together. You can even solve puzzles by webcam with one person acting as host and following instructions given in the chat. Naturally, there are plenty of puzzles and other online games such as Madalin Stunt Cars 3 that you can play in real-time.
Set Up a Virtual Cooking Class
Cooking classes are a big hit for most people. They get to learn how to prepare a new dish or dessert and enjoy the tasty results. Meanwhile, they learn the value of working together toward a common goal, taking advice, providing assistance, and contributing. While you may not have an oven or adequately large food prep area in your office, your employees probably do. Set up a virtual cooking class so you can cook together while far apart. Some virtual cooking classes even provide the ingredients and instructions for added convenience.
Scavenger Hunts
Scavenger hunts are another experience that can take place in real life or virtually. In the workplace, separate employees into random teams and provide them with a list of items to find around the office or their home (clever clues can increase the challenge and spark creative thinking). Clues can be actual items or photographs that they can take and share in the chat function of your teleconferencing software.
Active-Listening Exercise
Here’s another unique idea for team-building exercises that they won’t see coming. Without tipping anyone off, deliver a long and seemingly pointless speech filled with abbreviations and acronyms, corporate slang terms, and just plain nonsense, interspersed with several useful facts and figures. When you finish, let them know that it was a test to see how actively they listened. Set up teams, provide basic clues, and have them work together to recollect those facts and figures and share them. Again, this is a great exercise in and out of the office. Have fun and pull your workers closer together!
