The Importance of Remote Team Building

Team building is an incredibly important part of managing and developing a team. This applies to both office teams and teams working remotely. However, this area is far too neglected. This could be due to a lack of time or because people don't realize the importance of doing these activities with their team.

By developing a team building strategy and identifying each individual's exact needs, you can ensure that everyone involved is motivated and on track to achieve their goals. This way, you can help employees deal with some of the most common issues that come with remote work. Your team will even develop techniques and strategies for general work, helping to improve their overall happiness and productivity.

However, when planning and carrying out activities with a team, their needs must be taken into account. At each stage of team development there are different needs that must be taken into account. Dealing with the individual phases is one of the most important aspects of the team development process.

Why is it so important to do this?

Teams Those who do not develop their collaboration skills and expand their social relationships will not be able to take full advantage of the benefits of remote work. As a leader, you naturally want to get the best performance from your team and ensure that your team is happy with the work they are doing. But it's not just about improving collaboration and increasing output.

Team building can impact some of the biggest issues remote workers face. Loneliness and poor work-life balance, two of the biggest issues that can impact work, are cited as a top concern by 38% of remote workers, according to Buffer's State of Remote Work 2020 report.

Buffer State of Remote Work 2020

Social team building activities and exercises that allow people to recover from their work help achieve several goals: helping people work better, helping people enjoy their work more , and helping people realize their potential. The benefits are truly far-reaching, and with a solid plan for implementing team building activities, you can really reap a lot of benefits:

• It improves overall communication
• It improves creativity within the team
• Breaks down barriers and silos
• It reveals hidden talents
• helps team members resolve conflicts better
• It creates trust between your team members

A Head of Remote can be of significant help.

Proven team building exercises

We've put together some of our own ideas and activities that you can do with your teams that go beyond the usual team building exercises. We've even included our top tips from a few other companies that are also great to do. Take a look and get inspired!

Set a goal

In this exercise, you'll help build the team by keeping everyone focused on achieving their goals. Everyone has them, but we don't always share them... we should change that! By asking participants to share their goals, you encourage the accountability and drive necessary to achieve the goals.

• Organize a meeting at a time that is convenient for everyone involved. Let them know that it's about communicating about their goals, both work-related and personal. Ask everyone to come prepared.
• As usual, you should go first so you can set an example of what is expected of everyone.
• Start by communicating your professional and personal goals that you want to share with the team.
• When you're finished, everyone should take turns doing the same thing, explaining why they want to do it and how long they expect it to take.
• And now comes the hard part! For this to really work, your team needs to put their goals on a shared calendar with an expected date when the task should be completed.
• Periodically, perhaps every week, take stock and see how everyone is doing. This can be a bit stressful for some, so keep that in mind and don't put too much pressure on more introverted team members.

Simply putting these goals on the calendar can create a real drive to achieve them. Even if they aren't achieved, they remain present in employees' minds and that can help them really focus.

Guess the owner

Aside from the fact that this exercise is a great way to get to know each other better, it's also a lot of fun! It's even more surprising when you think you know someone, but then you find out something very interesting.

• Ask your team members to prepare pictures from their childhood, unknown facts about themselves, or other quirky information that the other team members don't know about.
• Each member of your team then sends it to a moderator, which is most likely you as the team manager
• The moderator must then summarize all the information in a presentation. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just one fact, image or piece of information per slide.
• The team then has to guess which fact belongs to whom. You can even do this with a tool like sli.do so people have the opportunity to vote.

The aim is to further improve personal relationships between team members, especially as you carry out the project towards the end of its term. At this point everyone will know each other much better than at the start of the project. Guess the Owner adds variety by asking your team to think of things no one would guess.

Interaktive All-Hands-Meetings

During monthly all-hands meetings, Slido uses live polls to re-engage and give a voice to all team members, including colleagues working remotely.

Since All Hands meetings are about the people, the Slido team likes to conduct a “Silent Hero” activity with a word cloud survey. Each team member nominates a colleague who they think has excelled in the last month and enters their name into Slido. As the names arrive, they appear on the screen in a word cloud.

Slido CEO Peter Komornik often uses live surveys to present company figures and statistics. He runs a multiple-choice survey that allows colleagues to guess how well the company did in the last month and vote in real time.

Both Meetings At the end of a quarter or year, Peter likes to turn the company's highlights into a quiz and run a fun competition using Slido's newest feature - quizzes. Since Slido's team is spread all over the world, an interactive quiz is a great team building activity that everyone can participate in! Man

Coffee & Learn sessions

Since 2018 I have been running “Coffee & Learn” sessions for the Hotjar marketing team. Coffee & Learns are informal, 15-minute sessions where we take turns sharing something we do, what we are, or what we've learned with the rest of the team. Coffee is optional, but encouraged if participants enjoy it .

I started this tradition because I wanted to bring the team together less as a group of colleagues working on the same project and more as a group of people who spend 40 hours a week together. We've covered topics ranging from the very practical (how to practice leadership, how to ask good customer questions) to the very personal (how to recover from burnout, what we've learned in our lives as remote workers).

The idea behind this is that it is extremely valuable to come together regularly to learn from, about, and with each other: I believe that trust is built and maintained when we continually come together in a supportive environment and are willing to share and trust received."

- Fio Dossetto, senior editor at Hotjar

Show 'n Tell

Prezi hosts bi-weekly Show 'n Tells to bring together its San Francisco, Budapest and Riga offices to share company news, product launches and more. Employees participate from their respective offices or dial in from home. Prezi ensures that colleagues in at least one other office have time to present something so that the Zoom call can be spread across the startup's different locations. For particularly special "Show 'n Tells" when the company has an important product launch, Prezi hosts company-wide toasts with champagne and of course cake! There are some pitfalls that you can read more about this blog experience.