Online Team Building Games for Free

As remote working on its way to become a common business practice, companies struggle to develop clever solutions to maintain and boost employee morale. Online team building games offer the best way to achieve that with many additional benefits. Most companies schedule online games to create a shared identity and improve communication among employees. Besides these, they can help a company to maintain and build a somewhat tangible company culture. 

In this article, we listed some of the most entertaining yet efficient online team building games. Team building games and ideas listed below are highly engaging, totally free, and suitable to play with remote workers. So let’s check them out now.

A Discord or Slack Channel Dedicated to Pet or Kid Photos

Everyone enjoys sharing photos of their loved ones. Creating a discord or slack channel dedicated to sharing favorite photos of pets or kids is a great way to increase engagement among workers. They can comment on others’ photos and get to know each other in a remote work environment. This method also requires minimum effort. 

A Book or Movie Club

Book or movie clubs are great for improving relations between employees. Like-minded members read a book or watch a movie every two weeks or a month. Then, they can discuss what they liked or not about a book or a movie.

With regular meetings, employees can improve their communication skills and relations with other members as well.

Virtual Trivia Games

There are a variety of online trivia games that companies can use to improve team morale. It is important to choose a common topic that can interest or have the knowledge of for every participant. Then depending on the scale of the group, individuals are divided into equal groups. Winning team members should get a prize, such as custom-made coffee mugs or online course coupons. 

All in all, trivia games are there to spark competition and conversation between employees in a fun way. 

Guess the Emojis

Guess the emojis are especially great for close-knit groups of colleagues. The game is quite simple and engaging; here is how to play it:

1. Everyone takes a screenshot of their most-used emojis and sends it to the moderator.
2. Each person guesses the top most used 5 emojis of each other. 
3. Points are rewarded for accuracy.  

Pancakes Vs. Waffles

If you are looking to improve the decision-making process and conversation skills among employees, pancakes vs. waffles is an amazing game to play. Follow these instructions to play this game:

1. For the first round, pick an easy comparison such as pancakes vs. waffles. Then, your team has to decide which one is better to keep forever since the other one gets deleted from existence. 
2. On the following rounds, use more biased comparisons to initiate deeper and entertaining discussions such as Mars vs. Pluto, Excel vs. Google Docs, Puppies vs. Kittens, Spielberg vs. Nolan, and such. 
3. There is not a clear winner for this game. However, it is possible to extend the game with interesting comparisons with winners. Let’s say the pancakes is the winner of the pancakes vs. waffles battle; then it can be fun and creative to discuss pancakes vs. kittens. 

Guess the Refrigerator

While this game somewhat underrates the sense of privacy, it is incredibly fun to play. If everyone agrees to join, you can follow these instructions to play this game: 

1. Everyone takes a photo of the inside of their refrigerator and submits them to the moderator. 
2. The moderator uploads photos to a dedicated channel so that everyone can examine the contents and send their guesses to the moderator. 
3. The person with the correct guesses wins the game. 

Favorite Things

Favorite things is a simple yet pretty efficient icebreaker game. It is important for this game to assign a question and announce the answering order in the beginning. The first question should be easy to answer, such as favorite things about remote working or Sundays. Then it is better to add more engaging questions. 

Werewolf

There are lots of different names given to this popular game, such as mafia, but the werewolf is the most popular one. This game is all about manipulation, deceit, and secrets. However, it is sensible to keep it light-hearted as discussions may become fiery. Follow these instructions to play this game: 

1. Each player draws virtual cards to assign them a specific role, namely werewolves, villagers, medic, and seer. Werewolves’ goal is to kill other players, villagers try to know which players are werewolves, the medic can rescue a player, and the seer can reveal player roles.
2. The moderator announces that its night time and calls werewolves to wake up. Werewolves select a player to kill, then go back to sleep. Then the medic wakes up and selects a player to save, then goes back to sleep. Lastly, the seer wakes up and selects a player to know his/her role. It is crucial to make these processes as silent as possible. 
3. The moderator announces that its day time and tells the group whether the werewolves kill a villager successfully or not. Survivors try to find werewolves and vote to eliminate a player at the end of the round. This process is repeated until only the werewolves, or the villagers remain.  

Virtual Charades 

Charades is one of the most popular and entertaining party games. Its virtual version is also fun in small-groups of colleagues. Similar to its real-life version, participants try to tell an object, movie, or a random image without using any words to their teammates. Then, others try to guess it correctly. To make things more serious, the losing team can buy gifts for the winners.

Virtual Dance Party

A virtual dance party is one of the simplest and quickest team building activities. Just open up a hit song that everyone can relate to and keep the energy levels high. It is possible to start a virtual dance party at the beginning of a session or out of nowhere at any time. Try to convince everyone to take part, even only by waiving hands. 

Online Room Escape Games

Escape games are getting increasingly popular as a virtual team building activity. There are dozens of high-quality online escape games you can try with your team, both free and paid. So your team can improve their collaboration, teamwork, and communication skills while having fun. 

Ten Finger Showdown

Ten finger showdown is the light version of “never have I never” that can be played with many colleagues at once. The idea behind it is also quite simple. Every participant shows their ten fingers extended to the cam; then the moderator starts giving examples of unusual or entertaining life experiences. Participants start removing a finger when the moderator mentioned a prompt that they’d experienced before. While there is not a certain winner for this game, the last player with the most fingers can be the winner. We listed some fun and work-friendly prompts that go like “I…

• know how to say “sorry” in at least four languages,
• made a sweater/scarf/mitten by knitting from scratch,
• have adopted a pet,
• have visited more than five countries,
• ate a chocolate bar in the last 24 hours.”

Guess the Workspace

Guess the workspace is an amazing game to spark conversations between colleagues. They can also exchange tips for making their workspaces better. Here are the instructions to play:

1. Everyone takes a picture of their workspaces and sends them to the moderator. 
2. Moderator posts workspace photos in order and asks others to vote for them.
3. The winner gets a prize that can be useful for their work environment. 

Virtual Show & Tell

Show & tell is a popular game among elementary schools. Students bring an object they like to the class and explain how the object is important for them. Virtual show & tell is an altered version of the game. Here’s how to play virtual show & tell: 

1. Give team members a minute to find an object that is meaningful to them. 
2. Then give them another minute to explain why the object is important, who gave it to them, and why they keep it. 

Virtual show & tell the game is great to initiate meaningful conversations between colleagues. So they can know each other better and communicate much more easily.

Why Are Online Team Building Games Useful?

Remote working has its own challenges for an employee, such as feeling unproductive, disconnected, lonely, or even isolated. A single person might not overcome these feelings without any outside help. Regular online team building games can help individuals feel in part of a group and give them a chance to improve their skill sets. There are lots of other benefits of online team building games for participants and ultimately for companies. They can be summarized as:

• Improving team coordination, communication, and retention. 
• Learning each others’ backgrounds and personalities.
• Building happier and productive teams
• Creating a solid company culture.
• Increasing company reputation and job satisfaction.

FAQ About Online Team Building Games

What is a virtual team building activity?

A virtual team building activity refers to any online activity that colleagues do as a team to improve their skills and communication. While most virtual activities are similar to their real-life counterparts, there are many unique virtual team building activities.

What is the purpose of online team building games?

Online team building games have tons of benefits both for workers and the company. Their main purpose is to keep team morale high, engage conversations between colleagues, and improve their soft skills.

Is running online team building games difficult?

Team building games are not difficult to run, and yet they require a certain amount of dedication. The most important part is to choose the most suitable game for the team. Other than these, there are lots of professional communication tools that make the process a lot easier. 

How to measure the success of a team building game

Team building games’ success is not as simple as measuring other metrics like sales or inventory improvements. Nevertheless, there are still many methods to evaluate it. You can compare productivity rates, overtime take-ups and simply send surveys to your team regularly.

Is it possible to bond with a remote working team?

If a remote working team only talks about work-related things, it will not likely build a bond between individuals. That’s where team building games come into play. Thanks to team-building games, people who know their colleagues’ areas of interests outside of work-related ones can form deeper connections.

Online Team Building Games in Short

Remote working has its own pros and cons. The main challenge for remote working is to keep team morale high, productive, and interactive. Online team building games can help a business to achieve these. So in this article, we listed some of the best online team building games that are free and entertaining for all. Now that you have a fully functioning team it’s time to start a startup. Learn how!

The post Online Team Building Games for Free is republished from Dopinger Blog