30 Best Virtual Team Building Activities (2023 Edition)
Virtual Team Building Activities
30 of the best!
Even though virtual team building activities have become the norm over the last couple of years, there is still a demand for fun and innovative ideas. Luckily, there has been plenty of time (and boy, don’t we know it) to test which activities work best. To save you a lengthy Google search day, we have compiled 30 of the current best virtual team building activities:
Area 51
“Is it a bird, is it a plane?! No! it’s the first of our fun virtual team building activities. This activity encourages teams to think creatively and adapt their communication skills to suit various levels. The premise is simple: to get someone to describe something as if they were talking to an alien who has just landed on earth. Naturally, the alien has no idea what on earth you’re referring to (see what we did there?) so simple and descriptive language is encouraged. Why not relate this to your specific workplace and ask the team to explain your company and their job role to an alien?
Virtual Coffee Shop
It is no secret that coffee shops are a great place to connect with people. After all, we all know-and- love the notorious TV series Friends and their infamous jaunts at Central Perk. Undoubtedly, a comfy couch and a hot beverage are an excellent recipe for a virtual team building activity. In particular, online coffee meets provide an opportunity to build relationships and community with co-workers. To create a virtual coffee shop, simply set up a video call on your platform of choice and pour yourself a cup of joe. This activity can be undertaken in small groups, or if you prefer, in a one-on-one setting. You can even put on a Spotify playlist in the background to really simulate the downtown coffee shop vibe!
Scavenger Hunt
The art of searching for the other sock in the dryer is a time honored tradition for many of us. Luckily, it can be turned into a fun and rewarding virtual team building activity. Scavenger hunts come in many forms, from the clue-driven to the seek-and-find type. To make your own scavenger hunt, all you need to do is create a list of everyday items you can find around the house. For example, dirty dishes, junk food or a stuffed animal can be fun (and revealing!) choices to include. After the items have been decided, ask your team to take a picture when they find one of the items and to send via WhatsApp, a Slack channel, or whatever chat app you use.
Virtual Trivia Night
This is one of the most versatile virtual team building activities. Not only is trivia the epitome of teamwork and entertainment, it is an easy activity to organise for a virtual environment. All you need to do is prepare questions and answer sheets in advance to present on a video chat. At the end, grade the answers and the person with the highest total, wins. The questions can be general knowledge based or about your specific workplace (or both!). For inspiration on how to host the perfect quiz event, click here. If you’re feeling really hands-off, there are plenty of free question and answer templates online!
Virtual Happy Hour
Ah, the two magic words we long to hear after a long day in the office: happy hour. Arguably, the idea of a virtual happy hour is superior to heading to your favorite waterhole as you don’t have to worry about taking the subway home late at night. Not to mention, it can also be a hell of a lot cheaper! To create this virtual event, you first need to pick a video call platform to meet with your team. Next, grab your drink of your choice, load up on chips and interact as you would at your local bar. This can be a great bonding activity and all from the comfort of your own home.
Virtual Team Building Activities Continue!
Next up: Mister Rogers Calls
A nod to the legendary host with the most, Mister Rogers, this activity encourages your team to get talking. Over a video chat (for no more than 30 minutes) assign a topic for conversation. This can be anything from hobbies, favorite brand of toothpaste, or talking about your pets. Teambuilding recommends using the Donut app to randomly assign conversation partners every two weeks.
Praise Across the Board!
If you are wanting inspire warm and fuzzy feelings among your co-workers, this is the team building activity for you. In order to achieve these vibes, ask each member of the team to share an accomplishment they are proud of. Encourage your team to show their support and appreciation towards the person who is sharing. Along with a feeling all of the positive vibes imaginable, you may learn something surprising about your fellow co-workers.
Virtual Board Games
Board games are a classic pastime that are also available to be enjoyed online with co-workers. All you need is a carefully placed webcam and a solid internet connection and then you’re good to go! You can host classic games such as Scrabble on Facebook. Alternatively, if you’re wanting to get away from social media platforms, take a look at this list outlining easy and fun virtual team building activities.
Karaoke
Just because it is a virtual environment, it does not mean you cannot hit a high! You can easily bring the funk to an online karaoke event. What’s more, is that you can arrange karaoke sessions over video chats platforms with no treble at all! Puns aside, you can easily put on a playlist and singalong in your slacks from the comfort of your own home. You can use YouTube for backing tracks or take a look at some free online backing tracks available on websites such as KarokeVersion. Without a doubt, one of the benefits of a karaoke event being online, is that unlike real life, there is a mute button…
Guess the Baby Picture
Just for giggles! This is a quick and easy game that can be done on Zoom or via an email platform such as Slack. For this team building activity, ask your team to send-in a picture of themselves as a baby (around 2-3 years old is nest). Then, post the images in Google document and make sure everyone has access to view the files. Once that is done, get each participant to write down who the baby could be (they can either write it on paper or send their responses to the platform message chat). Then, collate answers, grade the scores, and reveal the answers!
The Emoji Game Teambuilding Idea
The modern day hieroglyphics, emojis are an accessible versatile resource that can be transformed into a quick and easy team building activity. One example of an activity you can try is to ask your team to guess each person’s five most used emojis. The person to recognise the most correct emojis is declared the winner. Alternatively, if you are wanting a more genuine activity, ask everyone to message with an emoji that describes their current mood.
Personality Tests
Whether you have endured a personality test for work or who;e burning the midnight oil on BuzzFeed, personality tests can be a great way to establish team dynamics. Hit-up Buzzfeed to find out what kind of cookie you are based on your Starbucks order. or what Game of Thrones character you are. Compare results for a fun way to get to know your team members and potentially even something you did not know about yourself.
Virtual Gig at Christmas / Holiday Season
Get the party started by bringing the music to a virtual setting. You can bring the entertainment directly to your home viewing screen simply by sharing a YouTube link to a concert. It may not be the same as feeling the bass thrum through your chest, but you can definitely turn your speakers up loud enough to try! If you are looking for more of an interactive event, there are online entertainment providers such as Event MB who have musical guests as part of their events.
A popular virtual team building activity: Bingo!
Get up to tricks with a quintessential game of bingo. Choose a virtual bingo event with Quiz Coconut! A round (or three) of bingo can be quick to setup and play online. In order to play bingo online, you can send a bingo card to everyone in advance and nominate someone to call out numbers. Alternatively, participants can take turns being the caller. The aim of the game is to see if anyone can get a line crossed off or a full house. You can either mail the cards online or find a bingo generator to do all the work for you. Click here for a detailed description of how to play the game. Bingo!
50 States Challenge
Feeling patriotic? Then challenge your colleagues to name all 50 states within a set period of time. For an intense challenge, see how many states people can list in one minute. You would be surprised how invested people get into this team building activity!
Murder Mystery
We all love a classic game of Cluedo, gathering around the kitchen table to figure out “who done it”. Online Murder Mystery events are a popular team building activity as it requires players work together to figure out who amongst them is the culprit. During a murder mystery event, each person is assigned a character. At this point, the team must use their cunning to figure out who the murderer is. There are online companies such as Murder Mystery Games that run via video apps like zoom that you contact for a hassle-free process. There is even a company that runs a ‘Murder in Ancient Egypt’ event online. Read about these virtual team building activities here.
Virtual Team Building Activity – Escape Rooms
This is a triple threat activity for the virtual world environment! Not only do they engage problem solving skills but they are also ideal for promoting teamwork and building relationships. For instance, your group may be tasked with breaking out of a jail cell and have to work together to bust out! This encourages teams to communicate in a fun and social setting to reach a common goal.
Online Fundraiser – especially at Christmas or Thanksgiving
A fundraising event is a great idea for banding together as a team and boosting morale. With that in mind, find a cause that your company feels passionate about and coordinate a series of activities to help raise money for the cause. There is a wide variety of virtual team building activities you can plan online, such as a virtual auction or a video game tournament. For more ideas, check out this website for a list of fun and creative virtual fundraising ideas.
Team Pursuit
Team pursuit is a classic game that can be transformed into a virtual team building activity. To begin with, you need to devise a series of challenges that can easily be completed online. With this in mind, design tasks that can be for either small groups or individuals to complete. The tasks can be mental or physical, or a combination of both. For example, you can give your team a set of brain teasers to complete under a time limit. It has been shown that team pursuit is a great activity to build trust and communication within your team by making them to work together to reach a single goal. Stuck for ideas? Here is a useful list of challenges to choose from.
Dance Party – for the holidays
Get your groove on from the comfort of your own home! Tune-in to a video call, crank up the tunes and boogie away. Make sure the cameras are on and you have a funky playlist ready to go. For a more competitive challenge, turn this dance-a-thon into a fun-filled dance off between colleagues. Nothing quite breaks the ice like finding out who in the office is amazing at the sprinkler. On that note, why not schedule dance breaks into your conference meetings as a fun energy booster?
Two Truths and One Lie
If you are wanting to get up-close-and-personal with your team, it turns out that this sometimes rather revealing activity! A positive aspect of this activity is that it is a simple game that requires no preparation. Having said that, you might want to practice your poker face!. To begin, yive your team a couple of minutes to come up with three statements about themselves: one of these needs to be a lie and the others two are true. The aim of the game is for team members to try to guess which of the three statements is a lie. For example:
1. I never use public restrooms.
2. I didn’t eat a single pizza during lockdown
3.I have a pet cat named Snuggles
If you want to add a competitive element to this activity, you can tally points for correct answers. This game is great for small groups and can be as innocent or as adventurous as you’d like. We’ll let you guess which is the lie, it’s easy as pie to figure out…
What do we have in common?
Nothing quite rallies a team together like finding out someone else also uses the same shade foundation or absolutely loves action movies. For this reason, this activity is a great way to get your team to learn more about each other. For these virtual team building activities, you need to first assign participants into small groups. Once this is done, task them to find three things they have in common. To get the conversation flowing you can suggest a category such as food. Alternatively, you can make it more challenging by omitting categories such as pets, food and movies.
Show and Tell
You may be heading down memory late right now remembering elementary school. Now that we have all our adult teeth and are not getting taller (sorry to disappoint!), we have experienced life in weird and wonderful ways and have many stories to tell. This activity allows your team to share something personal about them with the team and therefore promote bonding. To get things started, ask co-workers in advance to bring a prized possession to the next conference call to talk about.
Virtual Debate Club
Some of you may have joined Debate Club at your high school as an extracurricular activity. All in all, this virtual team building activity is good for practicing clear communication. In addition to this, they encourage critical thinking. To set up a debate, you can either choose a topic in advance or collectively decide on a video chat. In order for this to run smoothly and succinctly, set a time limit for the debate topic (around 45 minutes is usually enough). Some examples of topics you can discuss are: Is graffiti art just as worthy of regard as classical paintings? Is the use of technology changing people for the better. or worse? Is gaming a sport?
Speed Race (Typing Edition)
Find out who in your team has fingers like The Flash! This is a competitive activity that hones in on a key office skill: being able to type quickly and accurately. There are great websites that can facilitate this activity such as Typing Speed Relay and typingtest.com. In order to ramp up the competition, have your team post their results in whatever communication platform your team is familiar with.
A virtual activity for team building not often considered: Meditation
Needless to say, these have been challenging times. A guided mediation session can an effective way to bring people together in a calm and safe environment. To organise this, use a video platform such as Zoom to host the call. Find an online guided mediation you can share or ask someone in the group who may be willing to lead the session. To make this even more special, suggest (or even send) candles, innocence and scented oils to use during the session.
Virtual Field Trips – Remote Fun For The Office
With the wonders of technology today you can go anytime, anywhere! Many of us miss going out-and-about without having to worry about the pandemic. So why not bring the outside world to your screens at home? Take a trip with your co-workers without needing to leave the comfort of your own home. For example, a virtual field trip could be to a museum or a national monument. You can even tune-in to a livestream event, such as a webcam at a zoo. There are many possibilities to explore with this virtual team building activity idea!
Dinner Party
How can you simulate going for a meal at home? Simple! Get online to use whatever video call service your team is familiar with and have dinner while you chat. You can go all-out in formal wear or hangout in your slacks. The same goes for food, you can keep it casual or fancy. Pickup your favorite ready meal at the grocery store or make a Michelin star meal. Why not make a creative backdrop to flaunt to your colleagues? Or instead, ask your children to make it?
Question Time
Icebreaker activities are a common occurrence in the workplace. By all means, it is a successful tool to encourage your team to communicate by getting them to ask questions about each other. In addition, they also provide the opportunity for you to bond with your co-workers. Furthermore, icebreaker questions are a versatile tool that you can tailor to be as wild or as mild and you like. Some examples of questions you can ask are: as a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? Do you have any pets? If a movie was made of your life what genre would it be, who would play you?
The Price is (Almost) Right
“Come on down!” may ring a bell for fans of the iconic gameshow, The Price is Right. For those we are not familiar with the concept, the show revolves around contestants identifying accurate pricing of merchandise in order to win cash and prizes. To do this in a virtual environment, have the host of the call hold up a household object. After that, have participants shout out how much they think it costs. Whoever guesses within five cents of the actual retail price, gets a point.
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