What is virtual team building, and why do you need it? The thing is, side by side with the many advantages that working from home provides remote workers, there are several challenges in social and personal character.
Virtual team-building activities are paramount to sustain worker's individual well-being as well as not to lose social connections, always have the opportunity to receive and support colleague team members on work issues and reduce the level of loneliness and anxiety.
How to stay effective and, at the same time, engaged while constantly working from the virtual world? There are myriads of specialized features on the Teams platform! If you want to learn more about the benefits of virtual team-building activities as well as about the best virtual team-building games and events, read about useful Weljo practices!
In the conditions of routine workflow, remote team members encounter certain difficulties concerning both the decrease in work efficiency and the deterioration of health and social skills.
According to the data collected by the leaders of the remote work teams, the main problems are:
In this instance, a person can neither concentrate on work nor fully relax. This worsens both the quality of life and the quality of work.
If there is a need for advice or discussion of a work issue, remote workers may not always be able to contact colleagues promptly; it is not always clear who is available and who is not, and a team member who needs to be contacted urgently may not respond on time.
This is the case when there are two sides to the coin, and both of them are unfortunate. On the one hand, a virtual team member has no opportunity to see their teammates face-to-face. This leads to more misunderstanding, as through-message communication cannot always adequately transmit intonations or subtext that a person may read from a person's actions in real life. On the other hand, members of remote teams may feel pressured to always be present in the online space, even after the end of working hours and the working week. And this again leads to a lack of proper rest, a desire to get away from others, and professional burnout.
If employees take breaks for lunch, coffee, etc., in the office, then while at home, some bring coffee or lunch directly to the desktop to save time and finish early. But constant sitting, the unwillingness to waste time on getting up, stretches, going to the dining room, and back, as well as spending a long time in front of the screen without a break, only exacerbate problems with the spine and vision.
All these problems significantly slow down the workflow and reduce the efficiency of task completion in general.
In this regard, virtual team-building activities are simply essential to start moving towards progress towards:
Is virtual team building important? Now, you must have no doubt that it is. It remains to be understood exactly how to implement the team building initiative in life in order to maximize the interest of co-workers.
Weljo bot offers a variety of engaging virtual team-building activities that can be easily integrated into Microsoft Teams. With features such as video calls, online chats, and whiteboards, Weljo bot provides a wide range of fun break games that are perfect for remote employees.
So, what exactly does Weljo do to facilitate virtual team activities and boost company culture?
All in all, Weljo disposes of various opportunities to engage remote teams in fun, healthy breaks. If you're thrilled to know how playing online games, practicing meditation, and doing light physical activities, as well as making short, relaxing online meetings via video conference call, can become a part of your routine, have a look at the following virtual team-building ideas.
To discuss each of them in more detail, we can divide all the online team-building activities and virtual team events into a few categories. With the help of Weljo, you can use such virtual team-building tools as involving other team members in virtual coffee breaks allowing them to discuss non-work-related topics`. They can play fun virtual games to learn something new about each other and improve their communication skills. Or even overcome virtual team challenges and thus strengthen the collective bond.
For small breaks or for large rest pauses, Weljo is irreplaceable. Let's see which virtual games a company can use and what fun events it can organize with the help of Weljo to keep their employees wanting to work here as long as possible.
Virtual team games pursue different purposes, so we will divide them into three groups and provide several examples for each:
These are simple, short, and fun games that allow the employees to chill out after hard work. First, you can arrange a collective Bingo game. During the pandemic, many office workers already had the pleasure of entertaining themselves and making their colleagues laugh with a quiver of coincidences. There you can include funny situations like: "can never turn on the camera in time," "animal sounds in the background," "family members in the background," etc.
Another illustration of a fun game is Making Stories with GIFs. One colleague starts the story, and others should add their GIFs to get something remotely holistic and hilarious.
Spot the Difference is another game on this spectrum. For example, virtual teams can compete to see who finds all the differences first, with work-related privileges as a win. Virtual Scavenger Hunt is basically the same, but you need to collect or spot all the necessary items in your surroundings, so this virtual game is also extremely popular among remote workers.
The Weljo bot provides all these activities, so you don't need to think about how to organize them.
These team-building games are aimed at allowing colleagues to reveal the non-work-related side of their personalities and create solid friendships. In this instance, we start our team-building game top chart with well-known Virtual Trivia. The essence of Virtual Team Trivia is that two teams compete by answering ordinary or funny questions related to general erudition. The team that gets more correct answers will win. So employees will not only find out who is the most erudite but also have a lot of fun in the process.
The most productive remote teams have the strongest bonds. So trying another bonding game is totally worth it. Using the Together Mode in Guess Who, someone among employees, during a team meeting, can pick a secret person and make others ask questions about them. Named unsuitable team members can turn off the cameras until there is one person left, or the secret individual is not guessed.
It's not a secret that challenges are the best means of uniting a group. Thus, we selected a few enthralling trials to make the colleagues immerse themselves in the game. A virtual escape room experience, puzzle solving, riddles, and many other things come together in exhilarating games for big teams.
For example, Espionage offers co-workers the chance to feel like counterintelligence of the company, which was flooded with spies trying to steal important secrets. Steep plot twists and unexpected denouements melt the hearts of even the most skeptical people.
War of the Wizards is another big-scale virtual team-building activity. But this time, the team is invited to the world of spells, potions, and epic battles. Both games take approximately 90 minutes and require a large number of people. If you plan to arrange an engaging event with fun riddles and virtual escape rooms during virtual happy hours, it will be an unforgettable experience for your colleagues.
Making a good break after successful project management is vital, and if you wonder how to make it fun and engaging, you've come to the right place. The duration of the breaks Weljo provides may range from 10 minutes to an hour. It depends on the kind of break your company chooses.
When a member of a remote team starts a break, they can select:
So, what is the full spectrum of activities that Weljo bot proposes to engage in? They include:
To sum it up, having fun is a key to successful virtual team building. Therefore, with Weljo, it's possible to create such a favorable corporate culture in your company that people fight for available places!
There's nothing surprising about the fact that if an employee feels like they're surrounded by an unfriendly environment, don't have regular rest, and are unable to seek help. Motivation might decrease, too. If you notice that work efficiency has begun to decline and employees are not at all interested in the result of their work, then things are probably not going very well. But nothing that team-building practices couldn't solve.
Weljo bot uses MS Teams to connect two or more employees face-to-face with video communication. In addition, the gaming capabilities of the Weljo bot allows employees to try different icebreakers, learn about each other's common interests, and just relax over a fun game.
Weljo offers its new customers a trial period so that they can see for themselves the useful changes such as improvements in teamwork and increased involvement in the result. The trial period is free and lasts two weeks. Then, in order to renew your subscription, you will need to choose your monthly plan. The pricing for our services will be tailored to the number of employees participating, starting at just $3 per person. We offer the flexibility to include any custom requests you may have and are open to negotiating the best pricing plan that suits your needs.
The company's data is secure with Weljo, as it pays special attention to the preservation of personal data. Weljo guarantees the prevention of third parties being exposed to user information and implements data security practices in its everyday work. The content of personal conversations between employees will remain completely anonymous.
This is a special assessment for company leaders, created every month to track progress in employee satisfaction with Weljo bot and their wellbeing level. Before the start of cooperation with Weljo, you'll receive an offer to get a corporate climate survey to observe potential team’s weak points. Every month, Weljo will gather and analyze workers' moods and wellbeing levels to be aware of trends and adjust the company's policy with Weljo bot.
