Ensuring your team feels like a family is a challenging, but rewarding job. At Superlinear, we used to do various activities with the team before the lockdown: monthly social events and workshops, team lunches every day, celebrating birthdays together.
With COVID and having to work from home, this became impossible, so we had to shift our approach and work out a new strategy. Here’s a list of remote team building activities, to engage your team while they are working from home!
1. Donut calls.
We use an application called “Donut”. Every two weeks, it randomly pairs two colleagues and suggests they set up a 30-minute call at a convenient time. During those 30 minutes, they can get to know each other better, have a coffee (or a donut) together and just have a relaxing time. This way, the employees get to know each other better, on a deeper, more personal level. We’ve learned so many exciting facts about our teammates during these calls!
2. Watch & Learn session.
This is our recent invention, aimed at sharing our passions with the team. Every month, one of the employees organizes a session where he or she teaches others what he/she knows to do best, or is interested in. It can be anything, from cooking and dancing to history or riddle solving. You don’t have to be an expert, but you have to be excited about teaching your team what you like! And of course, you have to make it work in an online format.
3. Happy hours.
Every two weeks, four colleagues are randomly matched together to have a drink digitally and play online board games, in order to relax after a busy day. Online board games can also be substituted by quizzes, activities like “Never have I ever…” or anything that is fun and relaxing.
4. Business update.
This activity may not be as relaxing, but it is crucial to keeping everyone in the team informed and engaged. In our bi-weekly business update, our CEO informs the employees about our recent clients, upcoming deals, new decisions and strategies and asks everyone’s opinion. By doing this, we keep everyone involved in the decision-making process and ensure that we are moving towards our company goals together.
5. Knowledge sharing sessions.
Every two weeks, two people present useful information for the team. There are several categories: Machine Learning tips, recent AI developments, “5 things I’ve learned this month”. The last one is the most fun: it can be anything from coding to choosing a dinner venue. Always keeping it useful and interesting for everybody is the key!
Of course, replacing physical activities will never be as effective. But we find that those alternatives work really well, and we were able to make sure everyone is interested, engaged and learns new things in a fun way!
We hope you found those activities inspiring and can replicate some of them at your company. If you have any interesting team activities that work for remote working, please don’t hesitate to share them with us.
