Do you want to increase the team work and bond of your workers who are working from home? If yes, there are many summer virtual games and activities available that can help you do so. Below, you will find 10 virtual games and activities that you can implement to strengthen your team’s bond in the summer. Summer is a time for endorsing important aspects in your team which encourage productivity.
Virtual Water Coolers
Water cooler conversations are famous for being the quintessential moments in the workspace where workers have conversations that span outside their work lives. These conversations allow workers to find out about the personality of their colleagues. Once the team gets remote, they become deprived of these important conversations. You need to focus on bringing water cooler conversations into the virtual realm, and one of the ways you can do that is by creating an activity that revolves around those types of conversations.
No “I” In Team
The purpose of this game is to not only have fun, but also practice sound and clear communication with each other. Not to mention, this game is completely free to play. All you need is a Zoom account that is free to create. To conduct this excellent team building game for the summer, you have to divide teams into individual groups.
Zoom has the function to individually break out teams. Google hangout also has a similar feature. The next step is to place one person of the group as the talker, while the rest of the groups become listeners.
The talker needs to talk without stopping for two minutes straight. The objective of this activity is to be able to talk the most amount of times without using the “I” word.
The EE Words
In this virtual game, the host will choose any random category such as song title, celebrity names, animals, and more. Before the game starts, the host will have to prepare a list of ten to fifteen words, names and things that belong to a category. During the game, the host needs to read everything on the list one at a time.
The challenge of the game begins when all of the vowels become replaced with two letters or the EE sound. Participants will then have to figure out what the host is saying. For instance, the movie name Aladdin can be pronounced as Eeleedeen by the host, and the first one to get it right gets a point. During the summers, this game can help create a friendly environment within the workers.
What’s Missing
This game is for the purpose of enjoyment and visual skills. For this game, you just need moveable items in your environment, along with your laptop and connection to the internet. This makes the activity completely free of cost. The total time needed for this game is only about ten minutes, but you can choose to extend this game by adding more activities and more rounds to it.
This is a great game to play with your team while on Zoom call or any other video conversation platform. It requires you to have objects in your background while allowing the team members to observe them. After you they are done observing, you, or the host has to either close the lights or shut the camera down and make changes to the background. Once that is done, the team has to work together to identify what changes have been made, and this will help them enhance collaborative skills.
Totem – The Feel Good Team Building Activity
When it comes to virtual games for team building, there are none better than totem. Playing Totem’s team building activity in a virtual setup will help you create an incredibly strong bond. It helps in unveiling the natural strengths and weaknesses within each team members, which can be critical for team building. This activity pairs learning with interactive play so that you navigate across what is important. It also encourages a positive feedback mechanism within teams.
Incorporating Totem’s virtual alternative to your workforce will also truly show that you care about your employee’s performance, wellbeing and motivation. It also helps you offer them a great moment which stays in their memory. You will appreciate this virtual team building activity as it helps team members connect on a more personal level, and articulate meaningful conversations that rejoice feelings of affiliation, appreciation, competency and autonomy.
Did I Lie?
In this game, the host will need anything large enough to cover any household item. This is a great virtual game to play with your team this summer as it helps initiate team building aspects within your teams. The game is very simple, and it requires the host to hide an item behind the cover and speak out loud about them. The host can call out any item they want and make the members guess whether they are lying or telling the truth.
Movie Lines Game
This game is very simple and self explanatory for the teams. The goal is for participants to guess the name of the movie from reading out a line from it. A host in this instance has to prepare lines from popular movies and have team members guess the movie over virtual video calls. This activity encourages engagement and communication within team members, which in turn can be pivotal for increasing teamwork.
Two Truths and One Lie
This is a classic game to play with your team over the summer. You can easily virtually conduct this game, and the purpose of this game is to practice clear communication and have fun. It requires you to break the team members into groups and have them dot down five facts and three lies about themselves.
There are different ways you can do this, and one of them is by breaking down your team into smaller groups. You can also have a large group session where you select one person or multiple people. In this game, you can have the group member tell two truths and a lie about themselves, and then have the rest of the team decide on what the truth is and what the lie is.
Cutie Pie
This is a virtual team building activity that requires you to ask team members to send you pictures of them when they were babies. When the picture comes in, you can move forward and interject them in power point presentations. Everyone gets their own page so you can forward the power point to every participant. Kicking off a team meeting by displaying baby pictures and having the teams guess the pictures will be a great activity that encourages engagement. This activity can open up conversations, which helps team members get closer and more familiar with each other, resulting in better team work.
Once Upon a Time
This activity is great if you wish to spark creativity in your team members and also spread laughter. As a facilitator, you will have to let the team know about the ground rules of the game. In this game, you will have to build a story and have it come to a conclusion by the time it reaches the last person. Each person will have to pitch in a sentence to the story so that it can continue. This activity is funny, brings out creativity, prepares for brainstorming, and strengthens team bond with positivity.
Final Thoughts
The virtual games mentioned in this piece are ideal to have fun, spread laughter and positivity within your team. With remote work and hybrid work models being the predominant system of today’s corporate world, games such as these have become increasingly important.
