Tips For Improving Virtual Team Bonding

Keeping your remote employees connected and engaged as a team isn’t always easy. When your staff aren’t getting together in person, the bonds between them can begin to break down.

Unfortunately, as many business leaders know, without good employee relationships, the whole company culture can begin to crumble.

Fortunately, as remote and hybrid work becomes more popular, team leaders are beginning to discover new ways of unifying their employees.

Today, we’re going to explore some of the options you can use for better team bonding, even if you’re managing a virtual team.

Create A Virtual Break Room

Bonding opportunities don’t have to come from expensive team-building activities you invest in every couple of months. Some of the most important and meaningful moments for many of your team members will happen when they’re simply chatting on a day-to-day basis.

Unfortunately, in the remote world, your employees don’t have the same impromptu watercooler experiences they have in a physical office. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t recreate a similar space where informal conversations can happen.

Creating a virtual “breakroom” in Microsoft Teams or Slack is a great way to give your team members a place to simply talk with their co-workers and create friendships.

In these environments, employees shouldn’t feel pressured to talk about work. Instead, they should be free to chat about anything they choose (within reason).

Do Remote Work Office Tours

What better way to get to know your co-workers better than taking a tour of their remote office? Before your weekly meeting, consider asking employees to take turns doing a short tour of their office space, where they show the team where they spend the majority of their days.

These mini home tours are an excellent way to get people talking about shared interests.

For instance, an employee might notice a collection of plants in another peer’s office and start a conversation about looking after plants.

Remote office tours are also a great way to remind your employees that there are real people sitting behind their computers. It’s easy to forget that remote employees you don’t see on a daily basis are real people with unique personalities.

Host Virtual Events

Few experiences bring teams together more than events where everyone can share their knowledge and get excited about the same things. Holding virtual events is one of the best ways to get everyone in your workplace involved with something exciting.

You can invite different speakers for the event, get people involved in virtual learning opportunities, and even have an award ceremony where you give away prizes to your top employees.

A virtual event will be less expensive for your company than a real-world event because you don’t need to pay for things like meeting rooms, printouts, etc. .

Have Regular Bonding Meetings

It can be very effective to plan meetings specifically designed to get to know your people better. These meetings can follow virtually any format you like, but the aim should be to get people talking and sharing facts about themselves.

You could consider a series of “show and learn” sessions, where each member of your team introduces an important part of what they do each day to the rest of the team so everyone understands what part they play in your company.

You could also look into bonding opportunities that have nothing to do with work. For instance, you could sign your team members up for a monthly subscription box of exotic snacks and then sit down as a team to test out some of the treats as a group. This is a great way to get people laughing and bonding over some shared experiences.

Host Remote Learning Opportunities

Often, employees in a business form deeper relationships with their colleagues when they go through a challenging and fulfilling experience together. A great way to invest in your teams and improve their bonds is to get everyone signed up for virtual workshops and classes.

Not only will the learning experience give your employees something to talk about in their spare time, it will also push them to work together. Just make sure the learning experience is something everyone in your team can appreciate.

As an added bonus, investing in your employees can help them bring new skills and talents to your workplace, as well as improving your chances of long-term employee retention.

Forge forward!

Ilke (ilka)