An activity your team can do remotely to break the ice and improve collaboration

Are you looking for a quick and fun virtual team building exercise that will bring your team together, even from a distance? I have something for you! I’ve taken a well-loved, in-person team building activity and turned it into a virtual activity that you can do easily over a virtual meeting.

I shared this as an in-person team building exercise a few months ago, and people were obsessed with it. Because of that, I’ve gotten tons of requests to turn the exercise into a virtual team bonding activity. I’ve done just that, and I’m going to share it with you today.

For the virtual edition of my well-loved poncho exercise, I broke it down into two parts to make it easy for you to introduce to your team. Because this is virtual, there is some preparation that has to go into it in advance in order for it to be ready to present to your team.

Preparation Stage

For this, you’ll need a share drive service (like OneDrive or Google Drive) where you can create a spreadsheet to share with your whole team so that they can access it.

1. In advance, you’re going to create a spreadsheet with the exercise information.
2. Create tabs: one tab for each individual in your meeting.
   1. Number and colour-code each tab. The reason for this is that everyone in the meeting is going to have to go into each tab and write something there, so the numbering/colour-coding enables participants to identify whether they’ve already written in a particular tab.
3. At the top of each tab, write a big heading that says “What I appreciate about you is…”
4. Save your document to the cloud!
5. Share the link with your team in an email in advance of the meeting
   1. Instruct them not to go into the document or make any changes until the meeting when instructions are given!

Execution Stage

The next part is, of course, the execution stage. It’s really critical that you understand the instructions of this exercise and can communicate them accurately and effectively to your team, because when this exercise is happening virtually, everyone must be participating at the same time.

If you’re interested in this exercise so that you can introduce it to your remote team, then I want to walk you through the setup and the instructions! I’ve created a video over on YouTube where I walk you through everything you need to know (and even show you an example of what it looked like when I did it with my team). So, if you’re interested in this virtual team building activity, follow me over to YouTube and we’ll get you set up!

-Adriana

 

 

Thanks For Sharing!