Struggling to plan an engaging team meeting? Try these activities!
Don’t worry, I get it: it seems hard to facilitate engaging, positive virtual meetings with your team! While in-person meetings are great for team building, virtual meetings can be just as effective when it comes to team bonding. You just need some great virtual team building icebreaker ideas!
I’ve facilitated many virtual meetings and virtual workshops and I have a growing list of go-to virtual team building activities. I’m going to share with you some of the best remote team building games that will work for any team. Every time I use these activities in a meeting, people love them!
1. Fun fact guessing game
For this one, you’ll have to reach out to all your meeting participants ahead of time (ideally more than 24 hours before the meeting, to give them a fair amount of time to respond). Ask them to send you one little-known fun fact about themselves. Ideally, this will be something that nobody at the meeting will know.
Once you’ve collected the fun facts, place them in your PowerPoint presentation. At the meeting, you’ll bring up the fun facts one by one and have all your meeting participants guess whose fact it is. You can either do this in a round robin fashion by getting everyone to say their answer out loud, or you can ask participants to put their answer in the chat function. It’s always fun to see who guesses right, and this is a great icebreaker to get your participants engaged!
2. Fun geography
You’ll need to do a little bit of preparation for this one, as well (but what kind of meeting doesn’t require prep?). A couple days before your meeting, ask all your participants to find a picture of a place they love. Then, give them instructions on how to upload it to whatever platform you’re using for the virtual meeting so that they can use it as a virtual background.
When you start your meeting, instruct everyone to turn on their virtual background. Then, go around in a round robin fashion and have everyone explain why they chose that picture. This is fun because it gives everyone something interesting and personal to talk about on breaks and helps the team get to know each other better. Sometimes, you’ll find that multiple participants have chosen the same place (or simply travelled to the same places). This opens the door for some fun conversation and, once again, gets your team engaged and comfortable with one another!
More virtual team building activities
I have one more fantastic virtual team building activity to share with you that can actually be adapted into something that is more work-related, if you want it to be! Head on over to YouTube so I can explain to you what the activity is and how you can adapt it to fit your organization if you want to!
-Adriana