Traditional work-team-building exercises assume employees are present in a central office, and employees just need desk breaks. While this may work for most employees in the office, and a select few telecommuters, this falls short for employees that have long-distance meetings and and video conferences with remote employees in other cities. Here are the best methods for when this is the case.
Consider new locations
The most obvious and worst kind of short cut is choosing the office as the central team building location. If most of the employees do not work in, or commute to, the location office, then employees will spend a longer workday and longer commute just to get to the desk building (or off site if you’re lucky), prior to the start of the exercises. As a general rule, an easy-to-reach, centrally located (roughly evenly distributed) location around areas where team members live, is better than the location of a company office.
Milton Keynes is a good example of a location that works for all employees because it is between the locations of the London, Birmingham, and Oxford offices and is easy to access.
Don’t overwork the schedule.
A full day of team building can be much more tiring for a team that doesn’t interact much in person. It can be easy for fully in office teams to schedule activities from 9 to 5. By mid afternoon, fully scheduled team building becomes exhausting. Instead, work more breaks into the schedule. Don’t treat every minute like it needs to be scheduled. It can be more productive to leave large chunks of the team building day unstructured.
Leave unstructured time.
A large portion of the team bonding happens over lunch and breaks. Icebreaker activities don’t promote bonding much. It can be more beneficial to leave large portions of the day unstructured than to fill every time slot with a different activity. Another team building exercise won’t help the team as much as leaving that time unstructured will.
Choose the right activities.
Low stakes and collaborative activities promote bonding much more than anything competitive or physically demanding. That can be a shared problem or a cooking class. Once enough in person bonding has occurred, more competitive activities can take place.
Follow up afterwards.
There’s no reason for the day to just dissolve once everyone logs back off. A team channel photo, a message in team chat, a summary note, or a passing reference (in the next team meeting) to an activity based on the team building day, will help the team building day carry over to the “real work” and prevent the isolation of the team building day.
Here is an example of a checklist you can create for each team building day you plan.
- Select a location that is fair to each of the team members (in your local and in your remote teams) and is not only convenient for your central corporate location.
- Keep the planned activities to a reasonable part of the day with real time breaks.
- Leave real time unstructured.
- If the team doesn’t know each other well, select a low risk, collaborative activity.
- “Walk the talk” and do something small to extend the “team” once everyone returns to normal work.
Team building for remote and hybrid teams can be just as effective. Relatively more time will be spent doing the real work on the team building day than for teams that are colocated.
