Team building exercises for virtual teams

Do you remember a time when you came to work the next day after having a happy hour with your team? How did you feel? Did you start liking your colleagues more? If the answer is Yes, why do you think it happened?
When people spend time in an informal environment and talk about their family, food, or hobbies, they usually connect on a more personal level. Because of that, they loosen up and start seeing in each other human beings with real emotions. There is no more picture of very "serious" coworkers who are always professional and trying to be perfect. Consequently, people relax and feel SAFEr.

The same effect happens in Agile teams. When people get to know each other, there is more TRUST among them. Respectively, there is less tension and awkwardness in meetings, and you can hear more laughter. Also, team members easier admit that they've made a mistake and get less defensive when receiving constructive feedback. These outcomes lead to improving teamwork, cooperation, and performance overall.

While organizing a happy hour for collocated teams can be done easily, what can we do with virtual teams? Getting everyone together is challenging and quite expensive, especially if people are in different countries. We can't just buy tickets for everyone and bring them to one place regularly. Well, there are other alternatives.

Fortunately, there are many team-building exercises you can do remotely. You just need to get a little creative to help your team break the "ice."

Below I would like to share what I've done with my distributed teams and how it helped.


Three little unknown facts
What: I asked my team to send me 3 unknown facts about themselves. The idea was for everyone to come up with something fun or interesting that no one else knew about them. Next, they all had to guess to whom those 3 facts belonged.

Here are a few examples of facts:
- I hug trees.
- I buy more books than I read.
- I like cats more than dogs.

Benefits: Besides having fun and learning something new about the team, one more positive thing happened. Two quietest developers always had their cameras off before the game. They were finding different excuses for why they can't use their video. However, during that conversation, they felt comfortable enough turning it on and agreed to use it more often. I benefited from the call as well. I got to see people from a different perspective, which helped me understand their behavior in certain situations and find better approaches during facilitating ceremonies.


Appreciation game
What: I asked my team members to think of the strengths and good work of their teammates and what they appreciate them for. Afterward, we had a conversation where people shared what they thought of others and thanked each other.

Here are examples of what people said:
- Thank you to John for making meetings fun.
- Thank you to Amy for giving constructive feedback on a code review.

Benefits: it was one of the best calls I've ever had with my teams. It turned out we had been so focused on working and solving problems that we had forgotten to say "thank you" or give each other useful feedback. Discussing how much we appreciated one another and how cool everyone was, ended up being very rewarding. People later told me that they felt good and proud of themselves after the call, which positively influenced team spirit overall.


Pictures of life
What: Each team member presented 10-15 pictures of their life and shared some stories behind them.
Note: in case your team is not comfortable speaking about themselves, you can be the first to do it or ask a team member to whom the others look up to take the lead.

Here is an example of what pictures to show:
- Graduating from a university.
- Spending time with family or friends.
- Favorite vacation.

Benefits: First of all, we finally saw what the people looked like in full height (since we were a remote team, we had only seen faces until then). Also, we learned how others spent their lives outside of work and what they were passionate about. We saw what makes our coworkers happy and excited. As a result, similar to the "facts" exercise, it helped to understand the team members better and build good relationships within the group.


I encourage you to try team-building exercises as well. There are plenty of examples on Google for all kinds of teams. You won't regret doing so. Very soon, you will start seeing positive changes in your team's cooperation and collaboration.