In the past couple of months, many companies that never worked remotely suddenly faced a situation where their teams had less than a week to shift to a new way of working. On the other hand, companies that introduced at least some type of remote work in the past welcomed this situation perfectly prepared. But companies in both situations are facing a common challenge: keeping their distributed team engaged and active. Considering that team members spend most of their day either in meetings or doing their tasks, we wanted to find a way to keep everyone connected, content, and engaged beyond the work responsibilities.

As part of our fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, our company created a new vertical department, Community Support Center, with the aim to help our community during challenging times. In addition to taking care of the mental health of each team member, one of the main goals of this department is keeping our community active, just like before.

With social distancing measures, health concerns, and strict regulations, we faced a challenge: How can we keep the productivity and spirits high without violating social distancing? During one of our brainstorming sessions, one of our team members simply said: “We should do an online team building.” There are more than 250 people in our team — is this even possible to organize? We floated the idea to other team members, and it was unanimous — an online team building was definitely worth trying out.

After searching the web for tips and tricks, we came up empty-handed. We figured that our main goal was to have fun, so we decided to start there. From scratch. It ended up being a lot more work than we expected, but it was completely worth it — our community absolutely loved it.

If you’re struggling to figure out how to organize your own online team building, we have got the right thing you can use for inspiration. We figured it’s worth sharing the lessons we learned organizing our first online team building, things to avoid, and activities that might inspire you e so that other teams who are working remotely can coordinate their own online team building.

Create a Concept

While the idea of the remote team building might sound easy, there’s a good amount of planning and legwork that goes into it — and it starts with the concept. We created a concept where we split all team members into 20 groups and created 10 levels where the groups competed against each other.

Picking those ten levels was a whole new challenge. We decided to go with a sweet combination of trivia questions, scrabble, riddles, and mystery. Each level had a moderator that welcomed opposing groups and spent 10 minutes with them. Every room had different rules and ways of communication. In our case, we used communication on Slack groups, video calls, or drawing on Zoom to engage group members. Every group had one goal: collect as many points as possible in each room and cumulatively collect the highest number of points to win the game.

Pick Moderators

Moderators were a critical part of our online team building. They are the ones creating a concept for each room and rules, choosing all of the questions in advance, and lastly moderating everything that happens in their room. This also means that during the online team building (ours lasted three hours) they are in charge of keeping the atmosphere going with each new group that enters the room.

Choose Your Tools

By far the greatest challenge of coordinating any type of remote activity that includes 2o+ people is choosing tools that will support it. For our team building, we wanted to create an environment that brings group members together and helps them cooperate all the time (besides having fun, of course).

Each group had to have the ability to hear the room moderator but also to communicate with group members all the time. We decided to use Slack to connect group members and left them with an option to have all communication on their group Slack channel or to jump on a call and talk there. Moderators hosted their rooms on Zoom where only members of two opposing groups are allowed to be at the same time. You’ll also need a way for teams to submit their answers to the moderator. In some rooms, we used Slack DMs, while in others we used the main Zoom call for groups to share their answers, which worked pretty well.

Our experience showed us that people preferred rooms where they shared their answers verbally on the main Zoom call rather than writing them on a Slack DM.

Select Topic and Questions for Each Room

We mentioned earlier that we went with 10 different rooms with each room having a different topic. In the initial phase, we had over 30 topics that we explored to find a best fit for our community.

In the end, these are ten topics we picked:

1. Classic Trivia (History) Room — We presented 15 questions and each group had to send their answers via Slack DMs to the moderator (Pro tip: go with open questions, they are much harder)
2. Classic Trivia (Movie & TV) Room — Similar to the History Room, with the only difference being the questions (Pro tip: don’t go with obvious questions from the most popular TV shows and movies)
3. Scrabble Room — We gave 15 random letters where groups had to create the longest word in order to win the maximum number of points (Pro tip: Use words that are unique for your company or team)
4. Lightning Room — In this room, each group had 25 short questions they had to answer verbally in 3 minutes (Pro tip: Google Friends Lightning Round for full context)
5. Risk Room — In this room, each group could lose points or win points depending on their answers (Pro tip: Raise the stakes, it will be much more interesting)
6. Mystery Room — Groups had to solve crime mysteries as fast as they can in order to win points (Pro tip: Don’t go with too much text, people get bored easily)
7. Riddler Room — Groups that solved movie and TV show riddles the fastest won the points (Pro tip: Use pictures rather than words) — We’re sharing the Riddler Room with you here, extra inspiration and motivation guaranteed.
8. Guess the Emoji Room — Groups had to guess song names which were written using emojis (Pro tip: Divide songs into music categories, it’ll be more fun)
9. Find the difference Room — We photoshopped a bunch of our team pictures and asked groups to find differences (Pro tip: Use Zoom to draw on pictures)
10. Guess the Song Room — We played different songs and instrumentals from different time periods and had groups guess the name and artist (Pro tip: Use songs that are all-time hits, but play only the instrumental version)

Surefire ways to improve the overall experience

1. Considering the fact that we had 20 groups that had to compete in 10 rooms, we realized that it’d be too much to have a round-robin tournament. We asked our talented mathematicians to help us create a unique tournament format where each group visited every room, but also played a different opponent in each room. If you don’t have anyone who’ll help you with this, we’re sharing our tournament schedule here — we hope this will make your organization a bit easier.
2. One day before the team building, divide people into groups and connect them on a chat. We used Slack and the only task they had was to pick a captain and let us know. We used a random group generator, but we paid special attention to connect people from different cities. Therefore, we made small changes to groups before officially announcing the teams. We named groups after famous cities from all over the world (Thanks La Casa de Papel for the inspiration).
3. On the day of the team building create and share a live sheet where you’ll keep track of all scores. In our case, we used Google Sheets. Each moderator had to enter scores as soon as two groups left his/her room. This really helped us keep the atmosphere going as people were constantly checking where they’re standing and who is their biggest opponent. Also, create an official tournament schedule and timetable in this live sheet, so groups have to check only one document for all information they need.
4. Before the official part began, we created a group video call where all participants came together to hear the introduction, rules, and of course, ask questions. After that, we invited them to check the live sheet and find their first room.
5. Once the team building starts, there’s not much you can do besides making sure that you enter scores on time and that the right groups are in your room for each round.

Overall, our team building lasted for three hours, which was a bit more than we initially expected (we aimed for two hours), but at 10.30 PM everyone jumped on a final call to hear the official winner announcement (even though they knew who the winner was from the live sheet). We’ve got a lot of amazing feedback that it was a fun way to bond as a team, so we plan to do this at least twice a year for the whole company.

Have you ever done something like this yourself? If so, let us know how it went in the comments below.