How to do virtual team building?
It’s a tough question but it’s one worth answering because the more time that we are spending working from home? Working remotely? We need to be tuned in to how to keep the productivity, collaboration, energy, motivation and morale high on our team. Because if we don’t, over time we’re going to take that nose dive. Our teams will take that that nose dive in productivity morale, etc. Luckily, I used to teach team building and leadership development at Penn State University and I now get to help some of the most innovative companies and top universities on the planet help make connection and engagement really easy.
BLOG NOTE: The following is an adapted and edited transcript of one of our daily YouTube tutorials. We know sometimes it is easier to scroll through written content which is why we are publishing here. Because of that, there may be typos or phrases that seem out of context. You’ll definitely be able to get the main idea. To get the full context, visit our YouTube channel here. And if you want to watch the video on this topic specifically, you can scroll down to the bottom of this post to access it as well.
In this video, I’m going to share a couple stories of virtual team building that I’ve helped companies create that will hopefully be concrete examples that you can steal, adapt and apply to your own teams in context.
In this video are:
3 clever strategies to weave in virtual team building
These strategies will help you throughout in a way that doesn’t burn out your team like jumping on a 3-hour team building zoom call.
Unpacking of stages of group development and team development
It is useful to have in mind when you are starting this journey of virtual team building.
You may be watching the video because had a routine of doing team development in person for some time and it has got disruptive and disrupted and now you need to figure out how to make it work virtually.
Let go of thinking about translating your in-person team development to virtual. When you jump on Zoom or Skype or Google Meet or wherever you’re meeting, it’s fundamentally different, right? You have no proof that I have legs right now. You have no proof that your team has legs. It’s just fundamentally different.
We need to think about it differently. Rather than asking “How can I do some of the in-person stuff virtually?“, the real question to ask as is “What can I do better virtually than in person?”
If you’re working either from home or in an office, you have this whole context all around you. You can invite people to literally leave their camera their Zoom stations and come back and bring an object that represents a part of who they are to share with the group.
If you were in a hotel ballroom, you couldn’t invite people to do that yet people’s homes and often office spaces are filled with things that they have surrounded themselves with to represent a part of who they are.
If you want to build an amazing team and get to know each other and connect in a really authentic, non-cheesy, trustful sort of way; inviting using the context that you have around you is really useful. there’s tip number 1.
All the strategies 3 don’t take a lot of time and they’re meant to be easy. One of the things that I do in my current work is we create tools like We! Engage Cards and We! Connect Card to make connection and engagement easy. I’ve never met any person or any team that doesn’t have too much to do in too little time. I believe that as you’re doing virtual team building, it’s best weaved into the current thread of your meeting cadence and what you typically do.
When we’re meeting virtually or when we’re working remotely, we don’t have all the organic connection that we sometimes have when we’re in person like chatting before meeting, etc. That requires us to be more intentional with the way that we connect and engage with people
virtually. Which is actually a good thing because typically, the organic connection ends up just being idle chit chat or small talk. Whereas you have an opportunity to make that much more purposeful when you’re meeting virtually.
The first stratefgy is the idea of an “Unofficial Start”
It was introduced to me from this fantastic human being named Mark Collard from Australia. Runs a brilliant company called plameo.com which is the world’s largest database of online interactive exercises.
Playmeo.com is this phenomenal resource with 400 plus interactive group games with virtual at and in person adaptations. They’re phenomenal, most of them have video tutorials that you can watch. You don’t have to read how to do something experiential which is often hard and even the search feature, you can type in “I’m a ___” and search which one fits you best.
You can say, “I’m a conference organizer and I want my group to….” And then you insert the purpose of why you want to meet. It’s a ridiculously simple to use phenomenal tool.
You can search for free and if you go to playmeo.com/weandme, Mark Collard, the founder
playmeo is a good friend and has offered 25% off any annual membership for playmeo. It’s a total steel. Super easy way to plan out your virtual team building right on playmeo. Hope that this was a mind-blowing discovery for you and that you see the value in this resource right away. You can see just a little bit right here as I scroll through some of the exercises. So, really simple. They’ve got picture of the activity when you click into it.
There are free ones that you don’t even need to have a paid account for or you can download a PDF of it and you can save it. You can open it up and click to see virtual adaptations of it. You can watch video tutorials, suggested further activities, and how to play narrative step-by-step instructions. You can consume all this or you can just go to exactly what you need and make it really, really easy. It’s an insanely useful resource and I highly recommend diving in and exploring playmeo.com.
The unofficial start which was introduced to me by Mark, this playmeo guy is the idea to spark immediate and purposeful engagement a few minutes before your meeting starts and a few minutes after. Feel free to search playmeo for unofficial starts.
There are really brilliant printed ones. Alphabet equations is one, wordles, things that are puzzles that get people engaged and get their brains warmed up. It could also simply be a question. You hop on a meeting, your regular standing meeting. You can ask the question “What are people usually surprised to find out about you?” And depending on team size, have people answer in the chat or unmute and actually share with the group and create space for follow-up questions, etc.
Doing that as an unofficial start is a really great way to create that intentional connection in a way that doesn’t need to be a 3-hour team building designated session. That can happen in 3 to 5 minutes
right before your meeting. It’s kind of like the metaphor I think about is going to the gym. Much healthier to go once a day for a little bit rather than on monday for 12 hours with the intention of losing 50 pounds. You’ll hurt yourself and it won’t actually make you healthier.
Second strategy is this idea of connection before content.
This goes beyond any sort of icebreaker. Connection before content has to connect people to each other. It can’t be something you, as the leader are just saying. You can’t share a cool cat video that you think will make people laugh. But not connection before content because it doesn’t connect people to each other. Second, it’s got to connect to the purpose of why you’re there. So, first, you have to reflect why are we having this meeting? And how can I come up with an exercise or even (simpler) a question that connects people to why they are actually there in the moment and allows people to share their experience knowledge or stories in a way that connects them to each other.
The third ingredient is weaving in the choice for authenticity and vulnerability
You cannot and should not force it. But at least creating the choice and option for authenticity and vulnerability in that meeting. Typically, the easiest way to do that is to invite someone to share a story. Because vulnerability doesn’t need to mean deep, it just means true. I would argue that vulnerability and authenticity is just people being able to psychologically be safe enough to just speak their mind so your question can relate to the purpose, allow people to connect to each other, get people to break out if you have the ability in zoom or another platform.
Break out into small groups of 3 to 5 people to answer that question and come back and popcorn it out, popcorn out responses to the group. It’s an amazingly simple and relatively quick way to just weave in virtual team building throughout.
The third way is kind of unconventional but it’s being intentional with the closing or the way that you close any giving meeting or exercise.
A couple of my favorite quick closing exercises that you can use that also create this element of virtual team building or build your team over time in small increments rather than big giant overwhelming exhausting doses.
One of my all-time favorite exercises I got from a wonderful facilitator in New Hampshire named Nate Fullen and he called it group anthem. The idea is to have your group checkout with a closing statement that begins with 1 of 3 phrases and beginning with these 3 phrases when you just invite your group to make that closing statement. It sounds like a bit of an anthem or like it’s got a musical. Not a musical ring but it’s got a rhythm to it that ends on a very high note but also invites people to share something really meaningful.
The three phrases are “I am, I believe or I will.” My prompt to the group would be, no matter what size, whether you’ve got 6 people in a meeting or 60 people in a meeting or 600 in a meeting, inviting people to popcorn out closing statements that begin with one of those 3 phrases.
I am, I believe or I will.
I’ll often say to people you know, you don’t need to unmute and then say, “My closing statement is I believe that….” Just start and speak with conviction and just start with I am, I believe or I will.” It’s a phenomenal way to put a wrap really purposefully and meaningfully in a meeting. Oftentimes it ends with higher energy rather than lower.
Typically we’re used to getting burnt out on Zoom or any other platform that we meet on. Because, the world’s most phenomenal autofocus device is just staring at a screen 20 inches away the entire time between inviting people to run around their space and grab something that represents a part of who they are and bring it back and share it and also doing really meaningful closing exercises like this, we immediately avoid Zoom burnout.
I was on a call with somebody at Nike who was planning internal team retreat. Usually happens 2 days in person. In this particular case, they had to move it all virtual and she was a bit concerned about that. Although, after planning it, she got really excited. She was like, “Oh, this is going to be great. Awesome” And then it happened and it just totally fell flat. What we realized as I was doing some coaching thinking through this is that the meeting was designed for consumption rather than contribution.
As I share here the 5 stages of Tuckman stages of group development, think about how within each of these stages, you’re inviting people to contribute and not just passively consume in any given meeting. Because when you invite people to contribute, they are actually building the team. When you invite people to consume, you’re just spitting stuff at them. State Tacoma and Stages of Group Development are forming storming, norming performing and adjourning.
In any group, even if you’ve been together for 5 years or 2 years, anytime you add somebody else into the group, you start at forming. The team is just kind of getting bearings on each other. Kind of figure out high observation level. Storming, some conflict enters the scene. Norming is when cultural values start to get decided.
I really like using We! Engage Cards or simply which is a deck of quotes on one side and pictures on the other. And so, Using imagery and quotes to invite people to norm. Pick an image and they don’t need to use these cards. You can use google images. Go find an image that represents an ingredient you think is really essential to this team’s success and share it in the chat. That right there starts to visually build the team a little bit more. Hope this was useful. I’m sure that there is lots more our channel is filled with tips and ideas and tools on how to make connection engagement easy.