Hey, what’s going on? Nice to see- oh you’re on mute yeah- no. Luckily, I am not actually on a zoom call. I am in a lovely little studio with Steven here and the aim today is going to be to unpack how do you do virtual team building. It’s one of the most frequently asked questions that I get. I used to teach team building and facilitation at Penn State University. I now got hired by some of the top organizations and universities on the planet to help make virtual engagement really easy. And in this video I’m going to unleash everything that is in my brain, so that it can be in your brain.
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In this episode, I want to give you a full spectrum look at virtual team building. A lot of my other videos go into specifically like, “Here’s an activity in virtual team building.” I want to give you a full spectrum look by answering 4 of the most frequently asked questions that I get related to creating virtual connecting experiences.
What Is The Objective Of Team Building Activities?
This is a really valid question to unpack. First, because if you don’t know why you’re doing team building, it doesn’t matter whether you’re virtual and pixelated, or in person and hot and sweaty. It doesn’t matter. Getting together for team building has to be rooted in a very good purpose that is clear to everyone, or else whatever you’re trying to achieve probably isn’t going to happen. Maybe, even worse, may create actually some resentment and some resistance in the future for your group to actually engage in any sort of team building or connection engagement exercises from that moment forward. And that is definitely not something you want to create because that’s a long lasting impact, and boom. Thumbs down. For me, I’ve got 5 objectives for team building exercises that I would say should be paramount and one kind of leads to another.
Getting To Know You
In some of my other videos on team building, I unpack these in much more depth but they are really quickly, getting to know you. You might want to want people to just simply connect, get to know each other better. You’ve added new team members, it’s a new semester, you might- I do a lot of work with orientation programs and universities so you might just have literally a whole new group coming in. It may just be value in getting to know each other.
Communication Shortcuts
You want to create communication shortcuts. You might want to decrease the amount of time that it takes to communicate something back and forth and reduce the amount of miscommunications that happen in your group.
Build Trust and Increase Psychological Safety
You might want to build trust and increase psychological safety. It is the number 1 predictor of high performing innovative teams. When you do team building well, whether it’s virtual or in person, it has the ability to increase that psychological safety.
Inclusion
When you- it is so much more important virtually to be intentional about including everyone, because it’s so much easier to get and feel left behind. Because you’re literally isolated, right. In an all remote team, like you’re working and when that meeting is over like, it’s just a vacuum of quietness in your own spa- or loudness if you have kids or other crazy things going on in the background working from home. But virtually, it’s really important to make sure that everybody can engage and participate, and that you’re not excluding or cutting anybody else out.
Culture Creation
Really good virtual team building involves a lot of speaking and listening typically. And our entire culture, your entire culture, is created by your speaking your listening. Because that speaking and listening creates all the actions and behaviors that also happen in an organization as well. And they tend to inform the beliefs in that organization about each other, about overarching values, etc. That’s exciting.
How Do You Make Virtual Team Building Activities Successful?
There are 3 key ingredients that I would want to incorporate in here.
Challenge by Choice
It’s paramount. If you are forcing or cajoling your group to do something, it’s automatically not good team building. One of the best ways to make sure there’s challenge by choice in your virtual team building is involve people in the process. Ask people what they want to do. Ask people the last- what one of the more engaging things that they’ve ever done in an online context is, and invite their feedback. Invite people to co-create. Maybe even delegate out and have team members lead different exercises that they’ve found on YouTube, on I don’t know, somebody’s channel about how to do virtual team building well. Have them- invite them to lead exercises so that it’s not just coming top down from a leader. That helps create a lot more challenge by choice; inviting people to choose to engage rather than engage because they don’t want to get fired. That’s a really bad reason to engage in any level of virtual team building.
Crystal Clear Intention
2nd essential ingredient to making this all work is crystal clear intention. The Latin root to the word intention actually means to stretch or stretching. I think about an intention like a rubber band or an elastic that stretches over the needs of the whole group. If your group doesn’t want to do virtual team building, don’t call it virtual team building. Say, “Hey, let’s kick off today with just 10 minutes of connection before content because we’re all working from home, and we have 100 percent less organic connection and interaction happening. And so let’s spend 10 minutes being intentional and deliberate with our connection before we jump right into work. Let’s bring a little bit of the humanity into our work.” Right? Something as simple as that. Getting crystal clear about your intention so that people know why. When you stretch your intention over the needs of others, it pulls people together because it allows people to say, “All right, cool. I’ll play that game. I’m in. Not even literal game like I’ll play the metaphorical game that you have put out in that context.”
Co-Creation
If you’ve ever seen the Blue Man Group, the entertainment- folks that paint themselves blue and do crazy stuff with paint and drums and all that sort of thing. One of the things that they say in some of their programs is, “If you want to connect with people meaningfully, build something together, cook something together, dance together, sing together, something like that.” The idea I wouldn’t necessarily recommend dancing together on zoom, well you could if you had a team that wanted to do that Don’t do that. Co-creation, when you build something together as a team, inherently, I believe that that is team building. What that might look like is hopping on Google jamboard and creating a vision board for your team for the next quarter, and having everybody drop 3 images that represent what they want to get out of work in the next 90 days, right. Just co-creating something like that together and being able to talk about it and have people share what images they chose, why they chose them, has a really powerful impact to create conversations that otherwise never would have happened.
What Are The Best Team Building Activities?
This is where we’re getting down into it, right. We’re getting down into the nitty gritty. What are the best team building activities to uncover. Now, that said, I don’t want you to leave this video empty-handed, so here’s one of my favorite ways to do virtual team building.
Connection Before Content
This is not setting aside 2 hours on a zoom call to do team building, this is just weaving into the current meeting cadence and structure that you already have, and carving out the first 5 to 10 minutes, and you can do it as in as little as 2 to 3, but ideally 5 to 10 minutes for connection before content. Connection before content should connect to the purpose of why you’re meeting, it should allow people to connect to each other, it should also create the option and choice for authenticity and vulnerability. The best way to do that is to ask a question. Start off your meetings with a question. Depending on your group size, even if you have 6 people meeting, split out into 2 breakouts and have smaller conversations, Have conversations in groups of 3 to 6 about that question that connects to purpose to each other and creates space for authenticity and vulnerability. That idea of connection before content will be better, in my opinion, than any amount of team building exercises that you do on a single day. If you weave connection before content into the fabric of your culture, you will be doing virtual team building in your sleep, or not in your sleep, at the beginning of your meetings as you go. If you want the 2 to 3minute version, even easier than that, just getting started off, give people a fill in the blank sentence. You might say, “My intention in this meeting is….” And just ask people to type into the chat what their intention is. One way to grab a digital whiteboard, whatever whiteboard it is, and put up a question, or sometimes I’ll even paste a picture of a Wii connect card, and invite people to leave digital sticky notes with their answers, but their name is not attached to them. It’s really cool to see how people answer questions and to see if you know each other well enough. They match those responses to the people that answered them.
How Do You Build Trust Long Term In A Virtual Team?
You may be reading this because you, on the whole, want to keep people motivated, you want to keep morale up, you want to build trust, etc. The best way to build trust long term in a virtual team is to spread out your team building instead of lumping it all together. Kind of going back to that idea of weaving 5 to 10 minutes of connection before content in, as opposed to 2 hours once a quarter, 2 hours once a quarter isn’t going to do anything. It’s like going to the gym 2 hours every 90 days and expecting to look like The Hulk. It’s just not gonna happen. The mindset here in terms of building trust long term that I want you to think about is walking 20 minutes a day for health and eating one pastry less a day for health.
That might mean doing something what I call an “unofficial start”, or what actually Mark Collard in Australia calls an “unofficial start”. Which is even before your meeting starts, having some intentional question that’s garnering conversation so that in the meeting, the minutes leading up to your meeting, people are connecting and talking etc. That actually builds your team more effectively than solving a puzzle together for a half hour. Really intentional, meaningful conversation has the potential to build your team more than some random activity on a Tuesday. “We are just beginning to understand the power of virtual connections.” “I am energized and ready to go.””I’m going to connect with my online participants much more than I have been in the past.” “I believe we’re going to have an amazing day.” “Next year is gonna be so much better.”