How To Bond With A Remote Team (4 Group Activities)

How To Bond With A Remote Team: 4 Group Activities

Start By Getting Curious and Asking a Lot More Questions

For the last six years, and especially throughout the pandemic, I’ve led many virtual connection labs inviting people to make meaningful connections even though they’re pixelated.

In this chapter, I’m going to share four really simple activities. I’m pulling these activities from a sea of failed attempts to create meaningful connections. By facilitating virtual connection labs with thousands of people every month for a long time, I’ve learned a few things not to do and what works really well every time.

My audience is primarily leaders and educators. But I don’t know your organization and your team. You know that best. As I say in every single one of my talks and workshops, I’m inviting you from this moment forward to ruthlessly steal and reinterpret everything I say, and apply it to your own context. 

The four activities are:

• 60 Removal
• Curiosity Ping-Pong
• QOTD, or question of the day
• Connection to Content 

Sometimes when we think about how we can get our remote team to bond, we imagine blocking off half a day to go to a virtual escape room or something like that. That’s fine and could be great—potentially. But like getting healthy, it’s much better if you’re able to take walks throughout the day and eat some broccoli here and there versus being healthy for one day and letting things go after that.

To create a healthy bond for your team, it’s much better to integrate bite-sized activities throughout the week. That’s more effective and sustainable.

1. 60 Removal

The first time I did this exercise as an experiment, I was facilitating a retreat in person with a group of 10 human resources professionals. They’d all worked together for at least three years, and some had been colleagues for 10 years. They knew each other really well, and they were experiencing some cultural and personality conflict.

I took out a deck of We! Connect Cards, which have a total of 60 questions. I laid them all out on a table, and challenged participants to remove every single question they could answer for the group. If they felt like they could answer this question—“What are people usually surprised to find out about you?”—for the entire group, they were permitted to remove that card from the table. 

You can play the same game with your group. You can have the deck shipped to you. Or download a free version on our website, www.weand.me/free, and send the link out to your remote team. The challenge, if you’re playing virtual without physical cards, would be to get everybody the questions, and have them remove any they could answer for the group. But to do this, they could just type the question they wanted to pull out into the chat. 

What’s cool about this activity is I’ve never had a team remove more than five questions. I don’t know if that speaks to the fact that we just don’t connect and ask questions like this of each other, or it’s a testament to the quality of the questions in the We! Connect deck. We designed the deck to feature questions that accelerate trust-building and connection, and to include questions that people haven’t typically been asked before.

The questions are psychologically safe, accessible and novel. That’s really useful for bonding as a remote team. A few examples are: “What are people usually surprised to find out about you?” and “If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people, what would it be?” and “What is something you would like to do more of?” 

There’s a whole decade or so of educational psychology research that says when we connect to each other it creates communication shortcuts. Having knowledge of one another’s personal backgrounds enhances our ability to understand each other.

For this activity, invite everyone to type questions that they could answer for the whole group into the chat. The questions that remain can be asked one at a time at staff meetings or to kickoff sessions, which leads us to the second activity.

2. QOTD, Question of the Day

Adults tend to ask so few questions per day compared to kids who are just voraciously curious about the world. 

We might ask a few questions when we meet someone. But very quickly that window seems to close. We seem to think, ‘I’ve learned enough about you.’ We put that information in a virtual box, set it aside and forget it. But if you want to bond as a remote team, you’ve got to shift the group into this mindset of learning.

I would argue that “knowing” is usually a me-focused mindset, and “learning” is very other-centric or we-focused. When you can create that shift in a group, it’s extremely helpful.

By starting your meetings with a question of the day, you can help your team connect before you dive into content. If you have very limited time, you could just have people drop their answers in the chat. If you have more time to hang out, consider splitting up into groups of three or four, discuss the question and come back together. Then “popcorn out” surprise answers and what everyone learned. That deeper version of this activity might take around 10 minutes.

You could also incorporate QOTD into an unofficial start to a meeting. That is to say, you could ask it right before the meeting begins, and let people answer the question until a few minutes after the official meeting start time. Just hold up a sticky note with the question on it to your camera, and have people answer quickly by unmuting or typing their response into the chat.

You could also ask the question of the day at the end of a meeting. This gives people something to look forward to if they know every monthly staff meeting ends with a question of the day. This is one I recently used on a virtual keynote with 300 people: “What is something you would like to do more of?” I framed it as more of an application question. “What is something that you would like to steal from the last hour and bring into life beyond this moment?” That’s a cool way to take QOTD and create some momentum for the rest of the day.

Think about asking it at the beginning, middle or end of a meeting. And be deliberate in asking a question for the purpose of connection and understanding each other better.

3. Curiosity Ping-Pong

I stumbled on the idea when a client came to me and said he just hated how it’s the default for everybody to be on mute. It just creates this inorganic, silent vacuum in virtual meetings. How can we break out of that vacuum, and create organic connection? 

Curiosity Ping-Pong is my current solution for that. Right at the very beginning of a meeting, you might ask a question like the one I mentioned earlier: “What is something you would like to do more of?” Invite people to type a quick response in the chat.

Then have people go to the chat and find something they’re naturally curious about based on what that person has shared. Unmute and ask that person a question. That’s where the ping-ponging begins. Let’s say Kate, my wife, said one thing I would love to do more is explore museums around Pittsburgh. I could unmute on that call and say, “Kate, what is one of your favorite museums in Pittsburgh?” or “What’s one of your favorite venues to visit?” And she might say Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens.

In that moment, I’ve taken surface-level curiosity and gone one layer deeper with a question. I’ve also invited other people to chime in strategically. One person comes off mute to ask their question. Then whoever was asked the question unmutes and answers it.

That’s the back and forth of Curiosity Ping-Pong. Let that go for as long as you would like. You could do this at the beginning or end of a meeting. 

If you want to make this a whole thing, you could tell your group that you’re going to play Curiosity Ping-Pong until everybody is asked a question and everybody answers a question. That would probably be practical if you had six to 12 people in a meeting. Any more than that and people might grow tired of the activity and want to play a new game.

4. Connection to Content

There are a lot of ways that you can connect people to your content, and make your content more visual, experiential and interactive. In this chapter unpacking how to bond with a remote team, I want to share with you one of my favorite ideas for question templates: What do you think about when you hear the word _______?

You can see how the question is open enough that you could fill in anything related to your content and it would spark a discussion about that topic.

Here’s another great way to harness the collective wisdom of the group and not just rely on one person blabbing content. Let’s say you’re going to talk about—to pick something especially unexciting—risk management. We’re going to go back to our HR group. You might ask: “What is something you know about risk management?” Depending on the group’s size, you could do breakouts, answer in the chat or have people come off mute and Ping-Pong answers.

By doing this, team members can meaningfully connect to the content. In regards to creating a bond among remote employees, you’re probably a team because you’re working together toward a common goal. As such, while it’s great to connect for connection’s sake, it’s really productive and smart for remote teams to connect through their content as well.

When you use question templates like the one above, you can customize the content. You’re also forced to design a session for contribution rather than consumption. 

If you liked these ideas, and you’re looking to help a remote team bond, reach out. Drop us a line at www.weand.me. We run virtual connection labs with people all over the planet, and we work with teams of all sizes to help make meaningful connection and engagement really easy.