Today we’re gonna help you by sharing 7 ice breaker games and virtual team building ideas to help keep your team connected.

If you guys have been working remotely as we do, then you know there are lots of great advantages to being able to do that, but there are also some key disadvantages including building a strong dynamic team where everybody feels connected to the company as a whole. 

This happens naturally when you’re working in the office, people bump into each other who don’t normally work together every single day, and that allows them to foster relationships outside their teams, and that makes them feel connected to everybody and the whole company. 

When you go remote that’s a lot more difficult to achieve, you have to be a bit more deliberate to be able to cause those same types of interactions that happen so naturally in the office. 

Building these personal relationships is so important for your business. When people feel comfortable around each other and know each other on a more personal level, they collaborate better, they feel more comfortable sharing ideas or debating issues. 

So we’re going to share with you 7 Ice Breaker Games And Virtual Team Building Activities that you can do to help your staff get to know each other on a more personal level. Some of these are going to be activities that you want dedicated time for, and we’ve also thrown in some ideas for icebreakers that you can do at the start of a meeting. 

#1 Pair Discussions

idea number one is pair discussions, this is a great way to foster those ad hoc conversations that seem to happen so naturally in the office when people are just going through their day. 

They get a chance to bump into one another and get to know them on a personal level in ways that you just don’t seem to do remotely, but this is a way to deliberately cause those interactions to still happen. The way this works is that every week, you want to randomly pair people together and encourage them to have a call and get to know one another. 

Now doing this manually can take a lot of work and become very tedious, very quickly as you can probably imagine, but luckily there’s a great plugin to slack called donut that does all of this, automatically. 

It does the pairings, it makes sure that people aren’t meeting the same people, week after week, it encourages people to meet, it bumps them along throughout the week, and asks them if they’ve scheduled their call yet. It will randomly choose one of the two to schedule the call, it does a lot of great things to encourage people to meet. 

And then at the end of the week, you can pull in the stats of everybody who did meet and who didn’t meet. And share that with the team to help encourage everybody to continue following through with their meetings. 

Pair discussions are a great substitute to encourage those conversations that happen so naturally in the office and donut is a great way to make it easy to do them.

#2 Guess Who?

Idea number two is an activity I like to call, guess who? This one is an icebreaker that you’re going to do at the start of the meeting. As the meeting organizer, you’re going to email everyone before the meeting and ask them to send you one interesting fact about themselves that other people may not know. 

Then when you start the meeting, you’re going to share one fact at a time, and everybody guesses who that fact is about. It’s just a fun little activity to get to know people and maybe there are some things that you get to learn about your colleagues like maybe they have a crazy Husky.

#3 Virtual Game Time

Idea number three is Virtual Game Time. This can be a great way to move people in to have conversations that might shy away from those pair discussions we talked about earlier. 

Introverts especially have a hard time carrying a conversation one-on-one, and this can be a great way to have them come in, give them something else to focus on, but still have those conversations that can happen naturally around the game. 

There are lots of different ways and lots of different games that you can facilitate game time with maybe your play Jackbox TV, maybe you have a bunch of people that like board games or card games. You can use something like Tabletop simulator to play those or maybe you have a crew that likes first-person shooters games like Counter-Strike. 

So give Game Time a try. It’s a great way to encourage more of those kinds of spur-of-the-moment conversations and give people more chances to get to know one another on a personal level.

#4 Proud Moment

Idea number four is an exercise called Proud Moment. This is another icebreaker that you’re going to do at the start of the meeting but this one doesn’t require any prep work. What you do as the meeting organizer, is at the start of the meeting, ask everyone to think about a proud moment or accomplishment in their life, and why that moment means so much to them. 

Then you’re just going to take turns going around and sharing one at a time that proud moment and why it’s so important to them. This is a great exercise that helps you to boost team morale because they’re in a great mood when they’re thinking about their accomplishments or their big successes in their life. It also helps you understand and get to know what people value in life or interesting things about people. For example, maybe somebody’s proud moment was running a marathon or somebody else’s proud moment was becoming a parent, it helps to get to know people on a personal level and what’s important to them.

#5 Virtual Happy Hour

Idea number five is the host of virtual happy hour. This is a great thing to do on a Friday at the end of the day to kick off a weekend and get people together on a call, mix up their favorite drinks, whether it’s alcoholic or non-alcoholic and start to have conversations and get to know one another. and people will talk about their favorite drink, how they made it, their recipes through what they’re going to do on the weekend. It’s natural to have those conversations and get to know one another in that kind of setting. 

And you can even do a speed round where you mix up those groups(if they’re large enough) every 10 or 15 minutes so everybody gets a chance to kind of mingle throughout the company, and then Off you go. Have a great weekend. We’ll see you next week!

#6 Once Upon A Time

Idea number 6, Once upon a time, okay, this one is excellent when you want to bring about creativity in your team. I’m letting you know it brings about fits of laughter as well. So as a facilitator you’re going to let the team know the ground rules, you’re gonna build a fictional story and it’s gonna be a lot of fun. And you can do it in a round-robin fashion, which means every person is going to have a chance and it’s in sequential order. But the key is this, you have to build the story and have it conclude by the time it reaches the last person. 

So you don’t want to leave that last person hanging, where they’re trying to scramble to finish up the story, and you only have a sentence. That’s it. One sentence. 

It’s a great way to bring about creativity, especially if you’re having a virtual brainstorming session later that day. Or even if you just want to have some fun collectively as a group. 

So you kick it off as a facilitator by saying. Once upon a time…, there was a boy. And then the next person goes and the following person etc. until concluding with the last person, it is hilarious, I highly recommend this one, super easy virtual team building activity.

#7 Slack Channels.

Idea number six, are slack channels. Another great way to facilitate those conversations that allow people to get to know one another is to create a bunch of slack channels. For topics that people at your company are really interested in.