5 Essentials for Fun and Powerful Team Building

Having a strong team is truly the cornerstone to a company’s success. But when you’re talking about a remote company, where employees who work together on a daily basis may never have even met, it’s critical to ensure that the team learns how to work together, trust each other, and yes, even like each other. That makes powerful team building essential.

For fun and powerful team building, below are five need-to-know essentials:

1. Try something new.

Gathering your remote workers for board meetings and brainstorming sessions is so passé. Instead, take your team and do something creative—and cool. Try snowboarding, hula lessons, and super fun scavenger hunts. Getting them to do something entirely out of their comfort zone can help your team think in new ways and bond even more. Why? Well, if the president of the company and the new hire are both working side-by-side to build the biggest sand castle possible, it levels the playing field and makes everyone equal.

2. Make it charitable.

You want your team members to get together and ultimately inspire powerful team building. One of the best ways to do that is to get together for a purpose beyond the bottom line of the company. Inspire them to have some serious remote team collaboration by visiting a children’s hospital or organizing a fundraiser to raise money for Alzheimer’s. You can get them to donate food or even volunteer together to serve up meals—and smiles—at a soup kitchen. Make it not about them—and all about sweet charity.

3. Try mini meet-ups.

Sure, you’d like to get your entire team together as often as possible, but financial and geographical limitations can make it difficult. So think smaller and organize more localized meet-ups among team members who live fairly close to each other. They don’t even have to be on the same team (in fact, it might be better if they’re not!), so they can get to learn about other aspects of the company and how it runs.

4. Ditch the ego.

It can be easy to want to win, particularly if your team building involves lots of games and competition. But while you should encourage your teams to want to win, make sure that they understand that that’s not the only focus, even if that means that the CEO comes in dead last during the 10K challenge. So stress the idea of fun and togetherness—and that while winning is fun, it’s merely a bonus.

5. Lead by example.

Yes, creating a fun-filled team bonding experience can certainly feel like a lot of work. But as much as you might want everything to be perfect, it’s better if you show that you’re having fun, too. If your employees see that you’re stressed—or worse, not participating—they might feel reluctant to play along. So even if you have a thousand things to do, dive right in with your teams and have some fun!

Engaging in fun and powerful team building is a great opportunity for managers to really get to know their staffers. And while you do want to incorporate some aspects of business into your retreats, you should focus on the main goal—having fun and creating better bonds with your staffers that they will carry over into their work, and your bottom line.  

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By Jenifer Blais | Categories: Build a Remote Team

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