We were all in a similar boat when the work from home order came out. “What? I’m getting paid to work with my cat as a colleague? Score!” A week in and things were going swimmingly: The house looked cleaner than ever, you’d been able to stay in your pyjamas for longer than ever before and your cat was loving the attention.
A couple of weeks in… your cat has basically packed your bag for you, you’re still in your pyjamas and you realise that you haven’t seen another human in so long you don’t know if you’ll remember your social graces.
Worry not! Workforces around the world are having to adapt to the new normal and luckily, technology allows us to do team building activities online. There are now a whole bunch of cool things to do with your colleagues and teams that will keep up morale and at least ensure that they have to take a shower every now and then.
We’re going to go through some clever online team building games such as work online bingo games, quizzes, and much more. Let’s get to it, shall we?
Depending on the people in your team and how relaxed your work environment is, this could be a getting-to-know-you type of affair, or it could be a hilarious exercise in learning some pretty crazy things about your colleagues. Either way, it is a great bonding experience for all involved.
Each employee has to say two truths and a lie about themselves and the others have to try to guess which one is the lie.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a bit of trivia. It dusts the cobwebs from the brain and it can be super fun and competitive. Split your team into groups and every couple of weeks another team must be in charge of the categories and questions.
This doesn’t have to be a regular occurrence but it’s something that could be useful not just for colleagues, but also for the business. Choose a topic such as inclusion, diversity, environmental issues, etc. and pick a book that has it as a theme. Then the team can read the book, come back and discuss it and also see if there are ways to implement these ideas better within the company.
The best kind of activities are ones that get people to socialise but that can also help the company in some way. Lunch and learn is a great way to get people together to learn essential work skills over lunch. Choose one person per session to take team members through an aspect of their job and how to do it within a 15 minute to half-hour slot.
We all know how to play storylines right? One person starts with a sentence and the next continues it and it can go in the opposite direction. Well, this has the same kind of effect, but with emojis. The first person creates a sentence with emojis and everyone else takes a turn in adding to it. Whoever went first then reads what they think the story is aloud at the end.
Now, we probably all know about show and tell from school, but it can be just as rewarding for adults. It’s unlikely that you know much about your colleagues, especially if you have a big team, so this is a wonderful way to get to know more about them and their interests. Each person gets a time slot—this can continue over a few weeks—to talk about something that they own, do or are interested in. This could be anything from their pet to gardening, cars, or their favourite holiday destination. It’s a wonderful way for people to feel special by talking about what they love and for others to learn about things they may not have been exposed to before.
You just had to know that bingo was going to be in here somewhere surely? But, we like to think we aren’t biased—even if we eat, sleep and read bingo—it is actually a really awesome game to play virtually with a team at work. The best thing is that there is a huge array of options to choose from. You could simply stick to traditional bingo, where one person is the caller and you all mark off your cards over Zoom or Skype. Or you could play something a little bit different. Each person gets a different card with common work sayings like “can you see my screen?”, “We can’t hear you”, “We’re just waiting for so and so”, etc. When someone hears this in the call, they mark it off their card and the first to get five in a row wins.
At the end of the day, you can’t spend your entire week and weekend chatting to colleagues, but lucky for you, we have a mammoth amount of online bingo games and more on our bingo site. You can also play online slots, Slingo bingo and other variations of the game to ensure that you keep it interesting. Check out Lucky Pants Bingo, we’ve been busting boredom for years!