Organize an online team-building now!

A few months ago I’ve organized an online team-building for my team, and it was awesome!

Abstract

Given the online-remote-async workflows that we have at the moment, I’ve decided that it would be a great idea to be proactive and organize an informal interaction within team members just as we’d have with water-cooler conversations or after-work beers back in the days. That would improve the relationship between team members and overall improve the productivity. One would ask — why and how?! This article strives to answer these questions along with discussing how you can organize something similar for your team.

Why it’s important to have beers together

That might sound a bit provocative, but instead of beers you actually put anything — pizza party, water-cooler convos, commuting to work together — all the things that people used to do back in the day and mostly do not do nowadays.
The importance of this lies in how our brain works, simply put — we treat a person better than an avatar in Slack or Teams. And the purpose of the team-building activities is to start thinking persons, personal commitments, relations, more human-centric instead of tasks, avatars, and code.

This keeps up the morale, motivation, therefore keeps up the pace, and prevents your employees from leaving.

Why it’s important to be proactive

In the end, all it takes to be proactive is experimenting, validating hypothesizes, and then seeing feedback on that. It gives you great knowledge over things, and, the most valuable, real experience of implementing change — whether that’s technical, social, organizational, political. In the end, the solution is the result. And just thinking of that already changes something, it changes us, who, in our turn, change our environment.

And now it’s even more critical since some of our colleagues might feel lonely, abandoned, frustrated just because of them not seeing each other every day in person.

So, being proactive helped me to see this opportunity and bring all the dudes and dudettes together and have great fun, so we can get to know each other better and progress within the projects we work on.

How I organized my team-building

I’ll just go over my approach to things. That perfectly applies to me, but we all are built differently, so feel free to modify the approach as it fits you best.

First, you need to announce that there is going to be a party! Even if you have no idea how it’s going to look like — does not matter — just announce that so you do not make up lame excuses to skip it. This teaches us about the commitment — that you make with your colleagues. Once the commitment is done, everyone knows that you would have to fulfill it. Once you fulfill it, you show an example that could motivate others to make public commitments and fulfill them.

Then, book a time slot in the calendar.

We use Google Calendar and ClockWise which enables smart scheduling of the events, so it does not eat too much of the focus time of your colleagues and is basically within their available timeslots. I went with 4PM-5.30PM option since it ate up the least focus time overall.
Give it a fancy name, give it a fancy description.

Done, you are awesome! Wait, not there yet.

Next thing — do your homework.
The homework contains of:

• Some kind words of appreciation for your friends
• Agenda — what we’ll be doing next hour and why we are here
• Actual content — contests, games, etc. I also mentioned prizes for the winners, so people could be motivated. As prizes, I bought a few Amazon 50 euro certificates and sent them out — but you can come up with something more creative :)
• Platform for everyone to say what they are feeling and what is bothering them, outside of working hours — prepare your introduction to that
• Wrap up — another portion of kind words
• Party until sunrise?! Hell yeah, now as everyone is in comfort, safe, and relaxed it’s time for endless beer talks like back in the old days! I really like that part!

One game I can suggest is https://sketchful.io/ — a game where one should draw, and the rest to guess what’s drawn.

Another is “Things” as I’ve called it. The main idea of “Things” is that host asks players to bring things to the camera. And the first one who brought it wins the points. What kind of things you’d ask — literally anything, I’ll give you some examples:

• Last things you brought from non-corona holiday
• An alcoholic drink
• Something orange which is not an orange
• Hobby thing
• Thing that appeared in your home with Covid
• A drawing
• Prettiest glass you have

All of these things will tell you information about people, and you did not know that information! Ask them to elaborate on that!
Last thing you brought from non-corona holiday — tells you so much about the personality, stories, what they value, etc.

Hobby thing — it’s so obvious but we actually rarely ask people about their hobbies! Once everyone knows that information, they will start treating each other differently — you’ll see.

Is that easy?

No, it’s not.

Is that valuable?

Can’t stress it enough, surely YES. This is a simple trick that boosted my team drastically. And it might work for your teams with slight corrections.
Test it and let me know how it went!
Cheers.