Remote Teambuilding
Building real human relationships in a remote environment can be really tough. The 2 minute pre-meeting chit-chat in Zoom only gets you so far, and it is my experience that unstructured "happy hour" video calls are the WORST and should be abolished. My team at Future is fully remote and after a few awkward Zoom-based team hangs, I got a bit obsessed with cracking the code on how we could have meaningful and fun social interactions with each other. After experimenting with a bunch of different activities, I'm excited to share a few of the ones that worked the best in the hopes that they'll work for other teams too!
Weekly Team Game 🕹️
On my team, we play a game once a week at the end of our weekly cross-functional design, engineering & product team sync. It works best to have a designated default organizer (on my team, it's me!), but any team member is welcome to host if there's something they're excited to play. It's fully optional to attend, and we end up having a slightly different crew every week depending on who wants to hang out. I like to rotate through different types of games because variety is the spice of life & different folks are good at different ones. Here are some of the games we've played & liked:
Picks of the Week 📑
I'm particularly biased in favor of this one because I love both recommending things & being recommended things. For this activity, I set up a Google Sheet for weekly signups with this prompt:
"Flex your immaculate taste and influence your teammates by sharing 3 recommendations in #product-fun sometime during a week of your choice. You can recommend anything at all as long as you tell us why you like it - the more underrated/off-the-wall/creative/niche/obscure/random/fun, the better. Stick with a theme or go for a random assortment, the choice is yours! (Don't worry - you'll get a reminder when your date is approaching, and all posts will be linked in this sheet to make it easy to find previous recs!)"
After a few months of weekly posts, we ended up getting a complete set of picks from every single team member on themes as diverse as fragrance, British game shows, YouTube DJ sets, Korean snack foods and how to make the most of your morning like a medieval squire. It was super fun to learn something new about each team member from what they chose to recommend, and to this day I am still enjoying multiple things that were recommended to me during this project.
Love Notes 💌
This is bit more niche, and a bit heavier on the effort side for both the organizer & team, but it's sure to warm the heart so I'm including it anyway. About a week before Valentine's Day, we set up a Google Form with a textbox for each member of the team and sent out the link for everybody to fill out as many or as few notes as they wanted with a few kind words for their teammates. We split up the responses by person and DM'ed each team member a nicely formatted packet of their love notes on Valentine's Day.
Slackmojis 🪩
It's so easy to upload custom Slack emojis! You can find excellent ones at slackmojis.com, but it's also very easy to make something custom with an image of your choice at makeemoji.com.